ok not to be insane but the whole tom putting the bidding sticker on greg situ is SO indicative of their entire relationship bc its all about Tom’s desire for control and ownership over something (due to him feeling powerless and out of control in his relationship with shiv). Him putting that sticker on Greg wasnt just a hehe ill look after you way it was much more ‘I own you. You are reliant on me now and I OWN you’. Which is a sentiment that is the very FABRIC of their relationship, calling back to the ‘I will not let go of what is mine’ water bottle scene. Obsessed actually

Fun Blog #4

Chapter 4 of Fun Home is a real eye-opener when it comes to understanding the impact of living a lie. Bruce, Alison's dad, has been hiding his true self for so long that it's caused a lot of pain and suffering for himself and his family.

We learn about his affairs with men and teenage boys, including Alison's babysitter Roy. These secrets have taken a toll on his mental health and relationships, and it's heartbreaking to see how much he's suffered as a result of his repression.

On the other hand, Alison is embracing the truth about herself and her sexuality. She's open about who she is and isn't afraid to be herself. This is a stark contrast to her father, who is trapped in his own web of lies.

im the anon from earlier today and omg i never noticed lesley's credited on there. as much as i've been watching the show you'd think i wouldve spotted that lol. but now that has me thinking....do you remember like before the dhmis show there were theories that roy was a director/show writer based on another thing becky and joe worked on unrelated to dhmis (and iirc he was also credited on some of the web episodes too)?? then the final episode of the web series kind of made it true as we noticed he was pretty much in control of the simulated world and had a hand in everything.

i know people think lesley and roy have (or had) a connection and i wasn't really into it because i didn't understand where exactly this was coming from aside from the "you are not my son" bit. and i took that as mostly lesley being a weird insane #girlboss more than anything else. but what if her and roy worked on something together before the simulation......or perhaps they're somewhat working together??

now i don't really believe she'd work with roy being as she obviously is trapped in the simulation as well and it's implied she probably wants out too based on the fact she's sharing her knowledge with yellow constantly and trying to get him to see but this always fails. so i can only think that maybe she's stuck in his simulation (which Could be true if you remember the interview where roy wants to send his son to punish land and maybe the simulation is it. unless the interview is noncanon to the show).

or perhaps they're both stuck? maybe both roy and lesley are both stuck operating the simulation while also being trapped in their own personal nightmares by some unknown forces. and i mean this could be true if we look back to the final ep of the web show when red removes them from the simulation and roy tries to stop him (?i do remember theories where people saw it more as roy trying to bring him back into the simulation or induce him into the role as director but idk.) but its too late and the show starts up with entirely different characters. obviously roy was working behind the scenes and it's possible that unplugging the simulation only just erased them out of existence or reset the simulation and they just became new characters idk lol. but maybe they did briefly escape only to be put back again???

i don't know but i can't wait to see what's up with lesley and what is roy's purpose in the show. and da book i need to know why it's so important what will it show us!!!

SKSKSKS yeah i never noticed lesley was in the credits either until i saw it on the wiki!! the hidden details in this show r so amazing omg

and YEAH i remember that theory abt dhmis being connected to one of becky and joe's other works!! it was a series of 3 shorts called "craig's big day" which was confirmed to be the show that the puppets r watching in episode 2 of the webseries. its so wild to think they foreshadowed everything THAT far back before the kickstarter even happened AKSKSKSK

i do think that lesley and roy are definitely connected and i believe in the theory that she and roy represent yellow guys parents. idk if theyre working together tho, i feel like lesley being on a higher level in the house represents her being on a higher plane of existence and therefore shes "above" roy in terms of power and awareness. but we dont know for sure whether or not roy is aware of the levels, and whats on the level ABOVE lesley, so for all we know there could be an even BIGGER force at work behind it all!!

as for whether or not the interview (and therefore the webseries) is canon to the tv show and what that means for lesley....hmmm, im not sure!! i like the idea that lesley is trapped as well, but i also feel like she is involved in whats keeping the puppets trapped in some way. maybe its against her will, or maybe shes in league with whoever is really in charge. we dont know what her motives are for helping yellow guy either - did she really give him the book to help him, or did she tell him to tell his friends bc she knew they would take out his batteries and make him forget?? that being said i dont think she wants to "punish" yellow guy like roy does, i think she has her own plans for him that we can only speculate about at this point. i think part of her wants to keep him there so she can be with him bc he reminds him of/is probably based on her son?? but again thats only a theory lol

i saw a theory once that the trio in the tv show are actually clones/replacements for the trio from the webseries (lesley says she always keeps "backups," and it explains how theyre able to die and come back or be replaced whenever they escape). so my personal belief is that red guy freed himself and the original duck and yellow at the end of the webseries by unplugging the machine, but someone (roy? lesley? some other higher power?) just created new ones to take their place.

but AHHHH I AGREE I WANT TO KNOW WHATS IN THE BOOK TOO!!!! it would be cool if after the series is over it gets a physical release kinda like the gravity falls journals, i think that would be a neat reward that would add more lore and possibly some answers to the series :)

The Vampire's Ghost

I mean, I guess if ghosts exist and vampires can die then a vampire could become a ghost, sure.  This movie has Roy Barcroft from Radar Men from the Moon and Jimmy Aubrey from Swamp Diamonds, and a bunch of people who were in Westerns for most of their careers and aren't sure how they ended up in this jungle movie.  I picked it for those MST3K connections, for its promisingly b-movie-ish title, and also because I want to compare it with Curse of the Voodoo. The two movies have many things in common – but in other, important ways, they are quite different.

Nondescript handsome dude Roy Hendrick returns to the African village of Bakunda and learns that there has been a series of murders, all the corpses found drained of blood with wounds to the throat.  Rumors of vampirism are flying to and fro among the natives, but of course the white folks are above such primitive notions.  Roy goes to see Webb Fallon, owner of the local dive, who can usually be counted on to know what's up in the area.  While the two men investigate, their native servants quickly realize the blindingly obvious fact that Fallon himself is the vampire.  Roy, who is not so observant, saves Fallon from their assassination attempt and is rewarded by being placed in the vampire's hypnotic thrall.  He then cannot resist when Fallon steals Roy's girlfriend Julie and tries to make her his vampire bride!

So The Vampire's Ghost does definitely contain a vampire but that vampire is at no point a ghost – in fact, the movie ends basically immediately after he dies.  Disappointing.  Outside of that, though, this really isn't a terrible movie.  It's not a great movie by any means, not at all, but it meets a lot of the basic requirements that so many truly abysmal films fail to.  The story makes sense.  The characters are sufficiently differentiated that I know who's who.  Night scenes look like night scenes.  The movie doesn't waste time, except with a belly dancer sequence that goes on longer than it should but not long enough to actively piss me off.  I remained mostly interested and entertained throughout the run time. So yeah, honestly?  Could have been better, but could certainly have been worse.

A lot of the shortcomings here are budget related.  The Vampire's Ghost is clearly filmed on a bunch of 'jungle' soundstages and hastily-redressed sets from other movies, and the 'silver-tipped' spear that plays such an important role in the plot is just wrapped in aluminum foil.  The script is also rather bad, full of bald expository dialogue that the actors power through as best they can – which is often not very well, as none of them are particularly talented.  The guy playing Fallon himself is definitely weird-looking, with his thin face and bulging eyes, but he doesn't look very vampiric.  There's an absolutely dreadful barfight scene in which not one single punch even comes close to looking like it connects.

There isn't nearly enough character development.  The story hinges on Fallon's fascination with Julie, but we have no idea what he sees in her.  Peggy Stewart is pretty, but there's just not enough to Julie as a character for her to seem worth spending eternity with.  Nor is there much meat to Roy, which isn't helped by him spending much of the movie in bed with a fever.  We don't see the point to rooting for either of these characters.  Fallon's jealous mistress Lisa would have made a much more compelling heroine, but she and her other boyfriend are killed off for betraying him... which at least happens in one of the movie's most effectively tense sequences.

Some of the ideas in The Vampire's Ghost, on the other hand, are brilliant.  For example, there's the monster's name: Webb Fallon.  A 'web' is a trap, woven by a spider – a predatory creature that sucks the juices out of its victims. 'Fallon' is a name that means 'prince' in Gaeilge, somebody who rules over others, but is also reminiscent of the English adjective 'fallen', as in what happened to the angels who opposed God.  Or maybe it's supposed to make us think of 'felon', a criminal.  It's a name just brimming with nasty connotations and yet they remain subconscious until you actually give it some thought.  The first time you hear the name all you think is, “that is incredibly Irish.”

Second, there's the fact that the story is set in Africa.  Why would you have a vampire in Africa? Africa is generally thought of as a very sunny place and vampires fear the daylight!  Well, think about it – what else do vampires fear?  The obvious answer is 'crosses', and while local priest Father Gilchrist (a somewhat less subtly connotative name than 'Webb Fallon') has made certain inroads on the local population, many of them remain resolute heathens.  In fact, there's a bit in which the movie implies, though it never actually says, that in past centuries the people in this area used to worship Fallon himself as a god of merciful death!  While colonialism brings Fallon prosperity, it also brings the greatest possible threat to his continued existence.

(The movie does also deal with the daylight thing, though – Fallon can go out in the sun but it hurts his eyes.  This seems to tie in with a discredited theory that the myth of vampirism was inspired by the nervous system disorder porphyria, one of the symptoms of which is extreme sensitivity to light.  That's not why it was written that way, as the link was not proposed until the 1980's, but it's another example of these movies being eerily prescient in tiny ways.)

But I promised I was going to examine this movie in light of how it is like, or unlike, Curse of the Voodoo. Both films have a largely inactive protagonist who falls under a curse in Africa, and must regain control of himself in order to destroy the individual who cursed him.  Like Stacey, Roy spends much of the movie ill in bed until the advice of an outside expert spurs him to action.

The two movies differ in some important ways, though.  I don't want to give the impression that The Vampire's Ghost isn't racist, because it is.  Its natives are superstitious primitives who speak in broken English, and they function throughout the movie as a sort of threatening force in the background, who are liable to hurt the white people they blame for the presence of Fallon.  We are told that they are abandoning the plantations and returning to the jungle, and that Fallon is preying on them, but we don't see either of these things.  This unfortunately implies that what happens to the black people is not important, or perhaps that the film-makers feel we wouldn't be properly horrified by violence done to victims who are 'only' natives.  The best thing I can say for The Vampire's Ghost is that it at least doesn't expect us to celebrate the violent death of a black man the way Curse of the Voodoo did.

With that said, the natives of The Vampire's Ghost are not only a threat-slash-victim-pool.  Somebody has taught them how European vampires work, and they've been trying to warn the white people about Fallon but nobody listens to them.  When their suspicions about Fallon are confirmed as a bullet passes right through him, they try to take matters into their own hands and very nearly succeed.  Later in the movie, their help is invaluable as they use their drums to spread the word of Fallon's escape and allow Roy and Father Gilchrist to track him down to the temple of death.

One of the biggest differences between this and Curse of the Voodoo is how African religions are presented to the viewer.  While Curse of the Voodoo told us that the local gods were real, powerful, and evil, The Vampire's Ghost gives us native magic that is ineffective, but is entirely opposed to the evil represented by Fallon's vampirism.  Throughout the movie he repeatedly finds various dolls and amulets nailed to his door trying to ward him off, and he tosses them aside as irrelevant.  The Vampire's Ghost does not respect voodoo, but it at least entertains the idea of using magic to heal instead of to harm.

So if voodoo is no use against a vampire, and if Roy can't shrug off his influence by sheer force of will, what can anyone do?  Well, remember Father Gilchrist?  Yeah, one of the things I found myself thinking about in Curse of the Voodoo was that this was a world where supernatural evil was active but there was no supernatural good to help counter it.  The Vampire's Ghost gives us a universe in which God helps those who ask for it.  This isn't exactly easy, because first Roy has to admit he needs help and that's a difficult thing to do.  Then, God doesn't smite the vampire Himself, but merely grants Roy the ability to resist Fallon's control.  This is quite nicely-handled, a plot point rather than a deus ex machina, and is even set up somewhat by an earlier interaction between Gilchrist and Fallon.

Unfortunately, this ending follows on from what is probably the stupidest and/or most racist thing in the movie.  Roy, who has been delirious for two weeks, comes out of it and says, “hey, guys, Fallon's a vampire”... and everybody believes him?  Even worse, this is after they didn't believe the perfectly healthy but black people who'd been telling them the same thing for months?  Yikes.

Batfam/Avengers Crossover Chapter Six: Blooming Bromance

Tagging (Let me know if you want to be tagged): @the-fair-maiden-of-fandom

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Category: Gen

Fandoms: Batman - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types

Relationships: Selina Kyle/Bruce Wayne, Natasha Romanov & Damian Wayne, Clint Barton & Cassandra Cain, Tim Drake & Peter Parker, Peter Parker & Tim Drake & Duke Thomas, Pamela Isley/Harleen Quinzel, Tim Drake/Kon-El | Conner Kent, Dick Grayson/Wally West, Roy Harper/Koriand'r/Jason Todd,

Characters: Bruce Wayne, Selina Kyle, Jason Todd, Dick Grayson, Tim Drake, Damian Wayne, Cassandra Cain, Stephanie Brown, Barbara Gordon, Justice League (DCU), Alfred Pennyworth, Tony Stark, Steve Rogers, Natasha Romanov (Marvel), Clint Barton, Thor (Marvel), Bruce Banner, Peter Parker, Alfred the Cat (DCU), Bat-Cow (DCU), Goliath (DCU), Selina Kyle’s Cat Isis, Kate Kane (DCU), Duke Thomas,

Additional Tags: Batbrothers (DCU), Avengers Meet The Batfam, MCU/Batfam crossover, Crossover, no beta we die like robins, rated T for Jason’s language, I bleeped it out though. Just to be safe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, canon? What’s canon?, Deaf Clint Barton,Deaf Character, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Happy Batfamily (DCU), Birdflash and joyfire are implied/referenced,

Summary: Tim hangs out with the youngest Avenger. A bromance is blooming.

Tim sighed into his mug of coffee. Everyone in his family - minus Stephanie and Babs, since they didn’t live at the manor -  had been gathered in the cave to discuss the ongoing conversation between some of the interdimensional visitors. They - consisting of Natasha Romanoff, Clint Barton, Steve Rogers, and Tony Stark - seemed to have been really freaked out by some of Jason’s snide comments, and were now discussing if the bats were in fact trustworthy.

Tim blamed Jason for this whole mess. Jason couldn’t hold his stupid tounge, so now Bruce had called everyone - after Cass told him what was happening -  together to spy on their guests and work out a plan.

Their conversation wasn’t that interesting either. It was everyone going back and forth, never changing their own arguments. The most interesting thing that happened was when Stark hopped on a computer and started to do research on them. Not that they found much.

“No way in f*** are we amicable!” Jason exclaimed when the article was brought up and read aloud.

“Aw, you sure little wing?” Dick asked, elbowing Jason.

“T-t,” Damian said, rolling his eyes. “Will you two imbeciles shut up? I’m trying to listen.”

Turns out there wasn’t much more. As soon as the Avengers dispersed, Tim turned off the computer. “Now what?”

Cass frowned. “They need trust. Show them.”

Bruce nodded. “Yes, it would be best if they trust us, as we are the ones sending them home. Lack of trust might provoke unnecessary responses from them. It would be best if we can work well together.”

“Show them.” Cass repeated vehemitaly.

“I agree with Cass,” Tim replied. “We shouldn’t just tell them to trust us. That could be taken quite badly. We need to show them.”

“How?” Duke asked. “I don’t know if you guys have noticed, but you are definitely not good at showing your emotions well.”

Bruce sighed heavily. “Yes, Duke, you have made that abundantly clear in the past.” Duke smiled at that, looking rather sheepish. Bruce frowned in concentration. “Let them make the first move. If they try to question you, don’t hold anything back. Try to be friendly.” Tim noticed he directed that last part at Damian and Jason.

“Don’t hold anything back?” Jason asked, an evil smirk growing on his face. Tim shuddered inwardly at whatever gruesome tale Jason was planning on sharing.

“Within reason,” Bruce growled.

Duke stood up. “Well, that sounds good for you guys, but I have Gotham to patrol.” Duke strolled off with a decidedly self satisfied smile on his face. He clearly thought that he was getting out of sharing his life story.

Bruce sighed once more. “Very well, Duke. Good luck.”

Duke nodded his thanks as he made his way to the changing rooms to get ready for his patrol.

*****

“Dude, this is incredible!” Peter had given Tim a chance to look at his web-shooters, and Tim was being a total fangirl over it.

“Thanks,” Peter replied, seeming quite proud. “The basic design is mine, Mr. Stark supplied some improvements though.”

Tim nodded as he continued to examine the device. “Are these veins turbine pumps?”

Peter grinned. “Yup! They compress the web fluid before shooting it out through the spinneret holes which cold-draws the solution and extrudes it through the air, where it solidifies.”

“And during the process the  nylon gains a four-fold increase in tensile strength?”

“Exactly!”

Tim shook his head at the brilliance. “Wow, this is utterly brilliant!”

“Thanks! Do you want to see the chemical formula?” Peter asked. He seemed really eager to talk about it with someone his own age.

“Of course!” Tim hit his forehead. “Gosh, I’m sorry! I completely forgot you came to me to see if we could make more.”

Peter shrugged, “no worries. I’m glad you like the devices.”

Tim reached over to one of the coffee tables in the sitting room they were occupying and handing it to Peter, who promptly began to write down the formula.

Upon seeing it, Tim gasped uncontrollably. “Oh my god, this is the greatest thing I have seen in a long time!” Peter had to be a genius to come up with this, Tim decided.

Peter grinned at Tim. “Really?”

“Totally!”

“You guys done fangirling?” A voice came from the door. “ ‘cause we have some people to decimate!”

Tim looked over to find Jason leaning against the doorframe, two nerf guns in hand.

“Decimate?” Peter asked.

Jason rolled his eyes. “Capture the flag on the back lawn in five. Bring whatever non-lethal weapons you want. You can get ‘em approved before the game starts.” And with that, he strolled off.

“You guys play Capture The Flag?” Peter looked excited.

Tim stood up, organizing the notes, then setting them aside. “Yup! It can get pretty wild though. Think you can handle it?”

Peter grinned. “I think so.”

*****

“Welcome to the 67th annual Bat Fa-”

“It's not annual and you know it Dick.”

Dick pouted as he looked over at Tim. “Come on, Timbo, let me have this!”

“Drake is correct, Grayson. You are acting idiotically.”

Tim glanced over at Damian. “You’re admitting I’m right?”

Damian glowered at his brother. “Of course not.” “But you jus-”

“Are we playing or not?” Someone had managed to rope Bruce into the game, but he was being pretty snippy about it.

Dick sighed, looking defeated. “Fine. Capture the flag. You all know how to play?” Everyone nodded, except Thor.

“I am unfamiliar with this specific midgardian game.”

Dick nodded. “Ok, that’s fine. Good chance to go over the rules anyway. There are two teams, each take one side of the playing area. So each team has a flag, or item of some sort that they each place in a visible yet defendable position. Part of the team defends their flag, while the other part attempts to steal their opponents’. If you get caught on the opposite team's territory, they put you in jail. Only one of your teammates can get you out, by tapping you. Get it?”

Everyone nodded. “Good. A few extra rules that must be followed,” Dick looked pointedly at Jason and Damian as he continued, “ include: no maiming. Serious injuries of most kinds are off limits. Lethal weapons are also out, unless you know how to use them nonlethally. You are also not allowed to leave the playing area at any point. Nor are you allowed to use cookies as bait in any traps. Especially Alfred’s cookies.”

Dick looked pointedly at Tim during the last rule, much to Tim’s chagrin. It had been one time!

“And finally, no touching Alfred’s shrubbery.” Everyone with the exception of the Avengers cringed at that. “Everyone understand?”

There was a chorus of “Yups” “Yes’s” and “f*** yeah, b****!” Tim didn’t need to be the world’s second greatest detective to guess where that last one came from.

“Good,” Dick said, grinning. “We’ll have two teams. Captains are Bruce and me. Let’s get into a line and start dividing.”

Tim got in line, grumbling slightly. A few of the Avengers had also joined, specifically Peter, Thor, and Banner. Tim wasn’t sure how much of a help Banner could be without “Hulking out” as Peter put it, but the guy seemed smart. It seemed like it would be an interesting game.

“Lil’ D!” Dick called, quite predictably. Damian grumbled and walked over to Dick’s side.

Bruce took longer to choose. He examined the faces of each person, one by one. “Tim.” Tim smiled, he had been expecting Dick to choose him, but with Bruce, Tim didn’t have to deal with the demon brat.

Dick chose Thor next, then Bruce chose Jason. They continued back and forth till Dick’s team consisted of Damian, Thor, and Banner. Bruce had chosen Tim, Jason, and Peter. Cassandra had opted to Referee the game, much to everyone’s relief. They could play everyone against Cass, and his sister would still win.

“Flags?” Cass asked once everyone had assembled with their teams.

“I got these from Alfred!” Dick said as he grabbed two large banners from beside a tree. One was Green, the other Blue.

Cass nodded. “You get Blue. Bruce, green.” Once Dick had handed the other banner to Bruce, Cass continued. “Ten minutes to plan and hide flags. Then go.”

They split up, Tim following right behind Bruce. “Ideas?” he asked when they were all in the cover of the trees that they had chosen for their side.

“The flag will go up in the old oak tree, as high as you can get it, Peter. I want Jason on Guard Duty near the tree, I’ll be farther out doing a border patrol. Tim and Peter, you’re both on infiltration duty. Skirt the sides as much as possible. Dick will most likely be trying to cross over, avoid him if you can. Watch out for Damian, too. He'll be joining Dick. Thor will most likely be guarding their flag along with Banner. He won’t be able to resist the pun. They should be pretty easy to take down.” Bruce paused for a moment, thinking. “Dick will probably place his banner somewhere near the westward fountain. Use the ivy wall to the east as cover.”

Everyone nodded, and separated. Peter scrambled up the oak tree with ease, and placed the banner at the literal top. It’d be almost impossible for anyone to reach it, but Tim knew Dick would love the challenge.

A couple minutes later, the guard routes were established, and Tim had shown Peter the way to the flag by drawing a diagram in the dirt. Tim quickly wiped it away, however, when Cass sounded an Airhorn. Tim had no idea where she had gotten it, but didn’t bother trying to figure it out. Tim sprinted to the side almost immediately, Peter right behind them. They wove through the trees, keeping to the shadows. Peter wasn’t nearly as stealthy as Tim, but they both kept out of sight.

Right as they were about to cross over the border, Tim stopped them. “Let’s get an aerial view before we proceed.”

“Sounds good,” Peter replied as they started to climb a nearby tree. Turns out it was the right choice, because they were awarded front row seats to Bruce grabbing Damian by his collar.

“Not today, Damian. You’re going to jail.” Bruce smiled fondly as he carried his youngest son away from the border and off to the previously chosen prison.

“Grayson!” Damian shreeked. “How dare you abandon me! Unhand me this instant, Father! Grayson! You shall rue the day I make my escape! This insult has not gone unnoticed! I refuse to be kept against my will by plebeians! You had better drop everything to assist me Grayson, or -”

Damian’s outraged voice slowly faded away as he was hauled off.

“Oof,” Peter said. “Think Dick will get him out?”

Tim snorted before shaking his head. “Knowing Dick, he’ll be remorseful for a bit before completely forgetting about the kid.”

Peter nodded. “Well, one less person we have to deal with, right?”

Tim grinned. “Yup! We should probably get going.”

*****

“Mmff! Mfffff-mmmf!”

“I think we did a good job, whattaya say, bug-boy?” Tim and Peter grinned down at a bound and gagged Thor and Banner. Both trying and failing to escape their bonds.

“I think we did quite well, bird-boy.” Peter replied. “But we should probably get going.”

Tim nodded as he plucked the banner from atop the fountain, right where Bruce said it would be.

“Let’s go!” they race off towards the border.

It didn’t take them long for them to reach the wide patch of grass marked with a hastily placed length of rope, but their path was blocked. Thor had managed to get out of Peter’s webs, and chased after them. He stood  facing them, his hammer out, pointing at their chests.

“Halt! I must not allow you any further.”

Tim grinned. “Bet I can take him down first.”

Peter grinned right back. “You’re on!”

Togather, they charged the norse god. Peter was flipped over Thor’s shoulder, shooting his webs out and pulling Thor’s helmet over his eyes, though he quickly pulled it up again. Tim unleashed a flurry of batarangs, which Thor dodged. This, however, set him off balance. Tim activated a smoke bomb, and expertly navigated the limited visuals to attack Thor, who was in the process of throwing Peter to the ground.

When the smoke cleared, Thor was once again on his back, taken down by Tim. Peter was also on his back.

“You okay there, Peter?”

Peter groaned and rolled over. “Yup. You won, though.”

Tim crowed. “Hah! Yeah, I did!” He offered his hand to his downed companion. You did a good job too though. We make a great team.”

Peter stood, and together they crossed over the border holding the banner just as Dick came out of the trees being chased by both Jason and Bruce.

“Aw, crap.” Dick said upon seeing Peter and Tim already back on their own territory.

Almost immediately, Cass appeared. A newly freed Banner also appeared. Well, he limped out of the trees.

“Team Grumpy Wins,” Cass says triumphantly. It took a moment for Tim to realise what she had said.

“Wait, I thought we didn’t use team names?”

Cass smiled and pointed at Bruce. “Grumpy.” She then turned to Dick. “Happy.”

Jason smirked. “That’s an accurate assessment.”

He and Cass high-fived.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Dick said good naturedly. “Good job guys. You up for another round?”

“Different teams this time,” Tim replied.

Dick smiled, “Sounds good! Maybe Dami should lead this time.” Dick’s eyes widened. “Crap! Damian!”

Everyone burst into laughter as Dick sprinted towards Team Grumpy’s jail.

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Choosing the best e-Commerce digital marketing agency will help you save time, headaches, and a massive amount of money. The goal of hiring an e-Commerce digital agency is to increase your website’s visibility and ultimately provide a quick return on your investment.

Before we go further, here’s a heads-up! Reaching the top of search engine rankings doesn’t happen overnight. Because of this, it takes several months to realize that you hired the wrong e-Commerce agency, and you end up facing damaging effects to your website’s online presence in search engine results. Too late to atone for your bad decisions.

If you are looking for honest SEO services with guaranteed results, then you came to the RIGHT place!

Compared to other e-Commerce marketing agencies, we offer you a stress-free, fast and rewarding experience! Our main goal of helping you set up an e-Commerce digital marketing system is to create new e-Commerce revenue streams that initially seem too complicated to leverage. We suggest that if you want the best results in your ROI, focus on the valuable metrics that matter.

ePropel is an e-Commerce digital marketing agency that offers guaranteed e-Commerce digital marketing services that will help your business dominate your market’s search engine rankings. We follow a 3-step system to grow your e-Commerce business based on fundamental strategies and best SEO and digital marketing practices. Our guaranteed SEO system has a proven track record in assisting small to medium-sized companies to sell to a global audience online.

Our main goal is to help you attract your ideal customers without paying hefty fees for paid ads. As your SEO partner, we will strive to help you get to the top results on Google and get organic traffic from the top 10 search result positions.

We now live in a different world, and as technology advances, Google is also advancing its requirements. We diversify, and with the latest developments in Google algorithm, it’s hard to keep up with the new marketing trend at an enterprise level.

LEARN HOW TO GET 10X MORE CUSTOMERS AND INCREASE YOUR ROI WITH EPROPEL’S 3-STEP SYSTEM.

We provide all the e-Commerce digital marketing services that your company needs to get results!

Our full-service SEO and e-Commerce digital marketing packages are designed for your business to rule the web and replace a dozen solutions with one suite to improve and leverage in all areas of your marketing. As our valued client, you will enjoy the following services:

Execution of effective e-Commerce digital marketing strategies

We will conduct an in-depth review and audit of your website to determine the necessary SEO strategies that will give your store the much-needed boost in its online presence. We will also execute effective e-Commerce SEO strategies customized to your business to make your online store more visible on the search engine results pages.

Perform website optimization strategies

Payments works seamlessly with any Salesforce application or data model, be it your out of the box Sales Cloud or custom application.

Help you design a custom, mobile-friendly site that makes purchasing your product be a breeze as possible

Payments works seamlessly with any Salesforce application or data model, be it your out of the box Sales Cloud or custom application.

EXCLUSIVE BONUS: WATCH OUR FREE TRAINING VIDEO TO BOOST YOUR SEARCH ENGINE RANKINGS QUICKLY.

What makes our e-Commerce agency different?

Our connection with our customers is at the heart of what we do, as we believe building a solid client relationship is the foundation for growth. Trust and values come FIRST to us, and we don’t act in self-interest. We continually strive to build a lasting and meaningful relationship with our clients founded by transparency and honesty.

With all that said, we take time to hear your goals and where you want to be in the future, so we have a FULL understanding of what your company wants to accomplish in e-Commerce marketing and ensure you are well-supported throughout the process.

Everything we do comes from the perspective of a business owner. We walk our talk, and we are 100% dedicated to serving you. We will treat your company as our own and look out for your business’s best interest as a whole. And as your SEO and digital marketing partner, you are NEVER alone in your game. We are in this together!

Simply put, we genuinely care about your business, and we are passionate about bringing noticeable results building your competitive advantage. Our SEO solutions and digital marketing system in place are driven towards making an indelible impact with significant change on your company’s revenue growth and, eventually, help your business succeed in this competitive digital age.

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE EPROPEL DIFFERENCE. WE GIVE YOU A HANDS-OFF SOLUTION IN GETTING CONSISTENT SALES AND LEADS.

So, let’s kick things off with the help of our certified digital marketing experts!

Take note that highly effective e-Commerce marketing is a make or break necessity for many e-Commerce companies. Today, a plethora of e-Commerce businesses credit online marketing for achieving an increase in their ROI and their generation of more sales.

When it comes to e-Commerce digital marketing, finding the RIGHT e-Commerce marketing agency or partner can help you tap into this rapidly growing sales channel and keep your business prepared for the future!

That said, if you are looking for a dedicated digital marketing team passionate about taking your business to the next level, our integrated digital marketing strategies will be perfect for you!

Make ePropel and our team your trusted e-Commerce marketing agency. Our e-Commerce digital marketing services go unmatched, providing your business with the best value possible and helping your e-Commerce store get ahead in today’s very competitive online business world. We will develop a customized internet marketing package to meet your business KPIs and revenue growth goals.

With our team of experienced SEO and digital experts and a growing number of satisfied customers, ePropel becomes the trusted choice for e-Commerce companies looking to drive revenue, generate sales, set up an effective conversion strategy, and ultimately, get good leads aboard.

PARTNER WITH EPROPEL NOW, AND TOGETHER, WE WILL GROW YOUR BUSINESS!

Why do you need a game plan for your online marketing?

The global market is continually expanding and innovating. If you don’t keep up with your competitors, you will be missing out on huge sales, let alone you lose in the game. Relying on the traditional forms of advertising and marketing products will not cut it or beat your competitors, especially in a very aggressive market with low customer spending.

With nearly all marketing efforts being performed now online, it is tough to draw customer’s attention to your business. Even more challenging is deciding between the various types of digital marketing people use today that will potentially market your business. If you continue to rest on your laurels in a world of business that’s highly competitive, sooner or later, a new competition lurks around the corner, and you are in a deadly trap.

Here’s a wake-up call to e-Commerce business owners

While you are not boosting your website’s visibility, your competitors are keeping the competition on their toes. So, if your potential and existing customers find them online, they will likely turn to your competitors instead of you as the go-to source for their needs. Thus, you miss the opportunity to pull in more customers and reach a large audience.

As you can see, digital marketing is relatively inexpensive and very doable, so there is no reason why e-Commerce businesses couldn’t stay in front of people and stand out from the crowd. No matter how new or small, your business can avoid being overlooked by the vast marketplace. Here’s the good news, at ePropel, we offer a suite of e-Commerce marketing services that make using e-Commerce marketing simple but on point and delivers results.

Take advantage of our online marketing strategies geared toward building your brand awareness, increased website traffic, targeted reach, leads, conversions, or even repeat purchases so that you could achieve your business growth goals. With a coordinated marketing strategy, your company will surely maximize the impact of your e-Commerce marketing efforts!

FIND OUT HOW YOU CAN GET MORE CLIENTS AND REACH YOUR TARGET MARKET THROUGH SEO. WATCH THE FREE TRAINING VIDEO HERE.

Again, don’t rest on your laurels. It’s time to take massive action!

As a business owner, it is common for you to spin the wheels and lose focus. And as the business continues to grow, the demands to be met become increasingly high. Without noticing, it presents you with ever more complex challenges at a near-relentless pace, losing your control and grip on the business. Add in your personal and family needs; things could spiral down quickly, and it’s easy to constantly feel overwhelmed and unmotivated. ‍

With overwhelming things going on in the business, unknowingly, the day has gone by, and you missed priming the pump that improves cash flow. Remember that generating MORE sales or getting more people walking through your door are the lifeblood of your business. At the end of the day, the main thing that matters is, how many sales are you making?

If you want your business to realize its full potential without getting overwhelmed, take this advice seriously: do things that truly matter to your business, and don’t wait for your feelings to change to take action. Whether you like it or not, your e-Commerce success depends upon the successful marketing strategies you have poured into your business to gain traction in a crowded online marketplace.

If wearing multiple hats at your job hurts your efficiency, decreases your focus, and undermines your productivity as the company’s primary decision-maker – it’s about time to stop trying to do it all by yourself. Simple. If you do the SEO legwork yourself, you need to learn the process and pay for tool subscriptions. In addition, to get it done right, you need to invest in training and courses. Too much on your plate already, and confused about what to do first. Consider outsourcing your marketing – this is perhaps the best decision. This way, you can give your undivided attention to more important things to run your business more powerfully.

Do you want an e-Commerce marketing going and need help from experts?

No worries, we’ve got you covered! We at ePropel will help you create a plan, strategize, and implement it into your business. We will make things happen for you and deliver maximum SEO results that propel your business to grow. ‍

Prioritize Keywords That Gets You Results

Identify what your prospects are searching for on Google and embed these keywords into the right areas of your website that you can consistently get qualified leads on a regular basis.

Optimize Your Website to Increase Visibility

With over 200 optimization factors, we identify the top factors that are turning your visitors away and what would increase searchability on your website. We then implement these on your website on so that it helps your store to rank on Google for more keywords

Quality Link Building To Accelerate Your Growth

Without high-quality and relevant backlinks, it’s almost impossible to get to the 1st page of Google for the most competitive keywords in your niche, so it’s very important to match your eCommerce store with the most relevant and high quality backlink opportunities to achieve 1st page Google results.

Without SEO, your website is not found by searchers, and your efforts will be for nothing. Remember, most e-Commerce traffic comes from Google, and because of this, implementing cohesive e-Commerce marketing strategies will help you get found, get noticed, and attract new leads.

Investing in SEO and digital marketing is a long-term investment. We believe that building our partnership with you is crucial to making our working relationship as smooth sailing as possible. We understand that you are busy running your business. Don’t worry; we’ve got this!

We will take your business marketing off your plate and help you get into the “​feels right” zone quickly to skyrocket your sales. We’ve got your back, and you can count on us, through thick and thin. We have everything tracked with advanced analytics on your site, showing all aspects of your business, resulting in a more effective and faster decision-making process and ensuring that all campaigns perform at peak potential. We will also send you a detailed regular SEO report that summarizes all necessary SEO metrics you need to know about your business.

Everything you need to know about e-Commerce marketing

With many marketing operations now taking place online, it can be tough to decide which e-Commerce marketing strategy is most useful for your business. So before we dive into much detail about the endless options for marketing your product, it is essential to understand that e-Commerce marketing and digital marketing are both inclusive.

Similarly, e-Commerce marketers can use all digital channels to promote their products, attract visitors to their website, facilitate purchases online and grow their business. While SEO results take time to be reflected on search engines, it offers long-term value. So, keep going!

At ePropel we help business owners improve their store and monitor their progress. We will help you implement clear, actionable, prioritized ground-breaking SEO strategies to improve your website performance.

Scan your website with possible SEO issues. No obligation is required.

AVAIL NOW FOR OUR FREE SITE AUDIT TO CHECK YOUR WEBSITE’S SEO SCORE.

Patience is a virtue even in SEO…

As an e-Commerce agency, we have been doing SEO for a long time; the most common client question is, “How long before we are #1 in Google?” We get that.

Here is the harsh truth, there is no such thing as instant SEO results. But once rankings are achieved, it is not easy to fall off Google’s SERP. So how long does it take for results to start kicking in? It takes 4-6 months to see the results and experience an increase in organic traffic to be accurate. ‍

Although most companies want fast and quick results, SEO cannot take effect overnight. It just doesn’t happen like that – SEO doesn’t work instantly. However, if website optimization is built on a right and solid foundation, it should continue to bring relevant organic results not long after the website is optimized.

When it comes to populating the first page in Google, the bottom line is that patience is a virtue. Google is getting smarter recently, and it takes considerable time to prove to Google that your website is worth it. If you successfully make it to the first page, pat yourself on the back. This achievement means that Google has finally found your website credible and valuable.

So, kudos to your dedication and hard work. Allow us to be the first one to say, “Congratulations, all of your SEO efforts have finally paid off!” The main takeaway here is that the work will gradually produce BIG results if the SEO foundation is solid and done right. SEO is a daunting task, but it is a slow but sure process. So trust the process!

Now, let’s talk about the ins and outs of digital marketing

Nowadays, digital marketers use different platforms to generate noise towards their products or services. Let’s face it. Competition among small businesses is fierce. In fact, we frequently witness an uprising every now and then. With that said, digital marketing has never been more relevant and vital for companies to get their business found and thrive online.

A lot of e-Commerce companies are now investing so much effort in telling about their brands or showing off their products in the hope of bringing awareness and attracting more buyers online without spending so much money on advertisements. These are made possible because of the digital marketing strategies they implement on their own.

As the competition online gets more rigid, more and more business owners have difficulty keeping up with competitors. Add in the fact that digital marketing continues to evolve every single day.

This scenario is quite challenging for many businesses to take advantage of the marketing channels available, especially if entrepreneurs are not clear on their starting point and where their company is headed within a given timeframe – it can seem scary, intimidating, and confusing. Add it, for businesses with limited time and resources on hand – it’s often difficult to take advantage of digital marketing channels, which leads to neglect and not taking action to leverage and stay ahead of the curve.

So why does digital marketing matter to your business?

The reasons are simple and clear. To make it easier to understand, let us break them down into tiny bits and pieces.

IT DOESN’T NEED A CONSIDERABLE INVESTMENT

e-Commerce marketing won’t break the bank to implement the strategies. If you are new to digital marketing, find suitable channels that work for your business.

IT EFFECTIVELY INCREASES THE CONVERSION RATE

Although e-Commerce marketing doesn’t promise fast results after optimizing the website, it can easily convert subscribers and leads into high-paying customers and repeat clients when done right.

INCREASES YOUR RETURN ON INVESTMENT

As you get higher conversion rates, it will impact the revenue positively, make more money, and increase your profit margin.

DEFINES AND CLASSIFIES YOUR TARGET MARKET

In business, you need to understand who your target customers are. Speak directly to your ideal target market that can resonate with what you are offering, and in time, your efforts will pay dividends.

BUILDS AND STRENGTHENS YOUR BRAND

Having a brand is not enough. It needs to be promoted and instilled in your potential customer’s minds, which means getting your brand in front of them and winning their trust to increase your credibility. The greater brand awareness your business has, the higher the chances to convert website visitors into paying customers.

SHARE QUALITY CONTENT ABOUT THE COMPANY ACROSS DIFFERENT PLATFORMS

SEO and digital marketing involve the optimization of your content. Creating content and sharing them on different digital media platforms make you look like an industry expert. Being so is an advantage because it will give you an instant upper hand on competitors.

Ready, set, let’s go!

If you don’t have an SEO and digital marketing system in place, what are you waiting for? Now that you know the ins and outs of e-Commerce marketing, let’s discuss how you can build a successful business strategy for your online store.

Set realistic long-term goals for the business.

Break down long-term goals into actionable steps.

Keep your new and existing customers happy.

Keep your new and existing customers happy. Like other relationships, the business relationship is about establishing mutual trust. Nurturing your customers will solidify your business’s future success, avoid customer churn, and increase client satisfaction.

Pandemic lockdown is a blessing in disguise to small businesses...

Entrepreneurship is not for everyone, making it difficult to stay afloat, especially for startup business owners during trying times like what we are going through right now. With the influx of COVID-19 worldwide, many businesses that were severely affected are now out of business. ‍ The ones believed as temporary closures became permanent shutdowns delivering a gut punch to business owners across various ranges of industries. Despite the reopening to new normal, thousands of small businesses are still struggling to get their heads above water. ‍ On the flip side, e-Commerce businesses have been turbo-charged by the pandemic. Coronavirus restrictions forced people to stay at home and avoid leaving their houses unless absolutely necessary. With more consumers needing to physically distance and local stores changing their in-store operations due to daunting COVID-19 case counts, the option to shop online became the best alternative to many.

Turn your dry pipeline into a well of golden opportunity

Pandemic has changed the way people shop and accelerated the digital world’s shift where business interactions and transactions are done online. The compulsory measure to arrest the virus caused the most significant change to online shopping. ‍ But our difficult circumstance goes to show that every cloud has a silver lining. The strict stay-at-home combined with physical distancing orders led many people to shy away from physical stores, sweeping more virtual and e-Commerce businesses off their feet. ‍ If you have the right mindset, you can see a dry pipeline as a once-in-a-lifetime chance to innovate, restructure, shift priorities and take advantage of the new trends of commercial opportunities brought on by the unprecedented times. That’s right.

According to recent surveys, retail e-Commerce sales soared to an all-time high during the global pandemic. The challenging situation we are in right now is perhaps the MOST ironic. Do you agree?

A dry sales pipeline compels businesses to perform into exploration mode, try new things, and accelerate the learning curve. So, despite the economic fallout, COVID-19 helped drive e-Commerce sales up to 97% compared to the pre-pandemic season. 

This enormous growth of e-Commerce means competition, which means that e-Commerce companies struggle to get new clients because of too much rivalry online. Sounds like you?

GET A FREE AUDIT TO CHECK WHAT’S HOLDING YOUR WEBSITE BACK FROM ITS POTENTIAL TO GET RANKED AND NOTICED.

Supercharge your e-Commerce site search to get more traffic

So as COVID-19 spikes and restrictions remain uncertain, today is the perfect time to jumpstart boosting your e-Commerce business. If you think your company doesn’t need SEO, think again! As the pandemic continues to reshape our world, many consumers turn to e-Commerce to purchase the items they need and become accustomed to the convenience of shopping from home.

The dramatic shift from in-store shopping to massive buying online is expected to have lasting effects on the consumers’ shopping preferences, even when things go back to a pre-COVID-19 way of life. The prediction is that online shopping is here to stay even when the pandemic is over. So, grab the chance to get discovered by your potential customers and dominate your niche.

Don’t just launch your e-Commerce store; leave it sitting online and wait for orders to come through. Sorry not sorry – this is not how it works. Flow in orders and sales won’t come unless you get the word out there and let the people know about what you are offering. Letting your website die in the vine and not doing anything is like throwing your money away since no one will see this website of yours. Your website is not getting any leads that you needed to scale your business.

In the digital era, setting your e-Commerce website is the easiest part of the process. The difficult step is how to get attention and convert the leads into loyal customers. We offer e-Commerce marketing services to maximize reach and transform your shop into a retail store’s powerhouse.

GET IN TOUCH WITH US TO SEE HOW YOU CAN SKYROCKET YOUR E-COMMERCE BUSINESS GROWTH AMID TIGHT COMPETITION.

Step up in your SEO game. Why not?

First, let us make a recap. Website optimization through SEO strategies is the game-changer for ranking high on Google, capturing new leads, and increasing your revenue in the future. If your brand has high visibility online, it fuels more sales for your business.

After e-Commerce store launching is completed, don’t sit back yet. Instead, invest your efforts into turning your website into a lead magnet and acquire more customers straight from your website. Even a pandemic can’t slow down your e-Commerce business if you have the right SEO in place.

To reiterate, taking your business online is totally different from creating a website. Every effort we make to improve our website’s performance leads to revenue in some way.

So, if you want to leverage your business, keep this in mind:

Your e-Commerce website becomes the marketplace where customers learn about your products and services and make pre-purchase decisions. The customers also carry out commercial transactions like buying or selling on the platform itself.

SEO is a non-negotiable strategy for an effective e-Commerce marketing

The pandemic has turned several businesses upside down. If your e-Commerce store was hit hard by this Coronavirus outbreak and has experienced a massive decline in traffic and conversion, it’s time to do the work. Yes, you heard it right!

Don’t wait for things to get better before you put in the work. While everything is slow, it is the perfect time to restructure, which includes improving your SEO and utilizing digital marketing platforms to skyrocket your sales, outrank your competitors, and get back on track when the pandemic is over.

Sounds good? Here’s how to get started:

Declutter your website pages. Remove irrelevant pages that were created without a strategy, including those that got obsolete over time. Although Google indexed them, they don’t matter to your business anymore. So better delete the non-essentials – having less is more. ‍

Only publish high-quality content. It was once a fad that producing heaps of content was the key to rank. But things have changed. The rule of thumb is to go for quality over quantity. Today, Google is more focused on the VALUE you are providing to the online readers. So, when publishing content, keep posting less but highly informative and keyword-rich articles. Then, you are good to go! ‍

Utilize other platforms like Amazon and App stores. Explore other websites that your audience is searching and don’t just restrict your efforts to rank in Google alone. Look beyond and seize every opportunity you have. The goal here is to maximize your online visibility to get found by an impending flood of virtual customers. ‍

Level up your website’s on-page SEO. On-page SEO is the key to improving your brand visibility, achieving a surge in organic traffic, and whatnot. On-page SEO is done by optimizing and adding keywords to the individual page on your website. If done correctly, it has the potential to improve your website rankings in Google and reach your target audience over time. ‍

Improve visitor’s dwelling time by creating engaging content.‍ Dwelling time is the amount of time users spend on your website before they go back to check out other results in the search engine. Adding high value, quality, informative and engaging content will increase your chances of converting visitors into potential customers and avoid leaving before they get to your website. ‍

Switch your website to Google’s mobile-first index.‍ To simplify, Google prioritizes indexing sites that are mobile-first indexing compatible. As Google adapts to the growing use of mobile worldwide, Google bots prioritize crawling and indexing sites with compatibility with mobile-first indexing and mobile SEO in general. ‍

Amp up your technical SEO. The main goal here is to optimize the primary infrastructure of your website. Technical SEO has nothing to do with your content. The most simplified definition of the process requires Speed, Progressive Web Apps (PWAs), and JavaScript, to name a few. Improving your technical SEO allows the search engines to access, crawl, interpret and index your website without any problems.

Fill your sales pipeline with warm leads

As Google rankings increasingly become tougher, it is important to understand what your audience likes and preferences as a whole. Since most people now are spending most of their time on their smartphones, it is good to invest your efforts in identifying the suitable medium to engage and nurture relationships with your visitors and create content that adds value to them.

Take note that shoppers are spending more hours researching the items they want to buy online. If they highly consider your product, they will temporarily add them to the cart and buy it later. According to surveys, it takes about two weeks before they make the purchase decision.

As part of the sales process, newly found leads need warming up before they are ripe for conversion. The content you add to your website attracts potential customers. You can keep them engaged by giving them steam of quality content that will keep them coming back and increase their genuine interest as they move closer to making buying decisions. Most potential buyers are not only are searching online for the products they want to buy online but are also looking for answers to their questions.

Yes, it’s true. Almost all the customers have curious queries, so create content that is engaging and informative. Strive to satisfy their curiosity and meet them at every level of their research – from product discovery, comparisons with other products, and reviews from previous clients.

Aside from getting a paying customer when you add value to your audience journey, you will also get a fresh ranking boost from Google. It’s like killing two birds with one stone. So don’t settle for mediocre content; go for quality content that will help you stand out, pull visitors into your funnel, warm them as prospects, and eventually, fill your pipeline with qualified hot leads.

LEARN MORE ABOUT OUR TAILORED SOLUTIONS TO SCALE YOUR E-COMMERCE WEBSITE UP. BOOK A STRATEGY CALL WITH US NOW!

Final words

SEO is a critical need by e-Commerce businesses nowadays. There is no other way to move forward your e-Commerce business faster and get better ROI than optimizing your website. As an e-Commerce digital marketing agency, we will get the results for you while you focus on your business. Choosing your e-Commerce digital marketing agency is a matter of life and death. It could help you succeed or fail in your SEO campaigns. So choose wisely. Your choice in hiring the right e-Commerce SEO agency matters because it either catapults your e-Commerce store to brilliant new levels of success or pulls your business a giant step backward.

Partner with ePropel, and guaranteed, your business is in good hands. We have what it takes to help your business grow. We will unleash your e-Commerce to its full potential allowing your website to get more traffic, exponentially increase your revenue and gain more repeat businesses online. So whether you want to increase your profit or get your brand out there, ePropel’s e-Commerce marketing services will help achieve your business’s goals to succeed within a target audience.

ePropel is an SEO agency that helps companies to accelerate their website’s organic visitors through our proven 3-step system. Our team has more than 20 years of experience and are driven to deliver exceptional results for our clients.

Get More Customers Organically For Your eCommerce Store

Find out how you can attract more of your ideal customers on the top of Google Search results without paid ads with our 3-step SEO system.

With 43% of all e-commerce traffic coming from Google search, e-commerce stores who capitalize on this will benefit from increased profits and consistent organic customers for years to come.

Take a minute to schedule a time below to see if you are a good fit to at least double your organic website leads through our 3 step system.

I WANT TO GROW MY ORGANIC LEADS

Our Clients Have Massively Increased Their Sales Through Our SEO Services

Our team have helped companies ranging from emerging eCommerce stores to large companies like Capital One to be found at the top of Google through Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Through this, we helped them to get more qualified leads and more sales while achieving a big return on their investment.

Two Spoons

Hannah from Two Spoons already had a strong social media presence before working with us, with over 115,000 followers on Instagram and growing her followers fast. However despite this growth, her website leads was not growing fast enough.

Through working with us, we helped Two Spoons to grow from 2,000 organic visitors per month to 10,000 organic visitors per month!

See this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Omxdm5SHvlc

Alpha Crowd Control

Allan from Alpha Crowd Control has been running his business for more than 15 years. When traditional marketing channels stopped working and his paid ads didn’t bring a good return, he struggled to find new customers…

Through our 3-step system, we TRIPLED his business’ organic website leads which helped to create a 50% increase in his annual revenue!

See this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEfh4g_y06A

E-Commerce Digital Marketing Agency

Having a functional e-commerce store or website is not an end-all and be-all. In a constantly changing digital and competitive business landscape nowadays, most e-commerce merchants worldwide turn to SEO and digital marketing agencies to help build their brands and grow their customer base. Because of this, marketing business online has become increasingly important in any company’s success.

Promoting your e-commerce store by utilizing SEO strategies and different digital marketing platforms offers immense value. Still, it is NOT a small and easy feat. Since SEO rankings take time to improve after optimizing the website, it is a truly daunting task to find the needle you are looking for in the enormous haystack of information that search engines return. For this reason, more and more entrepreneurs are now relying on outside help to achieve organic growth.

Are you thinking about hiring an e-Commerce digital marketing agency?

Choosing the best e-Commerce digital marketing agency will help you save time, headaches, and a massive amount of money. The goal of hiring an e-Commerce digital agency is to increase your website’s visibility and ultimately provide a quick return on your investment.

Before we go further, here’s a heads-up! Reaching the top of search engine rankings doesn’t happen overnight. Because of this, it takes several months to realize that you hired the wrong e-Commerce agency, and you end up facing damaging effects to your website’s online presence in search engine results. Too late to atone for your bad decisions.

If you are looking for honest SEO services with guaranteed results, then you came to the RIGHT place!

Compared to other e-Commerce marketing agencies, we offer you a stress-free, fast and rewarding experience! Our main goal of helping you set up an e-Commerce digital marketing system is to create new e-Commerce revenue streams that initially seem too complicated to leverage. We suggest that if you want the best results in your ROI, focus on the valuable metrics that matter.

ePropel is an e-Commerce digital marketing agency that offers guaranteed e-Commerce digital marketing services that will help your business dominate your market’s search engine rankings. We follow a 3-step system to grow your e-Commerce business based on fundamental strategies and best SEO and digital marketing practices. Our guaranteed SEO system has a proven track record in assisting small to medium-sized companies to sell to a global audience online.

Our main goal is to help you attract your ideal customers without paying hefty fees for paid ads. As your SEO partner, we will strive to help you get to the top results on Google and get organic traffic from the top 10 search result positions.

We now live in a different world, and as technology advances, Google is also advancing its requirements. We diversify, and with the latest developments in Google algorithm, it’s hard to keep up with the new marketing trend at an enterprise level.

LEARN HOW TO GET 10X MORE CUSTOMERS AND INCREASE YOUR ROI WITH EPROPEL’S 3-STEP SYSTEM.

We provide all the e-Commerce digital marketing services that your company needs to get results!

Our full-service SEO and e-Commerce digital marketing packages are designed for your business to rule the web and replace a dozen solutions with one suite to improve and leverage in all areas of your marketing. As our valued client, you will enjoy the following services:

Execution of effective e-Commerce digital marketing strategies

We will conduct an in-depth review and audit of your website to determine the necessary SEO strategies that will give your store the much-needed boost in its online presence. We will also execute effective e-Commerce SEO strategies customized to your business to make your online store more visible on the search engine results pages.

Perform website optimization strategies

Payments works seamlessly with any Salesforce application or data model, be it your out of the box Sales Cloud or custom application.

Help you design a custom, mobile-friendly site that makes purchasing your product be a breeze as possible

Payments works seamlessly with any Salesforce application or data model, be it your out of the box Sales Cloud or custom application.

EXCLUSIVE BONUS: WATCH OUR FREE TRAINING VIDEO TO BOOST YOUR SEARCH ENGINE RANKINGS QUICKLY.

What makes our e-Commerce agency different?

Our connection with our customers is at the heart of what we do, as we believe building a solid client relationship is the foundation for growth. Trust and values come FIRST to us, and we don’t act in self-interest. We continually strive to build a lasting and meaningful relationship with our clients founded by transparency and honesty.

With all that said, we take time to hear your goals and where you want to be in the future, so we have a FULL understanding of what your company wants to accomplish in e-Commerce marketing and ensure you are well-supported throughout the process.

Everything we do comes from the perspective of a business owner. We walk our talk, and we are 100% dedicated to serving you. We will treat your company as our own and look out for your business’s best interest as a whole. And as your SEO and digital marketing partner, you are NEVER alone in your game. We are in this together!

Simply put, we genuinely care about your business, and we are passionate about bringing noticeable results building your competitive advantage. Our SEO solutions and digital marketing system in place are driven towards making an indelible impact with significant change on your company’s revenue growth and, eventually, help your business succeed in this competitive digital age.

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE EPROPEL DIFFERENCE. WE GIVE YOU A HANDS-OFF SOLUTION IN GETTING CONSISTENT SALES AND LEADS.

So, let’s kick things off with the help of our certified digital marketing experts!

Take note that highly effective e-Commerce marketing is a make or break necessity for many e-Commerce companies. Today, a plethora of e-Commerce businesses credit online marketing for achieving an increase in their ROI and their generation of more sales.

When it comes to e-Commerce digital marketing, finding the RIGHT e-Commerce marketing agency or partner can help you tap into this rapidly growing sales channel and keep your business prepared for the future!

That said, if you are looking for a dedicated digital marketing team passionate about taking your business to the next level, our integrated digital marketing strategies will be perfect for you!

Make ePropel and our team your trusted e-Commerce marketing agency. Our e-Commerce digital marketing services go unmatched, providing your business with the best value possible and helping your e-Commerce store get ahead in today’s very competitive online business world. We will develop a customized internet marketing package to meet your business KPIs and revenue growth goals.

With our team of experienced SEO and digital experts and a growing number of satisfied customers, ePropel becomes the trusted choice for e-Commerce companies looking to drive revenue, generate sales, set up an effective conversion strategy, and ultimately, get good leads aboard.

PARTNER WITH EPROPEL NOW, AND TOGETHER, WE WILL GROW YOUR BUSINESS!

Why do you need a game plan for your online marketing?

The global market is continually expanding and innovating. If you don’t keep up with your competitors, you will be missing out on huge sales, let alone you lose in the game. Relying on the traditional forms of advertising and marketing products will not cut it or beat your competitors, especially in a very aggressive market with low customer spending.

With nearly all marketing efforts being performed now online, it is tough to draw customer’s attention to your business. Even more challenging is deciding between the various types of digital marketing people use today that will potentially market your business. If you continue to rest on your laurels in a world of business that’s highly competitive, sooner or later, a new competition lurks around the corner, and you are in a deadly trap.

Here’s a wake-up call to e-Commerce business owners

While you are not boosting your website’s visibility, your competitors are keeping the competition on their toes. So, if your potential and existing customers find them online, they will likely turn to your competitors instead of you as the go-to source for their needs. Thus, you miss the opportunity to pull in more customers and reach a large audience.

As you can see, digital marketing is relatively inexpensive and very doable, so there is no reason why e-Commerce businesses couldn’t stay in front of people and stand out from the crowd. No matter how new or small, your business can avoid being overlooked by the vast marketplace. Here’s the good news, at ePropel, we offer a suite of e-Commerce marketing services that make using e-Commerce marketing simple but on point and delivers results.

Take advantage of our online marketing strategies geared toward building your brand awareness, increased website traffic, targeted reach, leads, conversions, or even repeat purchases so that you could achieve your business growth goals. With a coordinated marketing strategy, your company will surely maximize the impact of your e-Commerce marketing efforts!

FIND OUT HOW YOU CAN GET MORE CLIENTS AND REACH YOUR TARGET MARKET THROUGH SEO. WATCH THE FREE TRAINING VIDEO HERE.

Again, don’t rest on your laurels. It’s time to take massive action!

As a business owner, it is common for you to spin the wheels and lose focus. And as the business continues to grow, the demands to be met become increasingly high. Without noticing, it presents you with ever more complex challenges at a near-relentless pace, losing your control and grip on the business. Add in your personal and family needs; things could spiral down quickly, and it’s easy to constantly feel overwhelmed and unmotivated. ‍

With overwhelming things going on in the business, unknowingly, the day has gone by, and you missed priming the pump that improves cash flow. Remember that generating MORE sales or getting more people walking through your door are the lifeblood of your business. At the end of the day, the main thing that matters is, how many sales are you making?

If you want your business to realize its full potential without getting overwhelmed, take this advice seriously: do things that truly matter to your business, and don’t wait for your feelings to change to take action. Whether you like it or not, your e-Commerce success depends upon the successful marketing strategies you have poured into your business to gain traction in a crowded online marketplace.

If wearing multiple hats at your job hurts your efficiency, decreases your focus, and undermines your productivity as the company’s primary decision-maker – it’s about time to stop trying to do it all by yourself. Simple. If you do the SEO legwork yourself, you need to learn the process and pay for tool subscriptions. In addition, to get it done right, you need to invest in training and courses. Too much on your plate already, and confused about what to do first. Consider outsourcing your marketing – this is perhaps the best decision. This way, you can give your undivided attention to more important things to run your business more powerfully.

Do you want an e-Commerce marketing going and need help from experts?

Prioritize Keywords That Gets You Results

Identify what your prospects are searching for on Google and embed these keywords into the right areas of your website that you can consistently get qualified leads on a regular basis.

Optimize Your Website to Increase Visibility

With over 200 optimization factors, we identify the top factors that are turning your visitors away and what would increase searchability on your website. We then implement these on your website on so that it helps your store to rank on Google for more keywords

Quality Link Building To Accelerate Your Growth

Without high-quality and relevant backlinks, it’s almost impossible to get to the 1st page of Google for the most competitive keywords in your niche, so it’s very important to match your eCommerce store with the most relevant and high quality backlink opportunities to achieve 1st page Google results.

Without SEO, your website is not found by searchers, and your efforts will be for nothing. Remember, most e-Commerce traffic comes from Google, and because of this, implementing cohesive e-Commerce marketing strategies will help you get found, get noticed, and attract new leads.

Investing in SEO and digital marketing is a long-term investment. We believe that building our partnership with you is crucial to making our working relationship as smooth sailing as possible. We understand that you are busy running your business. Don’t worry; we’ve got this!

We will take your business marketing off your plate and help you get into the “​feels right” zone quickly to skyrocket your sales. We’ve got your back, and you can count on us, through thick and thin. We have everything tracked with advanced analytics on your site, showing all aspects of your business, resulting in a more effective and faster decision-making process and ensuring that all campaigns perform at peak potential. We will also send you a detailed regular SEO report that summarizes all necessary SEO metrics you need to know about your business.

Everything you need to know about e-Commerce marketing

With many marketing operations now taking place online, it can be tough to decide which e-Commerce marketing strategy is most useful for your business. So before we dive into much detail about the endless options for marketing your product, it is essential to understand that e-Commerce marketing and digital marketing are both inclusive.

Similarly, e-Commerce marketers can use all digital channels to promote their products, attract visitors to their website, facilitate purchases online and grow their business. While SEO results take time to be reflected on search engines, it offers long-term value. So, keep going!

At ePropel we help business owners improve their store and monitor their progress. We will help you implement clear, actionable, prioritized ground-breaking SEO strategies to improve your website performance.

Scan your website with possible SEO issues. No obligation is required.

AVAIL NOW FOR OUR FREE SITE AUDIT TO CHECK YOUR WEBSITE’S SEO SCORE.

Patience is a virtue even in SEO…

As an e-Commerce agency, we have been doing SEO for a long time; the most common client question is, “How long before we are #1 in Google?” We get that.

Here is the harsh truth, there is no such thing as instant SEO results. But once rankings are achieved, it is not easy to fall off Google’s SERP. So how long does it take for results to start kicking in? It takes 4-6 months to see the results and experience an increase in organic traffic to be accurate. ‍

Although most companies want fast and quick results, SEO cannot take effect overnight. It just doesn’t happen like that – SEO doesn’t work instantly. However, if website optimization is built on a right and solid foundation, it should continue to bring relevant organic results not long after the website is optimized.

When it comes to populating the first page in Google, the bottom line is that patience is a virtue. Google is getting smarter recently, and it takes considerable time to prove to Google that your website is worth it. If you successfully make it to the first page, pat yourself on the back. This achievement means that Google has finally found your website credible and valuable.

So, kudos to your dedication and hard work. Allow us to be the first one to say, “Congratulations, all of your SEO efforts have finally paid off!” The main takeaway here is that the work will gradually produce BIG results if the SEO foundation is solid and done right. SEO is a daunting task, but it is a slow but sure process. So trust the process!

Now, let’s talk about the ins and outs of digital marketing

Nowadays, digital marketers use different platforms to generate noise towards their products or services. Let’s face it. Competition among small businesses is fierce. In fact, we frequently witness an uprising every now and then. With that said, digital marketing has never been more relevant and vital for companies to get their business found and thrive online.

A lot of e-Commerce companies are now investing so much effort in telling about their brands or showing off their products in the hope of bringing awareness and attracting more buyers online without spending so much money on advertisements. These are made possible because of the digital marketing strategies they implement on their own.

As the competition online gets more rigid, more and more business owners have difficulty keeping up with competitors. Add in the fact that digital marketing continues to evolve every single day.

This scenario is quite challenging for many businesses to take advantage of the marketing channels available, especially if entrepreneurs are not clear on their starting point and where their company is headed within a given timeframe – it can seem scary, intimidating, and confusing. Add it, for businesses with limited time and resources on hand – it’s often difficult to take advantage of digital marketing channels, which leads to neglect and not taking action to leverage and stay ahead of the curve.

So why does digital marketing matter to your business?

The reasons are simple and clear. To make it easier to understand, let us break them down into tiny bits and pieces.

IT DOESN’T NEED A CONSIDERABLE INVESTMENT

e-Commerce marketing won’t break the bank to implement the strategies. If you are new to digital marketing, find suitable channels that work for your business.

IT EFFECTIVELY INCREASES THE CONVERSION RATE

Although e-Commerce marketing doesn’t promise fast results after optimizing the website, it can easily convert subscribers and leads into high-paying customers and repeat clients when done right.

INCREASES YOUR RETURN ON INVESTMENT

As you get higher conversion rates, it will impact the revenue positively, make more money, and increase your profit margin.

DEFINES AND CLASSIFIES YOUR TARGET MARKET

In business, you need to understand who your target customers are. Speak directly to your ideal target market that can resonate with what you are offering, and in time, your efforts will pay dividends.

BUILDS AND STRENGTHENS YOUR BRAND

Having a brand is not enough. It needs to be promoted and instilled in your potential customer’s minds, which means getting your brand in front of them and winning their trust to increase your credibility. The greater brand awareness your business has, the higher the chances to convert website visitors into paying customers.

SHARE QUALITY CONTENT ABOUT THE COMPANY ACROSS DIFFERENT PLATFORMS

SEO and digital marketing involve the optimization of your content. Creating content and sharing them on different digital media platforms make you look like an industry expert. Being so is an advantage because it will give you an instant upper hand on competitors.

Ready, set, let’s go!

Set realistic long-term goals for the business.

Break down long-term goals into actionable steps.

Keep your new and existing customers happy.

Set realistic long-term goals for the business. ‍ Goals are your stepping stones for an expected end result. A company without goals will have no sense of direction, no defined purpose, and nothing to strive for. When it comes to marketing, setting goals serves as its backbone. Set your marketing goals based on the company’s overall corporate goals and objectives.

Pandemic lockdown is a blessing in disguise to small businesses…

Entrepreneurship is not for everyone, making it difficult to stay afloat, especially for startup business owners during trying times like what we are going through right now. With the influx of COVID-19 worldwide, many businesses that were severely affected are now out of business.

The ones believed as temporary closures became permanent shutdowns delivering a gut punch to business owners across various ranges of industries. Despite the reopening to new normal, thousands of small businesses are still struggling to get their heads above water.

On the flip side, e-Commerce businesses have been turbo-charged by the pandemic. Coronavirus restrictions forced people to stay at home and avoid leaving their houses unless absolutely necessary. With more consumers needing to physically distance and local stores changing their in-store operations due to daunting COVID-19 case counts, the option to shop online became the best alternative to many.

Turn your dry pipeline into a well of golden opportunity

Pandemic has changed the way people shop and accelerated the digital world’s shift where business interactions and transactions are done online. The compulsory measure to arrest the virus caused the most significant change to online shopping.

But our difficult circumstance goes to show that every cloud has a silver lining. The strict stay-at-home combined with physical distancing orders led many people to shy away from physical stores, sweeping more virtual and e-Commerce businesses off their feet.

If you have the right mindset, you can see a dry pipeline as a once-in-a-lifetime chance to innovate, restructure, shift priorities and take advantage of the new trends of commercial opportunities brought on by the unprecedented times. That’s right.

According to recent surveys, retail e-Commerce sales soared to an all-time high during the global pandemic. The challenging situation we are in right now is perhaps the MOST ironic. Do you agree?

A dry sales pipeline compels businesses to perform into exploration mode, try new things, and accelerate the learning curve. So, despite the economic fallout, COVID-19 helped drive e-Commerce sales up to 97% compared to the pre-pandemic season.

This enormous growth of e-Commerce means competition, which means that e-Commerce companies struggle to get new clients because of too much rivalry online. Sounds like you?

GET A FREE AUDIT TO CHECK WHAT’S HOLDING YOUR WEBSITE BACK FROM ITS POTENTIAL TO GET RANKED AND NOTICED.

Supercharge your e-Commerce site search to get more traffic

So as COVID-19 spikes and restrictions remain uncertain, today is the perfect time to jumpstart boosting your e-Commerce business. If you think your company doesn’t need SEO, think again! As the pandemic continues to reshape our world, many consumers turn to e-Commerce to purchase the items they need and become accustomed to the convenience of shopping from home.

The dramatic shift from in-store shopping to massive buying online is expected to have lasting effects on the consumers’ shopping preferences, even when things go back to a pre-COVID-19 way of life. The prediction is that online shopping is here to stay even when the pandemic is over. So, grab the chance to get discovered by your potential customers and dominate your niche.

Don’t just launch your e-Commerce store; leave it sitting online and wait for orders to come through. Sorry not sorry – this is not how it works. Flow in orders and sales won’t come unless you get the word out there and let the people know about what you are offering. Letting your website die in the vine and not doing anything is like throwing your money away since no one will see this website of yours. Your website is not getting any leads that you needed to scale your business.

In the digital era, setting your e-Commerce website is the easiest part of the process. The difficult step is how to get attention and convert the leads into loyal customers. We offer e-Commerce marketing services to maximize reach and transform your shop into a retail store’s powerhouse.

GET IN TOUCH WITH US TO SEE HOW YOU CAN SKYROCKET YOUR E-COMMERCE BUSINESS GROWTH AMID TIGHT COMPETITION.

Step up in your SEO game. Why not?

First, let us make a recap. Website optimization through SEO strategies is the game-changer for ranking high on Google, capturing new leads, and increasing your revenue in the future. If your brand has high visibility online, it fuels more sales for your business.

After e-Commerce store launching is completed, don’t sit back yet. Instead, invest your efforts into turning your website into a lead magnet and acquire more customers straight from your website. Even a pandemic can’t slow down your e-Commerce business if you have the right SEO in place.

To reiterate, taking your business online is totally different from creating a website. Every effort we make to improve our website’s performance leads to revenue in some way.

So, if you want to leverage your business, keep this in mind:

Your e-Commerce website becomes the marketplace where customers learn about your products and services and make pre-purchase decisions. The customers also carry out commercial transactions like buying or selling on the platform itself.

SEO is a non-negotiable strategy for an effective e-Commerce marketing

The pandemic has turned several businesses upside down. If your e-Commerce store was hit hard by this Coronavirus outbreak and has experienced a massive decline in traffic and conversion, it’s time to do the work. Yes, you heard it right!

Don’t wait for things to get better before you put in the work. While everything is slow, it is the perfect time to restructure, which includes improving your SEO and utilizing digital marketing platforms to skyrocket your sales, outrank your competitors, and get back on track when the pandemic is over.

Sounds good? Here’s how to get started:

Declutter your website pages. Remove irrelevant pages that were created without a strategy, including those that got obsolete over time. Although Google indexed them, they don’t matter to your business anymore. So better delete the non-essentials – having less is more. ‍

Only publish high-quality content. It was once a fad that producing heaps of content was the key to rank. But things have changed. The rule of thumb is to go for quality over quantity. Today, Google is more focused on the VALUE you are providing to the online readers. So, when publishing content, keep posting less but highly informative and keyword-rich articles. Then, you are good to go! ‍

Utilize other platforms like Amazon and App stores. Explore other websites that your audience is searching and don’t just restrict your efforts to rank in Google alone. Look beyond and seize every opportunity you have. The goal here is to maximize your online visibility to get found by an impending flood of virtual customers. ‍

Level up your website’s on-page SEO. On-page SEO is the key to improving your brand visibility, achieving a surge in organic traffic, and whatnot. On-page SEO is done by optimizing and adding keywords to the individual page on your website. If done correctly, it has the potential to improve your website rankings in Google and reach your target audience over time. ‍

Improve visitor’s dwelling time by creating engaging content.‍ Dwelling time is the amount of time users spend on your website before they go back to check out other results in the search engine. Adding high value, quality, informative and engaging content will increase your chances of converting visitors into potential customers and avoid leaving before they get to your website. ‍

Switch your website to Google’s mobile-first index.‍ To simplify, Google prioritizes indexing sites that are mobile-first indexing compatible. As Google adapts to the growing use of mobile worldwide, Google bots prioritize crawling and indexing sites with compatibility with mobile-first indexing and mobile SEO in general. ‍

Amp up your technical SEO. The main goal here is to optimize the primary infrastructure of your website. Technical SEO has nothing to do with your content. The most simplified definition of the process requires Speed, Progressive Web Apps (PWAs), and JavaScript, to name a few. Improving your technical SEO allows the search engines to access, crawl, interpret and index your website without any problems.

Fill your sales pipeline with warm leads

As Google rankings increasingly become tougher, it is important to understand what your audience likes and preferences as a whole. Since most people now are spending most of their time on their smartphones, it is good to invest your efforts in identifying the suitable medium to engage and nurture relationships with your visitors and create content that adds value to them.

Take note that shoppers are spending more hours researching the items they want to buy online. If they highly consider your product, they will temporarily add them to the cart and buy it later. According to surveys, it takes about two weeks before they make the purchase decision.

As part of the sales process, newly found leads need warming up before they are ripe for conversion. The content you add to your website attracts potential customers. You can keep them engaged by giving them steam of quality content that will keep them coming back and increase their genuine interest as they move closer to making buying decisions. Most potential buyers are not only are searching online for the products they want to buy online but are also looking for answers to their questions.

Yes, it’s true. Almost all the customers have curious queries, so create content that is engaging and informative. Strive to satisfy their curiosity and meet them at every level of their research – from product discovery, comparisons with other products, and reviews from previous clients.

Aside from getting a paying customer when you add value to your audience journey, you will also get a fresh ranking boost from Google. It’s like killing two birds with one stone. So don’t settle for mediocre content; go for quality content that will help you stand out, pull visitors into your funnel, warm them as prospects, and eventually, fill your pipeline with qualified hot leads.

LEARN MORE ABOUT OUR TAILORED SOLUTIONS TO SCALE YOUR E-COMMERCE WEBSITE UP. BOOK A STRATEGY CALL WITH US NOW!

Final words

SEO is a critical need by e-Commerce businesses nowadays. There is no other way to move forward your e-Commerce business faster and get better ROI than optimizing your website. As an e-Commerce digital marketing agency, we will get the results for you while you focus on your business. Choosing your e-Commerce digital marketing agency is a matter of life and death. It could help you succeed or fail in your SEO campaigns. So choose wisely. Your choice in hiring the right e-Commerce SEO agency matters because it either catapults your e-Commerce store to brilliant new levels of success or pulls your business a giant step backward.

Partner with ePropel, and guaranteed, your business is in good hands. We have what it takes to help your business grow. We will unleash your e-Commerce to its full potential allowing your website to get more traffic, exponentially increase your revenue and gain more repeat businesses online. So whether you want to increase your profit or get your brand out there, ePropel’s e-Commerce marketing services will help achieve your business’s goals to succeed within a target audience.

ePropel is an SEO agency that helps companies to accelerate their website’s organic visitors through our proven 3-step system. Our team has more than 20 years of experience and are driven to deliver exceptional results for our clients.

Get More Customers Organically For Your eCommerce Store

With 43% of all e-commerce traffic coming from Google search, e-commerce stores who capitalize on this will benefit from increased profits and consistent organic customers for years to come.

Find out how you can attract more of your ideal customers on the top of Google Search results without paid ads with our 3-step SEO system.

Take a minute to schedule a time below to see if you are a good fit to at least double your organic website leads through our 3 step system.

I WANT TO GROW MY ORGANIC LEADS

Our Clients Have Massively Increased Their Sales Through Our SEO Services

Our team have helped companies ranging from emerging eCommerce stores to large companies like Capital One to be found at the top of Google through Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Through this, we helped them to get more qualified leads and more sales while achieving a big return on their investment.

Two Spoons

Hannah from Two Spoons already had a strong social media presence before working with us, with over 115,000 followers on Instagram and growing her followers fast. However despite this growth, her website leads was not growing fast enough.

Through working with us, we helped Two Spoons to grow from 2,000 organic visitors per month to 10,000 organic visitors per month!

Alpha Crowd Control

Allan from Alpha Crowd Control has been running his business for more than 15 years. When traditional marketing channels stopped working and his paid ads didn’t bring a good return, he struggled to find new customers…

Through our 3-step system, we TRIPLED his business’ organic website leads which helped to create a 50% increase in his annual revenue!

E-Commerce Digital Marketing Agency

Having a functional e-commerce store or website is not an end-all and be-all. In a constantly changing digital and competitive business landscape nowadays, most e-commerce merchants worldwide turn to SEO and digital marketing agencies to help build their brands and grow their customer base. Because of this, marketing business online has become increasingly important in any company’s success. 

Promoting your e-commerce store by utilizing SEO strategies and different digital marketing platforms offers immense value. Still, it is NOT a small and easy feat. Since SEO rankings take time to improve after optimizing the website, it is a truly daunting task to find the needle you are looking for in the enormous haystack of information that search engines return. For this reason, more and more entrepreneurs are now relying on outside help to achieve organic growth.

Are you thinking about hiring an e-Commerce digital marketing agency?

Choosing the best e-Commerce digital marketing agency will help you save time, headaches, and a massive amount of money. The goal of hiring an e-Commerce digital agency is to increase your website’s visibility and ultimately provide a quick return on your investment.

Before we go further, here’s a heads-up! Reaching the top of search engine rankings doesn’t happen overnight. Because of this, it takes several months to realize that you hired the wrong e-Commerce agency, and you end up facing damaging effects to your website’s online presence in search engine results. Too late to atone for your bad decisions.

If you are looking for honest SEO services with guaranteed results, then you came to the RIGHT place!

Compared to other e-Commerce marketing agencies, we offer you a stress-free, fast and rewarding experience! Our main goal of helping you set up an e-Commerce digital marketing system is to create new

e-Commerce revenue streams that initially seem too complicated to leverage. We suggest that if you want the best results in your ROI, focus on the valuable metrics that matter.

ePropel is an e-Commerce digital marketing agency that offers guaranteed e-Commerce digital marketing services that will help your business dominate your market’s search engine rankings. We follow a 3-step system to grow your e-Commerce business based on fundamental strategies and best SEO and digital marketing practices. Our guaranteed SEO system has a proven track record in assisting small to medium-sized companies to sell to a global audience online.

Our main goal is to help you attract your ideal customers without paying hefty fees for paid ads. As your SEO partner, we will strive to help you get to the top results on Google and get organic traffic from the top 10 search result positions.

We now live in a different world, and as technology advances, Google is also advancing its requirements. We diversify, and with the latest developments in Google algorithm, it’s hard to keep up with the new marketing trend at an enterprise level.

‍  LEARN HOW TO GET 10X MORE CUSTOMERS AND INCREASE YOUR ROI WITH EPROPEL’S 3-STEP SYSTEM.

We provide all the e-Commerce digital marketing services that your company needs to get results!

Our full-service SEO and e-Commerce digital marketing packages are designed for your business to rule the web and replace a dozen solutions with one suite to improve and leverage in all areas of your marketing. As our valued client, you will enjoy the following services:

Execution of effective e-Commerce digital marketing strategies

We will conduct an in-depth review and audit of your website to determine the necessary SEO strategies that will give your store the much-needed boost in its online presence. We will also execute effective e-Commerce SEO strategies customized to your business to make your online store more visible on the search engine results pages.

Perform website optimization strategies

Payments works seamlessly with any Salesforce application or data model, be it your out of the box Sales Cloud or custom application.

Help you design a custom, mobile-friendly site that makes purchasing your product be a breeze as possible

Payments works seamlessly with any Salesforce application or data model, be it your out of the box Sales Cloud or custom application.

EXCLUSIVE BONUS: WATCH OUR FREE TRAINING VIDEO TO BOOST YOUR SEARCH ENGINE RANKINGS QUICKLY.

WHAT MAKES OUR E-COMMERCE AGENCY DIFFERENT?

Our connection with our customers is at the heart of what we do, as we believe building a solid client relationship is the foundation for growth. Trust and values come FIRST to us, and we don’t act in self-interest. We continually strive to build a lasting and meaningful relationship with our clients founded by transparency and honesty. ‍

With all that said, we take time to hear your goals and where you want to be in the future, so we have a FULL understanding of what your company wants to accomplish in e-Commerce marketing and ensure you are well-supported throughout the process. ‍ Everything we do comes from the perspective of a business owner. We walk our talk, and we are 100% dedicated to serving you. We will treat your company as our own and look out for your business’s best interest as a whole. And as your SEO and digital marketing partner, you are NEVER alone in your game. We are in this together! ‍ Simply put, we genuinely care about your business, and we are passionate about bringing noticeable results building your competitive advantage. Our SEO solutions and digital marketing system in place are driven towards making an indelible impact with significant change on your company’s revenue growth and, eventually, help your business succeed in this competitive digital age.

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE EPROPEL DIFFERENCE. WE GIVE YOU A HANDS-OFF SOLUTION IN GETTING CONSISTENT SALES AND LEADS.

SO, LET’S KICK THINGS OFF WITH THE HELP OF OUR CERTIFIED DIGITAL MARKETING EXPERTS!

Take note that highly effective e-Commerce marketing is a make or break necessity for many e-Commerce companies. Today, a plethora of e-Commerce businesses credit online marketing for achieving an increase in their ROI and their generation of more sales. ‍ When it comes to e-Commerce digital marketing, finding the RIGHT e-Commerce marketing agency or partner can help you tap into this rapidly growing sales channel and keep your business prepared for the future! ‍ That said, if you are looking for a dedicated digital marketing team passionate about taking your business to the next level, our integrated digital marketing strategies will be perfect for you! ‍

Make ePropel and our team your trusted e-Commerce marketing agency. Our e-Commerce digital marketing services go unmatched, providing your business with the best value possible and helping your e-Commerce store get ahead in today’s very competitive online business world. We will develop a customized internet marketing package to meet your business KPIs and revenue growth goals. ‍ With our team of experienced SEO and digital experts and a growing number of satisfied customers, ePropel becomes the trusted choice for e-Commerce companies looking to drive revenue, generate sales, set up an effective conversion strategy, and ultimately, get good leads aboard. ‍ PARTNER WITH EPROPEL NOW, AND TOGETHER, WE WILL GROW YOUR BUSINESS!

WHY DO YOU NEED A GAME PLAN FOR YOUR ONLINE MARKETING?

The global market is continually expanding and innovating. If you don’t keep up with your competitors, you will be missing out on huge sales, let alone you lose in the game. Relying on the traditional forms of advertising and marketing products will not cut it or beat your competitors, especially in a very aggressive market with low customer spending. ‍ With nearly all marketing efforts being performed now online, it is tough to draw customer’s attention to your business. Even more challenging is deciding between the various types of digital marketing people use today that will potentially market your business. If you continue to rest on your laurels in a world of business that’s highly competitive, sooner or later, a new competition lurks around the corner, and you are in a deadly trap.

HERE’S A WAKE-UP CALL TO E-COMMERCE BUSINESS OWNERS

While you are not boosting your website’s visibility, your competitors are keeping the competition on their toes. So, if your potential and existing customers find them online, they will likely turn to your competitors instead of you as the go-to source for their needs. Thus, you miss the opportunity to pull in more customers and reach a large audience.

As you can see, digital marketing is relatively inexpensive and very doable, so there is no reason why e-Commerce businesses couldn’t stay in front of people and stand out from the crowd. No matter how new or small, your business can avoid being overlooked by the vast marketplace. Here’s the good news, at ePropel, we offer a suite of e-Commerce marketing services that make using e-Commerce marketing simple but on point and delivers results.

Take advantage of our online marketing strategies geared toward building your brand awareness, increased website traffic, targeted reach, leads, conversions, or even repeat purchases so that you could achieve your business growth goals. With a coordinated marketing strategy, your company will surely maximize the impact of your e-Commerce marketing efforts!

‍FIND OUT HOW YOU CAN GET MORE CLIENTS AND REACH YOUR TARGET MARKET THROUGH SEO. WATCH THE FREE TRAINING VIDEO HERE.

AGAIN, DON’T REST ON YOUR LAURELS. IT’S TIME TO TAKE MASSIVE ACTION!

As a business owner, it is common for you to spin the wheels and lose focus. And as the business continues to grow, the demands to be met become increasingly high.  Without noticing, it presents you with ever more complex challenges at a near-relentless pace, losing your control and grip on the business. Add in your personal and family needs; things could spiral down quickly, and it’s easy to constantly feel overwhelmed and unmotivated. ‍ With overwhelming things going on in the business, unknowingly, the day has gone by, and you missed priming the pump that improves cash flow. Remember that generating MORE sales or getting more people walking through your door are the lifeblood of your business. At the end of the day, the main thing that matters is, how many sales are you making? ‍ If you want your business to realize its full potential without getting overwhelmed, take this advice seriously: do things that truly matter to your business, and don’t wait for your feelings to change to take action. Whether you like it or not, your e-Commerce success depends upon the successful marketing strategies you have poured into your business to gain traction in a crowded online marketplace. ‍ If wearing multiple hats at your job hurts your efficiency, decreases your focus, and undermines your productivity as the company’s primary decision-maker – it’s about time to stop trying to do it all by yourself. Simple. If you do the SEO legwork yourself, you need to learn the process and pay for tool subscriptions. In addition, to get it done right, you need to invest in training and courses. Too much on your plate already, and confused about what to do first. Consider outsourcing your marketing – this is perhaps the best decision. This way, you can give your undivided attention to more important things to run your business more powerfully.

DO YOU WANT AN E-COMMERCE MARKETING GOING AND NEED HELP FROM EXPERTS?

No worries, we’ve got you covered! We at ePropel will help you create a plan, strategize, and implement it into your business. We will make things happen for you and deliver maximum SEO results that propel your business to grow.

Prioritize Keywords That Gets You Results

Identify what your prospects are searching for on Google and embed these keywords into the right areas of your website that you can consistently get qualified leads on a regular basis.

Optimize Your Website to Increase Visibility

With over 200 optimization factors, we identify the top factors that are turning your visitors away and what would increase searchability on your website. We then implement these on your website on so that it helps your store to rank on Google for more keywords

Quality Link Building To Accelerate Your Growth

Without high-quality and relevant backlinks, it’s almost impossible to get to the 1st page of Google for the most competitive keywords in your niche, so it’s very important to match your eCommerce store with the most relevant and high quality backlink opportunities to achieve 1st page Google results.

Without SEO, your website is not found by searchers, and your efforts will be for nothing. Remember, most e-Commerce traffic comes from Google, and because of this, implementing cohesive e-Commerce marketing strategies will help you get found, get noticed, and attract new leads. ‍ Investing in SEO and digital marketing is a long-term investment.  We believe that building our partnership with you is crucial to making our working relationship as smooth sailing as possible. We understand that you are busy running your business. Don’t worry; we’ve got this!

We will take your business marketing off your plate and help you get into the “​feels right” zone quickly to skyrocket your sales. We’ve got your back, and you can count on us, through thick and thin. We have everything tracked with advanced analytics on your site, showing all aspects of your business, resulting in a more effective and faster decision-making process and ensuring that all campaigns perform at peak potential. We will also send you a detailed regular SEO report that summarizes all necessary SEO metrics you need to know about your business.

Everything you need to know about e-Commerce marketing

With many marketing operations now taking place online, it can be tough to decide which e-Commerce marketing strategy is most useful for your business. So before we dive into much detail about the endless options for marketing your product, it is essential to understand that e-Commerce marketing and digital marketing are both inclusive. ‍ Similarly, e-Commerce marketers can use all digital channels to promote their products, attract visitors to their website, facilitate purchases online and grow their business. While SEO results take time to be reflected on search engines, it offers long-term value. So, keep going! ‍ At ePropel we help business owners improve their store and monitor their progress. We will help you implement clear, actionable, prioritized ground-breaking SEO strategies to improve your website performance.

Scan your website with possible SEO issues. No obligation is required.

AVAIL NOW FOR OUR FREE SITE AUDIT TO CHECK YOUR WEBSITE’S SEO SCORE.

Patience is a virtue even in SEO…

As an e-Commerce agency, we have been doing SEO for a long time; the most common client question is, “How long before we are #1 in Google?” We get that. ‍ Here is the harsh truth, there is no such thing as instant SEO results. But once rankings are achieved, it is not easy to fall off Google’s SERP. So how long does it take for results to start kicking in? It takes 4-6 months to see the results and experience an increase in organic traffic to be accurate. ‍ Although most companies want fast and quick results, SEO cannot take effect overnight. It just doesn’t happen like that – SEO doesn’t work instantly. However, if website optimization is built on a right and solid foundation, it should continue to bring relevant organic results not long after the website is optimized. ‍ When it comes to populating the first page in Google, the bottom line is that patience is a virtue. Google is getting smarter recently, and it takes considerable time to prove to Google that your website is worth it. If you successfully make it to the first page, pat yourself on the back. This achievement means that Google has finally found your website credible and valuable. ‍ So, kudos to your dedication and hard work. Allow us to be the first one to say, “Congratulations, all of your SEO efforts have finally paid off!” The main takeaway here is that the work will gradually produce BIG results if the SEO foundation is solid and done right.  SEO is a daunting task, but it is a slow but sure process. So trust the process!

Now, let’s talk about the ins and outs of digital marketing

Nowadays, digital marketers use different platforms to generate noise towards their products or services. Let’s face it. Competition among small businesses is fierce. In fact, we frequently witness an uprising every now and then. With that said, digital marketing has never been more relevant and vital for companies to get their business found and thrive online. ‍ A lot of e-Commerce companies are now investing so much effort in telling about their brands or showing off their products in the hope of bringing awareness and attracting more buyers online without spending so much money on advertisements. These are made possible because of the digital marketing strategies they implement on their own. ‍ As the competition online gets more rigid, more and more business owners have difficulty keeping up with competitors. Add in the fact that digital marketing continues to evolve every single day. ‍ This scenario is quite challenging for many businesses to take advantage of the marketing channels available, especially if entrepreneurs are not clear on their starting point and where their company is headed within a given timeframe – it can seem scary, intimidating, and confusing.

Add it, for businesses with limited time and resources on hand – it’s often difficult to take advantage of digital marketing channels, which leads to neglect and not taking action to leverage and stay ahead of the curve.

So why does digital marketing matter to your business?

IT DOESN’T NEED A CONSIDERABLE INVESTMENT

e-Commerce marketing won’t break the bank to implement the strategies. If you are new to digital marketing, find suitable channels that work for your business.

IT EFFECTIVELY INCREASES THE CONVERSION RATE

Although e-Commerce marketing doesn’t promise fast results after optimizing the website, it can easily convert subscribers and leads into high-paying customers and repeat clients when done right.

INCREASES YOUR RETURN ON INVESTMENT ‍

As you get higher conversion rates, it will impact the revenue positively, make more money, and increase your profit margin.

DEFINES AND CLASSIFIES YOUR TARGET MARKET

In business, you need to understand who your target customers are. Speak directly to your ideal target market that can resonate with what you are offering, and in time, your efforts will pay dividends.

BUILDS AND STRENGTHENS YOUR BRAND

Having a brand is not enough. It needs to be promoted and instilled in your potential customer’s minds, which means getting your brand in front of them and winning their trust to increase your credibility. The greater brand awareness your business has, the higher the chances to convert website visitors into paying customers.

SHARE QUALITY CONTENT ABOUT THE COMPANY ACROSS DIFFERENT PLATFORMS

SEO and digital marketing involve the optimization of your content. Creating content and sharing them on different digital media platforms make you look like an industry expert. Being so is an advantage because it will give you an instant upper hand on competitors.

Ready, set, let’s go!

If you don’t have an SEO and digital marketing system in place, what are you waiting for? Now that you know the ins and outs of e-Commerce marketing, let’s discuss how you can build a successful business strategy for your online store.

Set realistic long-term goals for the business.

Break down long-term goals into actionable steps.

Keep your new and existing customers happy.

Set realistic long-term goals for the business. ‍ Goals are your stepping stones for an expected end result. A company without goals will have no sense of direction, no defined purpose, and nothing to strive for. When it comes to marketing, setting goals serves as its backbone. Set your marketing goals based on the company’s overall corporate goals and objectives.

Pandemic lockdown is a blessing in disguise to small businesses…

Entrepreneurship is not for everyone, making it difficult to stay afloat, especially for startup business owners during trying times like what we are going through right now. With the influx of COVID-19 worldwide, many businesses that were severely affected are now out of business. ‍ The ones believed as temporary closures became permanent shutdowns delivering a gut punch to business owners across various ranges of industries. Despite the reopening to new normal, thousands of small businesses are still struggling to get their heads above water. ‍ On the flip side, e-Commerce businesses have been turbo-charged by the pandemic. Coronavirus restrictions forced people to stay at home and avoid leaving their houses unless absolutely necessary. With more consumers needing to physically distance and local stores changing their in-store operations due to daunting COVID-19 case counts, the option to shop online became the best alternative to many.

Turn your dry pipeline into a well of golden opportunity

Pandemic has changed the way people shop and accelerated the digital world’s shift where business interactions and transactions are done online. The compulsory measure to arrest the virus caused the most significant change to online shopping. ‍ But our difficult circumstance goes to show that every cloud has a silver lining. The strict stay-at-home combined with physical distancing orders led many people to shy away from physical stores, sweeping more virtual and e-Commerce businesses off their feet. ‍ If you have the right mindset, you can see a dry pipeline as a once-in-a-lifetime chance to innovate, restructure, shift priorities and take advantage of the new trends of commercial opportunities brought on by the unprecedented times. That’s right.

According to recent surveys, retail e-Commerce sales soared to an all-time high during the global pandemic. The challenging situation we are in right now is perhaps the MOST ironic. Do you agree? A dry sales pipeline compels businesses to perform into exploration mode, try new things, and accelerate the learning curve. So, despite the economic fallout, COVID-19 helped drive e-Commerce sales up to 97% compared to the pre-pandemic season. ‍ This enormous growth of e-Commerce means competition, which means that e-Commerce companies struggle to get new clients because of too much rivalry online. Sounds like you?

‍GET A FREE AUDIT TO CHECK WHAT’S HOLDING YOUR WEBSITE BACK FROM ITS POTENTIAL TO GET RANKED AND NOTICED.

Supercharge your e-Commerce site search to get more traffic

So as COVID-19 spikes and restrictions remain uncertain, today is the perfect time to jumpstart boosting your e-Commerce business. If you think your company doesn’t need SEO, think again! As the pandemic continues to reshape our world, many consumers turn to e-Commerce to purchase the items they need and become accustomed to the convenience of shopping from home. ‍ The dramatic shift from in-store shopping to massive buying online is expected to have lasting effects on the consumers’ shopping preferences, even when things go back to a pre-COVID-19 way of life. The prediction is that online shopping is here to stay even when the pandemic is over. So, grab the chance to get discovered by your potential customers and dominate your niche. ‍ Don’t just launch your e-Commerce store; leave it sitting online and wait for orders to come through. Sorry not sorry – this is not how it works. Flow in orders and sales won’t come unless you get the word out there and let the people know about what you are offering. Letting your website die in the vine and not doing anything is like throwing your money away since no one will see this website of yours. Your website is not getting any leads that you needed to scale your business. ‍ In the digital era, setting your e-Commerce website is the easiest part of the process. The difficult step is how to get attention and convert the leads into loyal customers. We offer e-Commerce marketing services to maximize reach and transform your shop into a retail store’s powerhouse.

GET IN TOUCH WITH US TO SEE HOW YOU CAN SKYROCKET YOUR E-COMMERCE BUSINESS GROWTH AMID TIGHT COMPETITION.

Step up in your SEO game. Why not?

First, let us make a recap. Website optimization through SEO strategies is the game-changer for ranking high on Google, capturing new leads, and increasing your revenue in the future. If your brand has high visibility online, it fuels more sales for your business. ‍ After e-Commerce store launching is completed, don’t sit back yet. Instead, invest your efforts into turning your website into a lead magnet and acquire more customers straight from your website. Even a pandemic can’t slow down your e-Commerce business if you have the right SEO in place. To reiterate, taking your business online is totally different from creating a website. Every effort we make to improve our website’s performance leads to revenue in some way.

So, if you want to leverage your business, keep this in mind:

Your e-Commerce website becomes the marketplace where customers learn about your products and services and make pre-purchase decisions. The customers also carry out commercial transactions like buying or selling on the platform itself.

SEO is a non-negotiable strategy for an effective e-Commerce marketing

The pandemic has turned several businesses upside down. If your e-Commerce store was hit hard by this Coronavirus outbreak and has experienced a massive decline in traffic and conversion, it’s time to do the work. Yes, you heard it right! ‍ Don’t wait for things to get better before you put in the work. While everything is slow, it is the perfect time to restructure, which includes improving your SEO and utilizing digital marketing platforms to skyrocket your sales, outrank your competitors, and get back on track when the pandemic is over. Sounds good? Here’s how to get started:

Declutter your website pages. Remove irrelevant pages that were created without a strategy, including those that got obsolete over time. Although Google indexed them, they don’t matter to your business anymore. So better delete the non-essentials – having less is more. ‍

Only publish high-quality content. It was once a fad that producing heaps of content was the key to rank. But things have changed. The rule of thumb is to go for quality over quantity. Today, Google is more focused on the VALUE you are providing to the online readers. So, when publishing content, keep posting less but highly informative and keyword-rich articles. Then, you are good to go! ‍

Utilize other platforms like Amazon and App stores. Explore other websites that your audience is searching and don’t just restrict your efforts to rank in Google alone. Look beyond and seize every opportunity you have. The goal here is to maximize your online visibility to get found by an impending flood of virtual customers. ‍

Level up your website’s on-page SEO. On-page SEO is the key to improving your brand visibility, achieving a surge in organic traffic, and whatnot. On-page SEO is done by optimizing and adding keywords to the individual page on your website. If done correctly, it has the potential to improve your website rankings in Google and reach your target audience over time. ‍

Improve visitor’s dwelling time by creating engaging content.‍Dwelling time is the amount of time users spend on your website before they go back to check out other results in the search engine. Adding high value, quality, informative and engaging content will increase your chances of converting visitors into potential customers and avoid leaving before they get to your website. ‍

Switch your website to Google’s mobile-first index.‍To simplify, Google prioritizes indexing sites that are mobile-first indexing compatible. As Google adapts to the growing use of mobile worldwide, Google bots prioritize crawling and indexing sites with compatibility with mobile-first indexing and mobile SEO in general. ‍

Amp up your technical SEO. The main goal here is to optimize the primary infrastructure of your website. Technical SEO has nothing to do with your content. The most simplified definition of the process requires Speed, Progressive Web Apps (PWAs), and JavaScript, to name a few. Improving your technical SEO allows the search engines to access, crawl, interpret and index your website without any problems.

Fill your sales pipeline with warm leads

As Google rankings increasingly become tougher, it is important to understand what your audience likes and preferences as a whole. Since most people now are spending most of their time on their smartphones, it is good to invest your efforts in identifying the suitable medium to engage and nurture relationships with your visitors and create content that adds value to them.

Take note that shoppers are spending more hours researching the items they want to buy online. If they highly consider your product, they will temporarily add them to the cart and buy it later. According to surveys, it takes about two weeks before they make the purchase decision.

As part of the sales process, newly found leads need warming up before they are ripe for conversion. The content you add to your website attracts potential customers. You can keep them engaged by giving them steam of quality content that will keep them coming back and increase their genuine interest as they move closer to making buying decisions. Most potential buyers are not only are searching online for the products they want to buy online but are also looking for answers to their questions.

  Yes, it’s true. Almost all the customers have curious queries, so create content that is engaging and informative. Strive to satisfy their curiosity and meet them at every level of their research – from product discovery, comparisons with other products, and reviews from previous clients.

  Aside from getting a paying customer when you add value to your audience journey, you will also get a fresh ranking boost from Google. It’s like killing two birds with one stone. So don’t settle for mediocre content; go for quality content that will help you stand out, pull visitors into your funnel, warm them as prospects, and eventually, fill your pipeline with qualified hot leads.

LEARN MORE ABOUT OUR TAILORED SOLUTIONS TO SCALE YOUR E-COMMERCE WEBSITE UP. BOOK A STRATEGY CALL WITH US NOW!

Final words

SEO is a critical need by e-Commerce businesses nowadays. There is no other way to move forward your e-Commerce business faster and get better ROI than optimizing your website. As an e-Commerce digital marketing agency, we will get the results for you while you focus on your business. Choosing your e-Commerce digital marketing agency is a matter of life and death. It could help you succeed or fail in your SEO campaigns. So choose wisely. Your choice in hiring the right e-Commerce SEO agency matters because it either catapults your e-Commerce store to brilliant new levels of success or pulls your business a giant step backward. ‍ Partner with ePropel, and guaranteed, your business is in good hands. We have what it takes to help your business grow. We will unleash your e-Commerce to its full potential allowing your website to get more traffic, exponentially increase your revenue and gain more repeat businesses online. So whether you want to increase your profit or get your brand out there, ePropel’s e-Commerce marketing services will help achieve your business’s goals to succeed within a target audience.

6x13: Unforgiven

Then:

Good news? Sam’s got his soul back. Bad news? The walls are starting the crumble around it.

Now:

One Year Ago:

Bristol, Rhode Island

Sam Winchester, the soulless killing machine, goes around shooting things while the camera stays focused on his grandfather, a look of distress plastered on his face.The job done, with Sam sporting only a minor flesh wound, they quickly make their exit from town. The local law enforcement pulls them over before they can get very far though. Oh, they’re federal agents, but the sheriff doesn’t like the blood oozing from Sam’s arm and wants to haul them downtown. One: Sam in a Carhartt again is delightful. Two: Soulless Sam is just the most fun.

Sam laughs and starts to walk away from the cop, and before the cop can pull a gun on him, Sam beats the living shit out of him. (I mean, Sam’s still fun even if he’s a fucking psychopath.) “Do you think there are calmer ways we could have handled that?” Samuel ponders. “Do we care? Let’s go.” And they take off, leaving the cop unconscious in the middle of the road.

Present Day:

Sam and Dean are in random motel #3534. Dean’s got nothing on the Mother of All thing when Sam gets coordinates from an unknown source. The coordinates are for Bristol, Rhode Island, where three women have disappeared in the past week. Dean’s reluctant to check it out but Sam convinces him.

The boys arrive in Bristol (“Where Memories Are Made” lolololololol.) and Sam almost immediately starts having flashbacks. At a local nautical themed restaurant, they catch up on the case. Dean heads to the “Poop Deck”, when Sam is approached by a couple who thinks he’s “Agent Roark”. Uhoh. The woman, Debbie, asks if he’s back in town because the disappearances have started again. He goes along with it all and agrees (I mean, he is after all). She then asks where his partner is, and Dean interrupts and says “sex rehab.” Oh, if only Samuel was around to not enjoy your humor, Dean.

Debbie and her husband, Don, take off, but not before Debbie leaves a lingering touch on Sam’s shoulder. Hmm. Sam has another memory, this one of him and Debbie going at it pretty hot and heavy in the restaurant bathroom. Uhoh. The exchange did not go unnoticed by Dean. Sam admits that he thinks he and Samuel worked a case in this town. Dean shows him a picture from the restaurant wall with Sam in the background.

Dean wants to skip town. “You never use the same crapper twice.” (Dean could be a poet.)

Sam insists they need to stay and work the case. Dean relents.

Dean follows up on the victims. He starts by interviewing a roommate. Apparently one of the victims, Nicole, had previously meet Agent Roark. A neighbor in the apartment building was a victim the previous year. In fact he came by a few times. Dean’s spidey sense is vibrating. Apparently Agent Roark and Nicole’s non-relationship was loud and athletic.

Sam, meanwhile, heads to the sheriff’s office, but can’t even get in the door before the cop he accosted last year finds him and draws his gun on him. Uhoh. Sam flashes back to that night. UHOH. Sam gets thrown in the clink. (And called “dumb as a sack of hair” lol) The cop knows he’s not a federal agent and he wants to know where the bodies are.

Later that night, a woman walks into the dark cell area and demands that Sam tell her what happened to her husband. This woman knows Sam’s name, and what he does. Sam has a mega-flashback to when he and Samuel told the sheriff and this woman, his wife, their real story. The sheriff disappeared though, along with the two hunters. Sam tells her that he has no memory of his time here before. Why would he be back if he did? The woman believes him and tells him her name is Brenna Dobbs. She opens his cell door so he can find some answers.

We finally reach the truly nightmarish part of the episode. Debbie is at home enjoying her boxed wine when she runs out of said boxed wine (THE HORROR, but lbr, there’s another glass of wine in there if she just takes the bladder out of the box)

so she heads to her basement to find more. Something grabs her leg on the stairs and she stumbles to the floor. The camera (and monster) closes in on her as she screams.

Dean meets up with Sam again and fills him in on the missing person info he’s collected. They hear there’s another missing person over the police radio. Dean heads out alone after insisting that Sam stay hidden. A command Sam isn’t about to listen to.

After checking out the latest in the case, Dean calls and leaves a voicemail with his brother. He found a connection to the missing women. “They all banged the same dude. You.” This is a trap for Sam.

For Whatever Reason Dean is a Cute Bean All Hunched Over On His Phone Science:

Brenna comes home to find Sam in her house. She tells him that Debbie is missing and wants answers. Sam doesn’t have them, and he needs her help.

Sam flashes back to working the case with Samuel again and this time they’re sitting down and having a beer with Brenna and her husband. They end up talking about Sam’s relationship with Samuel. Soulless Sam rather smugly announces that he has a business-only relationship with Samuel. “Family just slows you down.” Nice, man.

When Sam snaps out of his flashback, Brenna hands over the case files for her husband. Cue more flashbacks!

Sam remembers Samuel concluding that they’re dealing with a monster called an arachne. Sam figures out that the arachne is hiding out in a local park, and that the monster seems to have a type - men in their thirties. He formulates a plan to lure it out. I’m sure it’ll be a nice, gentle plan where nobody gets hurt!

Back in the present, Sam listens to Dean’s voicemail while he leaves Brenna’s house. As he listens to it, he notices some cobweb blowing in the wind off the side of the front porch. Did he just finish talking to a….black widow? Dun dun DUN. While Sam checks out the webbing, we get a shot of him in arachnid vision.

At the place they’re crashing, Sam fills Dean in on the case and his spotty returning memories. Dean’s generally pissed to hear that Sam’s remembering ANYTHING from before. As far as he’s concerned, the next step down memory lane is a one way bus trip to Hell Boulevard. Dean insists that they blow town and call up another hunter but Sam puts his foot down. He’s got a soul now. That, paired with a terrible feeling that he was part of something awful, makes him want to stay. MAN it is such a relief to get caring Sam back - even if he really needs to just GTFO.

Together they make a murder wall, pinning up maps and pictures and looping yarn and THEORIES are flying it’s wild, guys. Sam looks at the evidence and flashes back AGAIN. Sam remembers using Brenna’s husband Roy as a lure for the arachne. Samuel was uncomfortable about it but Sam has zero patience for Samuel’s reticence. Roy was the right age and type for the spider-critter they’re tracking. How else are they going to find its lair?

In the flashback, the arachne gets the drop on Roy and drags him off before they can do anything. Soulless Sam isn’t worried - he turned on the GPS on Roy’s phone so he can track his phone to the spidey lair. “You’re about as cold as they come,” Samuel notes, which is a real damn statement coming from Samuel.

They track Roy to a barn covered in Halloween cobwebs. There are bodies under the webbing - bodies EVERYWHERE. Only they’re not bodies. They’re still alive and gasping under the webbing.

They find Roy right when the arachne, a woman, attacks. Sam slices off her head. Hooray! They saved the day!

Only...Sam looks at all the victims. They’re poisoned by a spider-monster and swiftly dying (according to his non-existent medical examination of them). It’s better to kill them all and put them out of their misery, Sam concludes. RECORD SCRATCH! Honestly, guys, I am guilty of thinking of soulless Sam as a dick, but not particularly murderous. I...forgot about this episode entirely. Sam remorselessly kills all the victims one by one. (Samuel - who HAS a soul - also isn’t winning any popularity contests with me because he just stands there.)

When Sam returns from this flashback, he tells Dean that he remembers everything now. And it ain’t good, sunflowers.

Brenna wakes in the night to an intruder in her home. It’s Roy! But it’s Roy transformed into an arachne. Sam happens to call her to check in (handwave handwave) and realizes that she’s in trouble. They head to Brenna’s house.

There are lights on in the shed and Brenna’s hiding in a corner. “What you did to Roy?” she asks Sam, “Is it true?” Cue Roy jumping in and attacking the Winchesters.

Before you know it, they’re tied up in cobwebs while Roy stalks in front of them. He reveals that the arachne was breeding, capturing mates and transforming them. Getting shot in the head had no effect on him because he had become….SPIDER MAN. (Without all the badass powers.)

It was Roy who tried to lure Sam back to town so he could avenge his own attempted murder. As added frosting on his revenge cake, all the women who went missing are now spider women and scattered throughout the country. “You killed one monster, you made so many more. Congratulations.” Roy ponders the timeless monster question: to kill Sam or turn him?

Dean breaks free before that existential question can be answered. Brenna slices Sam free and Sam kills Roy.

Later, Sam drops Brenna off at home and apologizes. Too little, too late, bby. She stalks inside and slams the door. I mean, same girl. Sam and Dean return to the place they’re squatting in. Sam’s dejected. Dean tries to bolster him up, telling him that none of the terrible things he did was him.

Sam’s not buying the “everything’s gonna be okay” line. And in just a moment, Dean isn’t either. Sam collapses and as he gasps on the floor, we get a glimpse of what’s in Sam’s head. It’s hell fire and Sam’s burning up.

__________________________________________________________________

Chicken Quotes for the Soul:

You got mysterious coordinates from a mysterious Mr. "X," leading to a mysterious town? That doesn't throw up red flags to you?

She just cougar-eyed you.

“You never use the same crapper twice.” “Everyone uses the same crapper twice.”

What? The boxed stuff doesn’t get better with age, Don.

What is this, "Days of Our Lives"? You're telling me you have some sort of amnesia?

Roy’s just some redshirt to you?

You love to say "I told you so."

You killed one monster, you made so many more. Congratulations.

__________________________________________________________________

Want to read more? Check out our Recap Archive!

Under the Docks

By: SassyShoulderAngel319

Fandom/Character(s): DC, BatFam - Jason Todd/Red Hood, feat. Roy Harper/Arsenal

Rating: PG/K+ (for mild alcohol)

Original Idea: This prompt!

Notes: (Masterlist)(By Character)(About Me) I’ve never been drunk and I don’t know how to write someone who’s drunk so... yeah. Sorry. @welovegroot @batboys-and-other-messes @haylo4ever @jason-redhood

^^^^^

Jason and Roy stepped out of the bar, letting the warm, muggy summer air hit their skin. “I think we overdid it,” Jason said.

Roy didn’t appear to be listening. He hadn’t had that much to drink—still getting his issues with alcohol under control and trying to be the responsible one to let Jason have a night of letting loose for once—but he was just past tipsy and feeling rather tired.

“W’ sh’d… take a walk,” Jason said decisively. “Yeah… walk…”

Roy threw Jason’s arm over his shoulders and started to pull him back toward the safehouse. “I don’… think that’s a good idea… dude… should go home…”

“No. Walk better. Walk off… alcohol…”

“Buddy, I don’t think it works that way,” Roy said.

“Roy. Walk,” Jason said. He let go of Roy’s shoulders and turned toward the harbor instead.

Roy sighed, but agreed. He didn’t have to monitor Jason too closely, but there were a few moments where Jason would stagger and Roy would have to catch him before he tumbled into a bush.

They ended up in the harbor. The huge long docks extended out into the sea. Sure there was supposed to be port security—as if that had ever stopped Arsenal and Red Hood—but they wandered the harbor unrestricted.

“Dude,” Jason said. “Did you hear that?”

“Uh… no?” Roy replied. “What?”

“Splashing!”

“Jay, it’s a harbor. That was probably just a wave hitting the docks.”

“No, dude! Had to be… a fish!”

Roy blinked slowly, trying to process Jason’s words. “Okay,” he said.

Jason dropped onto all-fours at the edge of the dock and peered over the edge. “Tide’s coming in,” Jason muttered, not even sure if he was right. He didn’t care. It didn’t matter. It was just the tide. But he could dangle a hand over the edge of the dock and trail his fingers through the water. He looked around for the fish splashing around. “Heeere fishy-fishy-fishy!” he singsonged. Roy sighed and sat next to him.

Jason screamed. Roy jumped. “What is it?!”

“Dude!” Jason exclaimed. “Look at this!”

^^^^^

Jason woke up with a headache. There was a glass of water on his bedside table with some pain pills and a note from Roy. Went to get supplies. B back soon. -Roy

Jason sat up and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Ohhh I hate myself,” he muttered. “More specifically, hangovers.” He drank half the glass of water, took the pills, and downed the rest. “Need to eat something…” Getting out of bed, he went to the rundown kitchen of the safehouse for some breakfast.

Tiredly munching on a bagel, he blinked hard and tried to remember what happened after they left the bar. He hadn’t been that drunk—it wasn’t a total blackout.

Let’s see… he thought, still nomming his bagel. We went on a walk and…

The bagel fell from his hand.

“Dude! Look at this!” Jason shrieked.

Roy dropped onto his stomach on the docks and looked down.

“It’s a GIRL!” Jason exclaimed.

The girl was floating on her back under the dock, a cloud of hair drifting through the water around her head. There was a cut on her temple, bleeding onto damp skin and into the water. Roy and Jason stared for a moment.

“We… gotta get her out… sharks,” Jason said, scrambling to his feet and pulling off his shoes and jacket.

“Whoa—Jay! What are you doing?” Roy shouted as Jason dove in.

Well. Not dove so much as flopped.

The cold water did wonders for the alcohol clouding his brain and making him tired. It was freezing and woke him up sharply. His muscles very nearly seized up. He forced his joints to move and surfaced, whipping his hair out of his face and twisting around. He swam over to the girl and tugged her closer. She was still unconscious.

That was the last Jason remembered that made sense. The rest… well. He must have been drunk enough that his brain was half-dreaming as he and Roy got the girl out of the water. It had been an awkward ordeal, he remembered, since they were both past tipsy and she was heavier than they anticipated—or they were just weaker when they were drunk. That was probably it.

He shook his head, making his headache throb, trying to clear out the half-dream as they’d pulled the girl out of the water. He could have sworn…

But no. No way that was real. It was impossible. He’d seen a lot of crazy things, but he had to draw the line of what was possible somewhere. And this was it.

He picked up his bagel from the counter and went back to eating it.

“Just… set her down here… all nice and gentle-like,” Roy said, pushing open the door to the bathroom as Jason carried her into the safehouse.

“Huh?” Jason asked.

“Well where else are we supposed to put her?” Roy edged around Jason, muttering something under his breath that Jason didn’t catch. He set the girl in the bathtub, plugged up the drain, and started to fill it. They found her in the water, it was best to assume she should stay in the water.

“Jason, you’re an idiot when you’re drunk,” he told himself. No way.

He must have been dreaming. He and Roy probably just walked around the docks for a while and then went back to the safehouse like it was any normal night. The rest was just a disturbingly realistic alcohol-induced dream he had.

Only one way to find out, a thought said in his brain.

Jason leaned back on the breakfast bar stool and looked down the hall at the two bedrooms and the bathroom. All three doors were closed.

Shaking his head, he finished off his bagel and got up from the counter, going over to the sink to wipe off the crumbs. “It was a dream,” he said aloud. “I’ve had dreams that real before.” Usually nightmares about torture, but he shut that thought down quickly.

Carefully, he tiptoed over to the closed bathroom door.

The mermaid in my bathtub is just a dream. The mermaid in the bathtub is just a dream. The mermaid—He eased open the bathroom door, peering around it while repeating the words in his head like a mantra.

“Hey there,” a female voice remarked casually.

Jason jumped a foot in the air and swore loudly.

Melodic laughter reached his ears. He shoved the door open fully.

The mermaid in his bathtub was most definitely not a dream.

“So… you gonna ogle or do you know how to talk?” she asked. Her arms were folded over her chest. Her long hair covered her modesty—but it wasn’t necessary given she was wearing some sort of green top. Her eyes… Jason couldn’t make out their color from his distance but they had a glimmer to them the likes of which he’d never seen. Her tail was long, elegant, and pristmatic, the silvery scales sending pale morning sunlight from the window dancing over the walls in rainbow colors. The fluke was draped over the side of the tub, too long to have her whole tail inside the bathtub. There were gills on the side of her neck.

She looked irritated.

“So, pretty boy, you gonna tell me how I ended up here?” she snarked.

“You… speak English?” Jason asked.

Her mouth opened in a mock-surprised O. “So he can speak!” she said sarcastically. After a snort of amusement, she shrugged. “And I'm coastal to this area. So I’ve learned how. Figured you wouldn’t want me to use my native language.” Her fluke flicked in amusement, arcs of rainbows flashing over the walls, apparently finding the thought of her trying to communicate with him in her native language funny. “Now. How did I end up here?”

“We found you… in the harbor.”

She hissed past clenched teeth. One hand reached up and touched the side of her temple. Jason noticed the webbing between her fingers as one finger touched the cut. She hissed again. “Fair enough,” she muttered. “Can you take me back?”

“Uh… not right now,” Jason said. “My buddy and I… we were kinda… uh, drunk when we found you. And I’ve got a nasty hangover.”

The mermaid started laughing, her whole tail shivering. Her fluke slunk into the tub water and she pulled her upper body higher. “That’s funny,” she said. “I forget that humans can inebriate themselves too.” She bit her lower lip in a smile. “You know, you’re pretty good-looking for a human.”

Jason pushed a hand through his messy-from-sleep hair. “Thanks,” he said.

She giggled. “You’re blushing,” she said.

“Am not,” Jason protested.

“Are too-oo!” she sung. Her tail slithered through the water. Jason blinked hard. Her singing voice was mesmerizing even if it was three notes. She seemed to notice, because she giggled again. “Yup. You’re blushing.”

Jason glanced at himself in the mirror. His ears and neck were turning red and pink was starting to color his cheekbones. “No I'm not,” he insisted, turning around and leaving.

He hadn’t made it back to the kitchen when her haunting, ethereal voice trapped him and pulled him right back to the bathroom. She was twirling some of her hair around her fingertips where the webbing ended. There was a grin on her face, satisfied that she had ensnared him by the looks of it. She stopped singing and stared at him, resting her chin on folded arms on the edge of the tub. Jason boosted himself onto the bathroom counter.

“Okay. I'm back. What do you want?”

“Company. I’ve never talked to a human before. I’ve lured humans off their ships before but they’re not talkative when they’re underwater. I’ve just spent years watching and waiting, learning your language in order to one day talk to a human.” Her fluke emerged from the water and dangled in the air.

Jason stared at her. “You’re gorgeous,” he said. She snickered. “I, uh, mean… you’re interesting.”

“Looks like the stories of the human men are true. Infatuated by my kind.” She was beaming.

“I—I'm not—don’t even—” Jason tried. Which only made her laugh harder. Normally he liked to think he wasn’t easy to fluster but she only had to make a few pointed remarks and he was a blushy, flustered mess. And the most infuriating thing was she knew it. She knew she could get to him and push his buttons. She swished her tail through the water and let the fluke drape over the side again.

“Tell me a story,” she said.

“Uh… what?”

“Tell me a story. Please. About humans,” she repeated.

Jason sighed. “I'm too hungover for this,” he muttered.

She just stared. “Please?”

“Fine.” He leaned back on the counter, back pressing against the mirror. “This one starts in a dark alley after a boy and his parents left a theater. It ends last night, when that boy’s son found a girl in the water under the docks…”

Something Between Us: Chapter Two

Link to chapter one

Link to Ao3

Despite Roy’s earlier fantasies of marathon sex they did in fact sleep the rest of the night. And it was the best night of sleep Roy had this week. Possibly his best night’s sleep in years. He wouldn’t describe himself as someone who needed a relationship. Or claim that forming this union with Kal filled some hole in his heart. That would be inaccurate either way anyway. But there had been so much left unsaid for so long that no matter the form of their new relationship, as long as they had one, it would help settle his sense of self. Put simply, Kaldur was the first bit of proof that Roy was a “real boy.”

An implanted drive to become a member of the Justice League couldn’t explain their closeness. There were no implanted memories for him to base his interactions on. And Kaldur had never met his original prior to the discovery of the whole cloning thing. Their relationship was all them. Roy’s original had admitted to trying to get close to Kal in an effort to capture something he felt he’d lost, but it just didn’t work. If anything it backfired despite his original’s insistence that Kaldur treated him normally, something that even Dick had trouble doing. Age/rank gap notwithstanding, the original didn’t mesh well with Kaldur. Respected him sure, but he just didn’t feel the pull. And Roy...well Roy couldn’t remember having to try.

Sleep must have been good for Kaldur as well. It was eightish and Kal lay on his stomach, still asleep, still naked. He hadn’t gone all OCD on Roy last night, so the sheets were a mess and their clothing lay on the floor where they left them. Roy wanted to kiss him but morning breath held him back. No, Roy’d just lay in bed and watch Kal sleep like a stalker. Cuz he’s a well adjusted adult and all that.

Kaldur stirred. He turned his head to look at Roy and smiled at him sleepily. “Morning.”

“Mor-” Roy squeaked, he cleared his throat and tried again. “Morning.”

Kaldur shifted into child’s pose right on the bed, splaying out his fingers and webbing as far as they would go. He groaned into the stretch as he wiggled his fingers.  His movement pulled the covers off his body. “You are starting again.”

Roy moved to sit cross legged on the bed. “Stop being beautiful and I’ll stop lookin. Breakfast?” Kaldur’s eyebrow twitched. Roy wasn’t interested in stopping with the compliments Kal’d just have to get used to it.

“Water,” Kal answered.

Roy smirked. “Did I dehydrate you?”

Kaldur sat up. “Funny.” he answered dryly. He moved to get off the bed.

Roy still watched just for the joy of it. Because this was happening, it was real, and he’d enjoy every moment of it.

Kaldur’s hands rested on his hips as he scanned the room. “We should clean.”

“Ugh.” Roy flopped back down on the bed, placing his arm over his eyes for added drama.

“At least make the bed.”

“I don’t know about you but I plan on using it again.”

“Change the sheets?”

Roy peeked from under his arm. “Fine.”

They changed the sheets, and picked up their clothes, because really that was all there was to do and it was kinda a waste of time. (This of course is why Roy’s home was probably a mess, maintenance is important Kal chided. Roy didn’t bother defending himself.) They brushed their teeth and Roy sipped on a glass of water while Kaldur gulped down three,the movement of Kal’s adam’s apple kickstarting Roy’s imagination. And then they had their first fight as a couple.

It was dumb because at some point last night Roy remembered thinking that he’d give Kal anything he wanted but he wouldn’t give up on this. He was going first, damnit.

So now he couldn’t take it back, because he’d won the argument. He would get to go first because he deftly convinced Kaldur that he needed Kal’s dick up his ass like a week ago. (Okay so he almost railroaded his chances with that declaration because of time and math and shit. It hadn’t even been a week since he’s been here, but fuck calendars. That wasn’t the point.) He couldn’t take it back no matter how much this current situation was making him want to shake apart because it was just too much. Because he forgot how good this felt. Since he was going to go first he was required to let Kal help with preparations since anything else would lead to Kaldur ignoring their agreement and result in Kal physically restraining Roy and power bottoming until one or both of them passed out. Which, yeah, later, and that’s about as far as that particular fantasy went before Roy had to bite down on his lower lip to keep himself in the present.

It’d been a while since Roy’s been on the receiving end mostly because no one else would do but Kal. Which might just be a mental blockage on his part more than anything doing with his actual sexuality.  He could get another guy with a little effort. He didn’t want to. There were women who would satisfy that itch but that required more intimacy than he was ready for from a one night stand. And surprisingly Jade was always so worried about hurting him that she could never get in to it. Such hesitance from a woman that loved torturing people... He guessed that’s one of the many ways he knew she loved him. Yes he was thinking about Jade right now. He needed something to distract him from Kal’s tongue up his ass.

This was supposed to help him loosen up after the requisite cleaning was done. Not get him off. Getting him off would mean starting over and ….Fuck. That was the whole damn point. Kaldur’s enjoying this. Roy thought conspiratorially. Roy shook the water from his hair. “Kal enough.” It was hard to sound authoritative when need tainted his voice. Kaldur just gripped Roy’s hips tighter. The feeling of Kal’s fingers digging into his skin made Roy’s toes curl.

It was hard not to slip while pressed up against the glass wall of the shower but Roy attempted to shift his weight forward anyway. “Really, I’m good now.”

Kaldur ignored him again, moving one of his hands forward to begin stroking Roy’s cock.

The extra stimulation caused him to involuntarily push backwards, an action that gave Kaldur encouragement he didn’t need. Roy gave up, they had all day anyway.

Roy needed a break, time to come down from his post orgasmic high. Roy didn’t want one, he pushed through the drowsiness to pin Kaldur against the tiled wall of the shower. Kal hissed as water from one of the sprays pelted his back. Roy hadn’t bothered to ensure that Kaldur didn’t end up on top of one. The water was warm for Roy’s benefit, meaning that it was uncomfortable for Kaldur. Roy didn’t notice. His fingers had returned to the task of opening himself up and Kaldur’s neck needed some attention.

The doorbell rang.

“Ignore it,” Roy said between kisses and Kaldur almost did.

Correction. Kaldur ignored the doorbell but something else caught his attention. He peeled Roy off of him.

“What’s wrong?” Roy’d be dissapointed but he knew that look. Knew it was time to shift gears.

Kal turned off the water then moved to get Roy a towel.

“What about you?”

“Not cold.”

“Kal...you're not exactly in fighting shape right now.” Roy fought against the distraction. Kaldur was so hard it looked painful. He had a plan to ease that pain, but of course they’d get cockblocked.

Kaldur ran his hand over his head, scratching his scalp. He looked down with a wry smile.

“Here.” Roy tossed him his towel. “What’s the plan.”

“We should….” Kaldur cocked his head. Super hearing, it wasn’t Superman levels but having evolved for underwater living sharper senses were part of the deal. “I think I can manage to get pants on before whatever...whoever? It’s just one?”

“Then go,” Roy commanded.

----------------------------------------

Kaldur had just made it to his room. Just opened the drawer to pull out some pajama bottoms when his bedroom door opened. 

“Hey Kal, I thought you were-”

That was Dick’s voice. Kaldur didn’t care then, because privacy apparently meant nothing to portions of the superhero community now that he had been found again. So yes, Kaldur did not bother covering himself again when he turned around.

Dick’s eyes bugged out and then he very pointedly looked at the ceiling. “Sorry I uh…”

“What is it Richard.” Kaldur said calmly,icilly, his face a mask.

“Yeah, what is it Richard?” Roy had entered  the room. Dry but undressed except for the towel around his waist. He slung an arm around Dick’s shoulders, trapping him.

Dick practically jumped out of his skin. He twisted to the side then straightened,  drawing his arms close to his chest as he hugged himself.  “Ugh dude, Kal’s bad enough. Put that away!”

Kaldur’s face softened as he turned to put on some underwear and pajama pants.

“What? Not my problem you didn’t run a proper risk assessment check before breaking in.”

Dick turned to glare at Roy. “How was I supposed to know that you two are together, together?” he hissed. His expression shifted to one of wonder. “Wait...are you guys together together? Cuz if so congrats but I’d prefer to find out over text and not...well.”

Kaldur tossed some clothes Roy’s way.  Roy caught them with his free hand.

“I have preferences as well.” Kaldur said dryly “But seeing as this morning will not continue according to my preferences-”

Dick freed himself from Roy’s grasp. “Ugh don’t bring it up.” He looked a little sick. “I feel like this is what walking in on your parents must be like.”

“Wait,” Roy started as he took off his towel. Dick rushed towards Kal’s bedroom door, he’d seen enough male nudity for the morning thank you very much. “You mean you haven’t seen Bat’s and Catwoman go at it?” Roy called after him.

They laughed at Dick’s loud groan from the hallway.

-----------------------------------------

There was a briefcase on his coffee table. Dick sat on the loveseat casually as if the case didn’t loom large from its location. As if he didn’t put it there on purpose. Roy, his Roy, said what he could not.

Roy gestured to the briefcase. “What the fuck is this shit?”

Kaldur smiled softly at Roy before retreating to the kitchen to start breakfast. It was nice to have his anger translator back.

“Calm down Roy,” said Dick.

Kaldur grinned. Dick should know better. “He just came out of retirement.” Roy said with emphasis. His voice getting louder with each word. “He hasn’t even been debriefed yet. “

“Look Roy I g-”

“You didn’t even have the decency to wait til he opened his door. Just broke in while bringing that.” Roy pointed to the briefcase again.

“It’s a bit of an emergency.”

Roy pointed to the ceiling. “You have a damn space station full of superheroes.”

“Okay okay...enough with the finger.” Dick sighed. “You ever hear of King Shark?”

“No.”

“Yes.” Kaldur cracked an egg into a frying pan then turned around.

“Yeah well, he didn’t take it that well when you fell off the map.” Dick explained. “And now that you’re back he’s made some big proclamation that he’s on the way here.”

“Okay?” Kadur returned to his work. Grabbing a few more eggs to crack into the pan. “King Shark is not a threat that requires my specific skill set. You and others could have intercepted him and I would be along shortly to help if required.”

“He has...spawn.”

“There’s a queen shark?” Roy asked.

Dick gave Roy a “How the fuck would I know?” look.

Roy returned a “Don’t bat’s always know look?”

Dick rolled his eyes.

“Do sharks lay eggs?” Roy continued.

“Some do-” Kaldur began to answer.

“Anyway!” Dick’s voice rose. “Backup is on the way. The little buggers are radioactive so cleanup’s gonna be a bitch. According to the watchtower he’ll be here in an hour or two. I just happened to be in Turkey so I was closest contact.”

“Oh,” Roy snarked. “You just happened to be in Turkey. You just happened to have that with you too?”

More pointing on Roy’s end, this was getting them nowhere. Kaldur figured it was time to swap in. “Roy,” Kaldur said softly as the turned down the burner. Roy moved towards the kitchen to take over because if they were gonna go fight radioactive bipedal shark spawn they'd better eat first.

Silver briefcase. Biometric locks. Kaldur pressed his thumbs to the latches and after a blue light scan and a soft beep the case clicked. Kaldur lifted the top and it was... different. He flicked his eyes over to Dick. “What is with you and blue.”

“Topaz actually. Matches your eyes.” Dick batted his eyes at him

“Stop flirting with my boyfriend.” Roy called form the kitchen.

Dick’s head snapped to Roy’s direction. “I’m not flirting with your boyfriend! Seeing his erection was enough. Trust me.”

Roy scoffed. “Your loss.”

Kaldur ignored them both. He pulled the suit out and shook it a bit. It was similar to his other suits except things were a lighter greenish blue...topaz, whatever, where it would normally be a red orange. And midnight blue where it was black. Pewter where it was gold, like the symbol of Atlantis and his belt. He set the main part of his new suit down. “What are these?” Kaldur lifted a second garment. A high collared, long sleeved, bolero, stiffer than the rest of his suit, it was the same shade of pewter as his Atlantean insignia.

“It’s a part of your new water bearer set up,” Dick explained.

“He doesn't need them anymore,” Roy supplied.

Dick shrugged. “Then imagine how powerful his water constructs will be if he uses them. Ready to suit up?”

Kaldur and Roy looked to each other.

“That was a rhetorical question,” Dick didn’t bother to hide his annoyance.

Roy’s smile triggered one from Kaldur.. “Breakfast first,” Kaldur said.

Linda Ronstadt Has Found Another Voice

The singer on living with Parkinson’s, the perils of stardom, and mourning what the border has become.

It’s been ten years since Linda Ronstadt, once the most highly paid woman in rock and roll, sang her last concert. In 2013, the world found out why: Parkinson’s disease had rendered her unable to sing, ending a musical career that had left an indelible mark on the classic-rock era and earned her ten Grammy Awards. Ronstadt’s earth-shaking voice and spunky stage presence jolted her to fame in the late sixties, and her renditions of “Different Drum” (with her early group, the Stone Poneys), “You’re No Good” (from her breakthrough album, “Heart Like a Wheel”), “Blue Bayou,” and “Desperado” helped define the California folk-rock sound. Along the way, two of her backup musicians left to form the Eagles.

But Ronstadt, now seventy-three, didn’t rest on her greatest hits, experimenting instead with a dizzying range of genres. In the eighties, she starred in Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Pirates of Penzance” on Broadway, recorded a standards album with the veteran arranger Nelson Riddle, and released “Canciones de Mi Padre,” a collection of traditional Mexican songs, which became the best-selling non-English-language album in American history. The record also returned Ronstadt to her roots. Her grandfather was a Mexican bandleader, and her father had serenaded her mother with Mexican folk songs in a beautiful baritone. She grew up in Tucson, Arizona, close to the border—a place that has since become a political flashpoint.

A new documentary, “Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice,” directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman and opening September 6th, looks back on Ronstadt’s adventurous career. She spoke with The New Yorker twice by phone from her home in San Francisco. Our conversations have been edited and condensed.

What is your day-to-day life like these days?

Well, I lie down a lot, because I’m disabled. I do a lot of reading, but I’m starting to have trouble with my eyes, so that’s kind of a problem. It’s called getting old.

What are you reading right now?

I’m reading Thomas Mann, “The Magic Mountain.” I somehow got to be this age without having read Thomas Mann, and I’m trying to make up for it. I read “Buddenbrooks,” and I fell in love with his writing. His books are nice and long, so it takes a couple of days to get through them.

Who do you spend most of your time with?

My son lives here. My daughter comes over. I have really nice friends; they come over and hang out with me. It’s hard for me to get out. It’s hard for me to sit in a restaurant or sit up in a chair. It’s hard for me to stand around, so if there’s a situation where I’m liable to be caught in a doorway talking to somebody for five minutes, I tend to avoid that.

What kind of music do you listen to?

I love opera. It’s so terrible—I listen to it on YouTube. I’m an audiophile, but I’ve just gotten used to the convenience of being able to hear twenty-nine different performances of one role. I listen to other music, too. I found this Korean band that I thought was sort of interesting on Tiny Desk concerts, the NPR series. They get musicians to come in and play live in a really tiny little space behind a desk. It’s no show biz, just music. They have great stuff. They had Randy Newman. Natalia Lafourcade, who’s a Mexican artist that I love particularly. Whatever’s new. The Korean band I saw was called SsingSsing.

Is it like K-pop?

No, it’s based on Korean traditional singing. It was kind of like David Bowie bass and drums, and then this really wild South Korean traditional singing. It’s polytonal. It’s a different skill than we use, with more notes in it. And a lot of gender-crossing. It looked like I was seeing the future.

When you sing in your mind, what do you hear?

I can hear the song. I can hear what I would be doing with it. I can hear the accompaniment. Sometimes I don’t remember the words, so I have to look them up. It’s not usually my songs I’m singing. I don’t listen to my own stuff very much.

           I listen to Mexican radio—the local Banda station out of San Jose. I mostly listen to NPR. I don’t listen to mainstream radio anymore. I don’t know the acts and I don’t know the music. It doesn’t interest me, particularly. There are some good modern people. I like Sia. She’s a very original singer.

How do you cope with the frustration of not being able to do everything you want to do?

I’ve just accepted it. There’s absolutely nothing I can do. I have a form of Parkinsonism that doesn’t respond to standard Parkinson’s meds, so there’s no treatment for what I have. It’s called P.S.P.—Progressive Supranuclear Palsy. I just have to stay home a lot. The main attraction in San Francisco is the opera and the symphony, and I make an effort and go out, but I can only do it a few times a year. It makes me sick that I’m ever not in my seat when Michael Tilson Thomas raises his baton, because he’s such a good conductor, and I miss hearing orchestral music. My friends come over and play music, and that’s where I like it best, anyway: in the living room.

As you tell it, the first symptoms you noticed before you knew you had Parkinson’s were in your singing voice.

Yeah. I’d start to do something and it would start to take the note and then it would stop. What you can’t do with Parkinsonism is repetitive motions, and singing is a repetitive motion.

You broke onto the scene with such a powerhouse voice. What did it feel like, singing with that voice?

Well, I was trying to figure out how to sing! And trying to be heard over the electric instruments. I had no idea that I sang as loud as I did. I always thought I wasn’t singing loud enough, because in the early days there were no monitors. You couldn’t hear yourself.

In the documentary, you talk about growing up in Tucson, Arizona, and how culturally rich that was. How do the current politics around the border resonate with you?

They’re devastating. I feel filled with impotent rage. I grew up in the Sonoran Desert, and the Sonoran Desert is on both sides of the border. There’s a fence that runs through it now, but it’s still the same culture. The same food, the same clothes, the same traditional life of ranching and farming. I go down there a lot, and it’s so hard to get back across the border. It’s ridiculous. It used to be that you could go across the border and have lunch and visit friends and shop in the little shops there. There was a beautiful department store in the fifties and sixties. My parents had friends on both sides of the border. They were friends with the ranchers, and we went to all their parties and their baptisms and their weddings and their balls.

And now that’s gone. The stores are wiped out because they don’t get any trade from the United States anymore. There’s concertina wire on the Mexican side that the Americans put up. Animals are getting trapped in there. Children are getting cut on it. It’s completely unnecessary. In the meantime, you see people serenely skateboarding and girls with their rollerskates, kids playing in the park. And you think, We’re afraid of this? They’re just regular kids!

I spent time out in the desert when I was still healthy, working with a group of Samaritans who go to find people that are lost. You run into the Minute Men or the Border Patrol every five seconds. The border is fully militarized. You meet some guy stumbling through the desert trying to cross, and he’s dehydrated, his feet are full of thorns, cactus, then you see this Minute Man sitting with his cooler, with all of his water and food and beer, and his automatic weapon sitting on his lap, wearing full camouflage. It’s so cruel. People are coming to work. They’re coming to have a better life. You have to be pretty desperate to want to cross that desert.

You were talking about this back in 2013, when your memoir came out, before it became such a national wedge issue. Were people not paying enough attention before?

Well, they didn’t live close to the border. They’d just go back to chewing their cud about it. It wasn’t their problem. I lived at the border then. I lived in Tucson for ten years. I saw what was going on. Putting children in jail—that’s not new. That was going on in the Bush Administration. Barack Obama tried to get immigration reform and Congress wouldn’t allow it. So people have been caught in this web of suffering, dying in the desert. They’re incredibly brave and resourceful, the people who make it. A C.E.O. of a big company once told me—when I said, “What do you look for in hiring practices?”—she said, “I look for someone who’s dealt with a lot of adversity, because they usually make a good business person.” And I thought, You should hire every immigrant who comes across the border.

Why did you decide to move to San Francisco from Tucson?

My children were coming home repeating homophobic remarks they heard at school. And they’d also heard other things, like, “If you don’t go to church, you’re going to go to Hell.” I thought, You know, I don’t need that. So I moved back to San Francisco. I wanted them to have a sense of what a community was like where you could walk to school, walk to the market. More of an urban-village experience. In Tucson, I was driving in the car for forty-five minutes to get them to school and then forty-five minutes to get them back, in a hot car. I didn’t want that life for them.

I can tell that you have a real sense of mourning over what the border used to be.

People don’t realize that there’s Mexican, there’s American, and then there’s Mexican-American. They’re three different cultures, and they all influence eachother. And they all influence our culture profoundly. The cowboy suit that Roy Rogers would wear, with the yoke shirt and the pearl buttons and the bell-bottom frontier pants and the cowboy hat—those are all Mexican. We imported it. We eat burritos and tacos, and our music is influenced a lot by Mexican music. It goes back and forth across the border all the time.

How did growing up in that hybrid Mexican-American culture shape you as a musician?

I listened to a lot of Mexican music on the radio, and my dad had a really great collection of traditional Mexican music. It made it hard for me when I went to sing American pop music, because rock and roll is based on black church rhythms, and I wasn’t exposed to that as a kid. I could only sing what I’d heard. What I’d heard was Mexican music, Billie Holiday, and my brother singing boy soprano.

So what drew you to folk rock in the sixties?

I loved popular folk music like Peter, Paul and Mary. I loved the real traditional stuff, like the Carter family. I loved Bob Dylan. And I tried to copy what I could. When I heard the Byrds doing folk rock, I thought that was what I wanted to do.

How did your recording of “Different Drum” with the Stone Poneys in 1967 come about?

It was a song I found on a Greenbriar Boys record, and I thought it was a strong piece of material. I just liked the song. We worked it up as a kind of shuffle—it wasn’t very good with the guys playing guitar and mandolin. But the record company recognized that the song was strong, too, so they had me come back and record it with their musicians and their arrangement. And I was pretty shocked. I didn’t know how to sing it with that arrangement. But it turned out to be a hit.

Do you remember hearing it on the radio for the first time?

Yeah. We were on our way to a meeting at Capitol Records, in an old Dodge or something, and I was jammed in the back with our guitars. Then the engine froze, and the car made this horrible metal-on-metal shriek. We had to push it to the nearest gas station, half a block away. The man was looking at the car saying it’ll never run again, and we were saying, “What will we ever do in Los Angeles with no car?” And from the radio playing in the back of the garage we could hear the opening of “Different Drum.” We heard which radio station it was on, KRLA, so I knew it was a hit, if they played it on the L.A. stations.

What are your memories of the Troubadour, in West Hollywood?

That’s where you went to hang out. We would go to hear the local act that was playing, or there’d be someone like Hoyt Axton or Oscar Brown, Jr., or Odetta. Nobody was anything particular at the time. We were all aspiring musicians. The Dillards were there. The Byrds hung out there. And then it started to be people like Joni Mitchell, James Taylor. Carole King would play there. When Joni Mitchell played, she played two weeks. I think I saw every single night.

In your book, you talk about being with Janis Joplin there and trying to figure out what to wear onstage.

Oh, I never could figure out what to wear. I grew up wearing Levi’s and a T-shirt or a sweater and cowboy boots or sneakers. And that’s what I left home with, and that’s what I wound up with. In the summer we’d cut the legs off the Levi’s and they were Levi’s shorts. When I got my Cub Scout outfit, that was a real change for me.

You say that you and Janis Joplin couldn’t figure out how to fit in—you didn’t know whether to be earth mothers or whatever.

We didn’t know whether we were supposed to cook and sew and embroider. Roles were being redefined. There were a lot of earth-mama hippie girls who knew how to do that stuff.

There’s a clip in the documentary of you being interviewed in 1977, and you talk about how rock-and-roll stars become alienated and are surrounded by managers who are willing to indulge them, and that’s how people wind up with drug problems.

They got involved with drugs because they felt isolated. Stardom is isolating. There are a whole bunch of people that you’re hanging out with who are trying to become musicians. And some were chosen and some were not, and it becomes a difficult relationship with the people who weren’t chosen. Sometimes they’re resentful, sometimes you feel uncomfortable. It’s like Emmylou Harris has in a song: “Pieces of the sky were falling in your neighbor’s yard but not on you.” The adulation made people feel disconnected. I also think that some people’s brain chemistry is more vulnerable to addiction. I was lucky. Mine was not.

David Geffen says that you had an issue with diet pills.

I had no issue with that. I just took them when I needed them. I didn’t like it. If I ate, I’d have to take a diet pill. It wasn’t something I did for pleasure.

There’s been a lot of looking back this year at the summer of 1969, with these big anniversaries of the moon landing and Woodstock and the Manson murders. What do you remember about that summer?

When Woodstock happened, I was in New York. I remember getting all the reports from people like Henry Diltz and Crosby, Stills & Nash. They’d come back with stories of everybody being in the mud. It sounded like a good thing to have survived, but I’m glad I didn’t go up there. Overflowing toilets and no food is not my idea of a fun time. I was playing some club—probably the Bitter End.

When the Manson family came through, they managed to murder my next-door neighbor, Gary Hinman. I was lucky I wasn’t home that night—they may have come for me. We knew those girls, Linda Kasabian and maybe Leslie Van Houten, too. I lived in Topanga Canyon at the time, and they would hitchhike, and they would talk about this guy Charlie at the Spahn Ranch. But I didn’t know him personally. We knew it was kind of a bad scene. But, when we found out how bad of a scene it was, we were horrified.

People must have been really scared before they were captured.

Oh, everybody was freaked out. We weren’t sure at the time whether the Gary Hinman murder was connected to the other murders, but we found out soon enough.

The music of that era was so intertwined with politics. How do you feel that compares with popular music these days? Is music addressing political upheaval?

Oh, I think so. Especially hip-hop. But I wish there was a little bit more political activism. I’m waiting for the Reichstag to burn down, you know? Because I was interested in the Weimar Republic, I’ve always been aware that culture can be overwhelmed and subverted in a very short time. All of German intellectual history—Goethe and Beethoven—was subverted by the Nazis. It happened in a thirty-year span and brought German culture to its knees. And it’s happening here. There’s a real conspiracy of international fascism that wants to defeat democracy. They want all the power for themselves, and I think that suits Donald Trump right now. He’d like to be a dictator.

In going through your history, I’ve noticed you’ve been selectively outspoken. There’s an interview from 1983 where a talk-show host in Australia asks you about deciding to perform in South Africa under apartheid, and you give this speech about how if you didn’t play anywhere with racism you wouldn’t be able to play in the American South or Boston. You also take shots at Ronald Reagan and Rupert Murdoch. As a popular performer, was there a cost to speaking out?

I never talked onstage for about fifteen years. But there were certain causes that we as a musical community united against, and one of them was nuclear power. We did a lot of No Nukes concerts—James Taylor, me, Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt—and if it was a particular cause that I was in favor of. I did what I could to help, but I don’t think my focus was particularly political. If somebody asked, I was perfectly happy to give my opinion.

I also found a clip from 1995 where you confronted Robin Quivers, Howard Stern’s co-host, on the “Tonight Show” about her association with Stern. Do you remember what upset you so much?

Well, first of all, I never heard Howard Stern on the radio. I had no idea who he was. I didn’t have a television. I didn’t know who Robin Quivers was. But it had just been on the news that day, what he had said about—oh, the girl singer.

Selena? He said “Spanish people have the worst taste in music” and played her music with gunshots in the background.

Selena, yeah. And it just offended me. As a Mexican-American, it just offended me that he would say such a horrible thing about someone’s dead daughter. I didn’t realize that Howard Stern made a career out of making unfortunate remarks about other people. And I didn’t know what Robin Quivers was like. I didn’t know anything about it. I just went, “Hey, that really offended me.” It made me angry. I didn’t realize what kind of a hornets’ nest I’d stepped into.

Did you get any reaction from him after that?

Oh, yeah. He said horrible things about me.

Going back to your performing career, in the documentary, your former manager Peter Asher says that you would see people whispering at your concerts and imagine that they were saying, “She’s the worst singer I’ve ever heard.” Were you really that insecure?

I just didn’t feel like I could quite sing well enough. It was best when I forgot about everything and just thought about the music, but it took me a long time to get there. I didn’t want to see people that I knew in the audience. I didn’t like to see the audience, actually. I couldn’t understand why they’d come. It’s a different relationship than singers like Taylor Swift have. I think it’s a little bit healthier that they embrace their audience and sort of feel like everybody’s on the same team. We were encouraged in the sixties to think of us and them. The hippies started that whole tribal thing, and it was the straights against the hippies. It was unhealthy.

How did you overcome your self-doubt?

I’d just say, “Breathe and sing.” As long as I pulled my focus back to the music, I was fine.

Your relationship with Jerry Brown is covered in the documentary and in your book, but not your relationships with some other prominent people, like Jim Carrey and George Lucas. Is there a reason for that?

I was writing about the music. They didn’t have anything to do with my musical process.

What did Jerry Brown contribute to your musical process?

Well, he was there when Joe Papp [the founder of the Public Theatre and Shakespeare in the Park] called saying that they wanted me for “H.M.S. Pinafore.”. But Jerry [gave me the message] wrong—it was actually “The Pirates of Penzance,” which I didn’t know.

Do you keep in touch with him?

Yeah. We’re friends. We’ve always been friends. He came over last Christmas.

What do you talk about?

Water in California. He said when he retires he wants to study trees and California Indians. I gave him my tree book, “The Hidden Life of Trees.” There’s a new history of water use in California that’s fantastic. It’s called “The Dreamt Land.” It’s like John McPhee-level writing. It’s really worth it for the writing alone.

The press always made such a big deal about the fact that you never got married.

I didn’t need to get married. I’m not sure that anybody needs to get married. If they do, I’m on their side. But I never needed to get married. I had my own life.

I have to admit, I was born in the eighties and I discovered you through “The Muppet Show.” What can you tell me about working with Kermit?

I had a crush on Kermit, so it was a problem because of Miss Piggy. He was her property. But we had a really good time on that show. There’s something extraordinarily creative about puppeteers. They’re fascinating, because when they do all their acting, they can’t let it go through their own body. I think they’re just loaded with talent. I loved watching them. It was a very coöperative experience. They let me help them with the story and the songs.

What was your contribution to the story?

This crush that I had on Kermit, they developed into a little storyline where Miss Piggy and I have a confrontation.

She seems like a very formidable rival.

She was. She was nasty! She locked Kermit in a trunk.

Because you’re a singer but not a songwriter, so much of your artistic expression comes through your choice of material. How did you choose songs for “Heart Like a Wheel,” including the title song by Anna and Kate McGarrigle?

I was just ambushed by that song. I was riding with Jerry Jeff Walker in a cab, and he said, “I was at the Philadelphia Folk Festival and I heard these two girls singing—they were sisters. They sang a really good song. You should hear it.” He sang me the first verse—“Some say the heart is just like a wheel / When you bend it, you can’t mend it / But my love for you is like a sinking ship / And my heart is on that ship out in mid-ocean”—and I just thought they were the most beautiful lyrics I’d ever heard. I said, “You have to send me that song.” And I get this tape in the mail, reel to reel, with just piano and a cello and the two girls singing their beautiful harmonies. The manager I had at the time said it was too corny. Somebody said it would never be a hit. And I don’t think it was ever a radio single, but it was a huge song for me. I sang it all the way through my career.

Were you surprised by the songs from that album that became hits?

I was surprised anything of mine was successful, because it always seemed so hodge-podge. I just tried different songs that didn’t necessarily have anything to do with each other, but which expressed a real urgent feeling that I just had to express. “You’re No Good” was an afterthought. We needed to have an uptempo song to close the show with, and that was a song I knew from the radio.

What were the biggest challenges in becoming a public figure?

Not having the ability to observe other people, because people are observing you. I had to keep my head down all the time. It was kind of excruciating. I still feel that way. I don’t like to be on the spot. Also, relationships were hard, because I was always on the bus.

In an interview from 1977, you said, “I think men have generally treated me badly, and the idea of a war between the sexes is very real in our culture. In the media, women are built up with sex as a weapon and men are threatened by it as much as they are drawn to it, and they retaliate as hard as they can.” Do you remember what you were talking about?

No, I don’t! I have to say that when I look at my whole career, over all, what counted the most was whether you showed up and played the music. I saw it happen with Emmylou, and I saw it happen with Joni Mitchell. Joni Mitchell was threatening to everybody. She could play better. She could sing better. She looked better. She could just do it all. But it’s true, there was a certain amount of chauvinism.There weren’t a lot of girls in the business who were doing what I was doing, so my friendship with Emmylou Harris became so important.

Did you find that there were things that were harder for you as a woman than for your male contemporaries?

Well, I had to do makeup and hair. That’s a lot, because that’s two hours of the day that you could spend reading a book or learning a language or practicing guitar. Guys just shower and put on any old clothes. And then there were high heels. I have extra ankle bones in each foot, and high heels were agonizing. I used to wear them onstage, kick them off, hide my feet behind the monitors, and find my shoes again before I had to leave the stage.

At the height of your rock-and-roll fame, you decided to do Gilbert and Sullivan. What drew you to that?

My sister, when she was eleven and I was six, I guess, sang “H.M.S. Pinafore” in her junior high school. My mother had a book of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas on piano, and somehow I learned the songs. I heard my sister practicing them. So, when I heard of “The Pirates of Penzance,” I knew what Gilbert and Sullivan was.

Was part of you tired of being a rock star?

Part of me was very tired of it. I was singing loud in halls that didn’t sound like they were built for music. I liked the idea of a proscenium stage. I think a proscenium has a lot to do with focussing your attention. A theatre is a machine built to focus your attention and allow you to dream. You’re hypnotized, in a way, and the person onstage is your champion, is telling your story. You find emotions you didn’t realize you had.

Throughout the eighties, you experimented wildly with genre, everything from Puccini to the Great American Songbook to Mexican canciones. I’m sure your record label was surprised when you said, “I want to make an album of Mexican folk music.”

Well, before that, I wanted to do American standard songs, and they said, “No, it won’t work.” In fact, Joe Smith [the chairman of Elektra/Asylum Records] even came to my house to beg me not to do it. He said, “You’re throwing your career away.” I’d been away so long working on Broadway.

Were you worried that your fans wouldn’t go along with the standards, either?

I didn’t worry about it until after we made the record [“What’s New”] and we were opening at Radio City Music Hall. And I realized, all of a sudden, people might not show up. They really might hate it. I was ordering matzo-ball soup from the Carnegie Deli next door, and it gave me the shakes so bad that I could barely stand when I got onstage. I was holding hands with Nelson Riddle in the wings—he was nervous, too. He said, “Don’t let me down, baby.” I said, “I’ll do my best.” He was the best of those arrangers—worked with Rosemary Clooney and Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald. He wrote beautiful charts for me. I was really lucky to have him. I went back to my apartment that night and just smiled, because we had gotten away with an evening of American standard songs.

When I see something now like Lady Gaga recording a standards album with Tony Bennett, it seems like she owes you a debt.

Well, she owes me nothing. She’s got enough talent to make it on her own. But, up until then, attempts by female pop artists to go back and do standards had not been successful. And Joan Baez had tried to record in Spanish, and that didn’t work. It depends on what the audience is expecting of you. When I did Mexican songs, I brought in a whole new audience. I played the same venues, but it was grandmothers and grandchildren. People brought their kids. And the standards audience was older—they were in their fifties and sixties, which seemed impossibly old to me at the time.

Is it true that you recorded “Canciones de Mi Padre” at George Lucas’s recording studio, Skywalker Sound?

The second album, “Mas Canciones.” I chose it because they have a big scoring stage. It has good acoustics that you can tune with the wooden panels on the side. There was a lot of room ambience. Mariachi’s a folk orchestra, and it was a good orchestra sound. It’s hard to find.

You also collaborated with Emmylou Harris and Dolly Parton. Do you keep in touch with them?

Emmy comes out to Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, which is a bluegrass festival here in San Francisco, so I see her about once a year. She comes over to my house. We used to sing together. Now she brings her laundry and we talk. When you’re on the road, you always have extra laundry.

Have you kept up with Dolly?

Emmy and I presented her an award recently, and I hadn’t seen her in a while. I don’t think she realized I’m as disabled as I am. She threw her arms around me, and I kept saying, “Dolly, watch out! You’re going to knock me down!” She thought I was kidding. I nearly fell down. I grabbed onto the podium that her award was on and knocked it to the ground. It was made out of glass and it broke. “Congratulations, here’s your award—smash! You get to take the pieces home.”

If you could wave a magic wand and record one more album, what would be on it?

It would be an eclectic mix. There’s a song called “I Still Have That Other Girl,” written by Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach, that I always wanted to record. And there’s a Mexican song called “Paloma Negra” I always wanted to record. I’d record all those songs that I didn’t get around to.

THANKS TO MIHCAEL SCHULMAN AND NEWYORKER.COM FOR THE ARTICLE.

The super mario gang- Playing Minecraft

I saw a post describing the MHA crew playing Minecraft and what they'd do if they were all on this huge server and I thought i could do one for The Super mario gang as well!

So this post is talking about: What if the super mario characters were all on this massive server where they had cheats but the admin was actually Roy but no one knows because his username is "luigishatepage". And what they'd do in this server too.

Mario - - Mario would play survival and try to build a house in the middle of a forest. He'd probably look up some cheats however he hates to admit how he managed to create a sword. He's really good at killing animals and hostile mobs, the only problem is that he gets very lonely and decided to change to creative and spawn some villagers. After getting back into creative mode, the villagers opened his door to a creeper and he died. He got bored and decided to go full time creative.

luigi - - Luigi on the other hand, died the first time and he played. He gave up and moved to creative buut he built his own mansion--It's large and has a lot of bookshelves and decorated webs. Sometimes the Super mario crew crash at his place.

Yoshi- Yoshi is a redstone expert, he tends to try and trap toad in his tricks because... well.. he's toad, right? Toad deserves it. Yoshis home revolves around redstone. It's actually pretty cool.

Toad - - He's a noob. He gets trolled by Yoshi quite a bit and doesn't know its /gamemode 1 to turn to creative so he's stuck in survival.

Toadette-- Doesn't play Minecraft because it's "not girly enough" for her to play.

Peach-- She plays Minecraft. It's actually an addiction. She climbs really high and then builds rollacoasters. She ordered her toad servants to build her a castle. She plays on Creative too.

Bowser-- He's trying to find Mario's house but Mario lives under a cave so i mean- Yeah. He's having difficulty. He plays on Creative but sometimes tries to change marios gamemode to survival despite not knowing whether he's flying or not. Someone is secretly trolling him so he moved to the nether.

Bowser jr-- Bowser jr spawns enemies near bowsers Castle and bowser gets really mad about this. Bowser jr is a master gamer. He does sometimes troll toad too. Yoshi and bowser jr both love to troll Toad together.

Larry koopa-- He spawned in a village but he blew it up with Tnt, as expected of course. He tries to play with bowser jr but bowser jr verbally abuses him.

Lemmy-- Lemmy does the storymode. That's it.

Morton jr-- He gets trolled and he spent ages building a mansion all for Roy to command it to disappear. It's actually kinda sad tbh.

Iggy-- He found marios cave but decided to keep it a secret. Nobody knows his location though.

Wendy-- Wendy went exploring underwater. She didn't know she needed a potion. Thankfully, Ludwig spends his time brewing them so it's cool.

Ludwig-- He brews potions and has a wizard hunt.

The yoshi fam-- They're on a whole different island. It's actually pretty cool.

King boo - - Trolls Luigi

Roy-- He's the admin but he pretends he's just another player.

sex cam

I was recently doing a search in Google to locate a website that would confirm my suspicions about a Tele-huckster--a pet peeve of mine to which I am hopelessly addicted. Something generated another and, yada yada yada, before I knew it, my flat screen monitor began flashing a chain of sexually explicit pictures in brilliant pulsating color. It had been an X-rated pop-up extravaganza; one I was unable to keep up with. I clicked frantically trying to close one close-up invasion after another. The bombardment continued on until it ran its course, eventually reaching some type of worldwide web adult abyss that even the web couldn't crawl below.

As I cleared up the sex cam debris I so innocently spilled--well maybe not too innocently--I was struck by my good fortune. Thankfully, the web came along decades after my early teen years. Had this stuff existed in the Sixties, I would nevertheless be squirreled away in my attic room even today, trimming the hair on my palms while mumbling incoherently to my seeing-eye dog.

On the other hand, learning the whereabouts, general appearance and overall intent behind female parts would have been a heck of much easier, not to mention more timely. Instead, my sex education was really the collective result of a hit or miss operation. During the time it had been torture, but I don't know, there clearly was something funny about it too. And all of it started at my local summer recreation center, Carteret Park ...

"What did Roy Rogers tell Dale Evans in the bed room once the lights went out?" Mud Finnegan asked a rapt band of adolescent boys sitting around a lengthy wooden table at our local summer hangout, Carteret Park. He was about twelve years old, annually more than I and several years more than a lot of the kids sitting on the benches--that was age-wise but he seemed a generation more than all us in most other way.

Mud looked around, working the table like an experienced Catskill comedian. No body dared answered his question because it surely wasn't a question at all. It had been an obvious lead-in to the cam girls line of another classic dirty joke; besides, no-one had a clue regarding the possible answer--no one that's except Moon Muller.

"I know!" Moon yelped in a lame attempt to impress the people, like he was really in the know.

"Shut up! That you don't know crap!" Fitzy snapped back, warning that one of is own patented headlocks could be coming Moon's way if he didn't keep his big trap shut.

"Do too!" Moon fired back in an astonishing show of bravado.

"Are you currently two f'in jerk-offs through?" Mud, as only Mud could do, used the "F" word with a specific artistic flair. He painted masterpieces with four letter words no differently than Monet did with colors from a pallet. Having regained the attention of his fickle audience, he continued to close the deal.

"Do you f'in dick heads want to listen to the f'in joke or doncha?" His eyes got wide and kind of crazy looking, one eyebrow climbing higher than the other. Of course, we wished to hear. Everyone settled down. He waited a minute, knowing timing was everything; then, delivered the goods.

The Ultimate Guide to SEO

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That's why a good consumer experience from an SEO viewpoint is more than your web site's speed. For instance, several businesses miss the mark along with SEO and images, and nevertheless rank well. If you want increased rankings, you need to examine his stuff - he's the particular Unicorn among a sea associated with donkey SEOs. Consumer Experience as such has a good enormous influence on SEO. Off-page SEO very efficiently within promoting your company where interpersonal media, bookmarking sites, forums, weblog directory, Q&A, articles, videos, picture and infographic sharing, and record sharing play well. So exactly SEO 2019 Slide how do the SEO masters cope-up with the ever-changing context through the search engines? For instance, let's imagine we want to create a blog post about SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION because we are trying in order to build a inbound link in order to an SEO website. That will number will probably tick upward as SEOs become more advanced in their strategies and Search engines is constantly on the location so much emphasis on hyperlinks. In spite of the fact that SEO offers the highest ROI of any kind of ecommerce marketing campaign, most on the web shops are put together along with little to no consideration associated with search engines like google. Consider these points while developing SEO strategy to get higher ranking in search results. The particular term SEO in relation in order to seo is also used in times to make reference in order to search engine optimizers, who are usually consultants that mange and help the development and completion associated with search engine optimization projects for clients. The faster you realize why Google is definitely sending you less traffic compared to it did last year, the particular sooner you can clean upward and focus on proactive SEO that will begins to impact your ranks in a positive way. Obviously, keyword search positions is another very important metric to track if you are usually analyzing your SEO efforts. Tone of voice search is one of the particular latest SEO trends in 2018. She provides some awesome tips on SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION for voice search, including thinking of how people ask questions plus understanding local queries and intention. In addition, when it comes to Nearby SEO, long-tail keywords become actually more important. Nearby SEO will play a excellent role in mobile searches is definitely all about content. That's why optimizing your SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION technique for voice search nowadays is of vital importance. To rest guaranteed that the right SEO Organization has been selected, the prior projects must be looked from. See the ranks of the projects on the particular top search engines. Adapting to tone of voice search in your SEO technique calls for careful attention in order to the keywords you try in order to rank for. In other words, content and hyperlinks will still be the creating blocks of SEO in 2018. From the above-mentioned information, crafting link-worthy content seemed in order to be the winning choice, because chosen by 35. 2% associated with the 100+ participants as properly as the close runner-up choice came out to become -- guest blogging on sites along with high Domain Authority for constructing reliable backlinks gaining 30. 8%. Outreaching top influencers of the particular niche to write articles and insert links in this; bagged the support of twenty one. 3% of the SEO experts, whereas the option of damaged backlink although being highly efficient in white-hat SEO practices obtained the selection rate of twelve. 7% of the total sharers in the survey. So, I would certainly declare 2018 is a problem for Google, just as very much as it might be regarding SEOs. We have a few good rankings, but we are usually always planning to improve and observe what the future holds intended for SEO. In 2018, the user experience is the particular center of development as properly as the key point regarding the SEO strategies. SEO continues to be king of the Internet, plus businesses will continue to require valuable, and unique content that will will meet the need associated with their company in the many years ahead. Backlinks are one of the most significant SEO factors. In order to give you a head begin, here are the SEO tendencies and techniques we expect in order to dominate in 2018. Debbie A. Everson is the particular CEO of, experienced SEO Experts and Search Engine Optimization Company to 2, 000 small companies. Off-Page SEO refers in order to all the things that may be done directly OFF your own website to help you much better search engine positions, such since social networking, article submission, community forum & blog marketing, etc. Without a doubt, 1 of the biggest trends that will has already begun to get place and will continue nicely into 2018 is the loan consolidation of niche MarTech players simply by larger content cloud vendors, along with the role and importance associated with SEO increasing significantly throughout this particular transformation. The essential to successful SEO is focusing on long-tail keywords you would like to be along with individuals search results because even when you have thousands even large numbers of social media following, this still won't be as eective as ranking high on the particular SERPs for your target key phrases. While obtaining as many pages indexed online was historically a priority intended for an SEO, Google is right now rating the quality of webpages on your site and the particular type of pages it will be indexing. As mentioned earlier around 95% of general population will certainly not move beyond the very first page SEO search results, therefore as a business you require an in-depth knowledge of the particular latest SEO techniques and begin incorporating them in your company today.

Many electronic natives and marketers alike are usually using SEO to its benefit by incorporating every keyword you can possibly imagine into the content they create. Now that a person understand tips on how to please your customers, how to satisfy search objective, and how to create content material, it's time to move on to Pillar #3 in this SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION strategy. As mentioned previously, businesses could not make the bigger mistake than thinking that will best SEO techniques only rely on content, because the most recent SEO techniques you need in order to adapt depend on greater than simply content. Today that you're on top associated with these 6 SEO trends plus have an arsenal of ideas to manage your strategy, a person are well positioned for SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION and digital marketing in 2018. In order to obtain a featured snippet, content internet marketers must structure their articles in order to a number of factors, having SEO well beyond the existing competition to reach the number one particular spot on Google. A good SEO strategy in 2018 requirements to consider the way we all consume visual content and exactly how search engines now go past text to explore the transforming habits of search. As a matter of reality, the strength of any website is situated in the DA. Domain Expert is SEOmozs calculated metric regarding how well a given domain name is likely to rank looking results. An SEO expert can tell you this single modification may not improve your web page rankings or authority very very much, however it will get even more clicks. Off-page SEO very efficiently in advertising your business where social press, bookmarking sites, forums, blog listing, Q&A, articles, videos, image plus infographic sharing, and document revealing play well. Even though AMP is not so very much a ranking signal for SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, you can imagine that AMP's, when properly utilised, provide the broader visibility. The white hat SEO methods are good for future-proof SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION results Meanwhile, black hat ought to be avoided at all expenses as they strategies are the particular ones that Google and various other search engines are determined in order to root out. SEO a lot more usually discuss domain trust plus domain authority based on the particular number, type and quality associated with incoming links to a web site. As electronic assistance gets more accurate presently there is a great opportunity each for SEO and content, gaining from a growing market that develops the brand with a consumer in a unique but nevertheless relevant and useful way. Not simply search engine algorithm changes yet also the way in which usually people search keeps changing, therefore, considering the above 10 SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION trends- digital marketers and company owners could make their web site ready for ranking high within 2018. If you look at huge brand names like Amazon and Walmart, a person see how powerful SEO may be. When you search regarding nearly every consumer product on Search engines, Amazon and Walmart are even more than likely to appear upon top. In the similar vein, you can't go to an SEO blog at the particular moment without seeing a function on Voice Search.

RankBrain is more associated with a ranking signal than a good SEO masterpiece, nevertheless, it will have some effects on SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, and can be especially helpful if users don't know fully what they're looking for, or even simply can't find the correct words to use. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION - Seo: the process associated with making your site better intended for search engines. Google announced last 12 months that RankBrain had become their own 3rd most important ranking aspect, and our SEO predictions recommend it will grow in significance for 2018. Creating and promoting linkable property is an excellent way in order to increase your SEO through the purchase of backlinks. You can get SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION results by executing Pillar #1 and Pillar #2 well, yet backlinks are fuel on the particular fire. This way, a person and your SEO can make sure that your site is created to be search engine-friendly in the bottom up. However, a great SEO can also help enhance an existing site. Not just is it a great method to get different viewpoints straight into your article and find out there new things, it also assists grow your SEO rankings plus traffic. Use LSI keywords in body (use Seo pressor plugin to get related keywords). All these consequences also lead to better SEO and higher search engine rankings. On-page SEO is the exercise of optimizing individual web web pages to be able to position higher and earn more related traffic in search engines. In the event that you are a local company and want to build upon your local SEO, do that simply by looking for websites that are usually associated with the area a person operate in. You can inquire your local magazine whether these people wish to work together upon online articles and mention your own business in them or enjoy the role of mentioned upon local websites like your neighborhood page. To predict tips on how to surface a business's results within a voice search, SEO experts now need to concentrate upon ranking for the common NL queries around target keywords. While every single client has a different goal, the SEO ranking principles are the very same. In 2018, it's going in order to be increasingly important for SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION builders to incorporate longer-tailed key phrases into queries. On-page SEO is the optimisation of the elements that can be found on your own website, which includes content, the code behind each page, visual elements and consumer experience. Only continuous updation of your website with the particular latest SEO techniques will assist to raise it to the particular top most positions within the particular ranking. No matter how many up-dates Google gets released for SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION but without having a correct content for a website just about all these updated will be used up. That makes SEO an perfect leads tool, because when people follow links back to your own site, you have the possibility to convert them to network marketing leads, and later make sales. There's simply no question that focusing on your own business' SEO is critical regarding a successful marketing strategy. The use associated with specific, purposefully chosen keywords will be also important in the procedure as the strategy of SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION depends on the ways individuals use search engines like search engines. In this post, coming from divided the top SEO techniques in order to help you skyrocket your ratings and boost your number associated with monthly visitors. Therefore, it's time for mobile search engine optimization for better SEO result. These 2 updates have compelled the SEOs to keep the mentioned tasks in check and work in the direction of Google's mission statement of offering authentic search engine results in order to the visitors. Search engines has emphasized links as the ranking factor since the 1990s, according to Moz, and they will continue to be an important aspect of every great SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION strategy. The ability of web SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION lies in understanding how individuals search for things and knowing what sort of results Google wants in order to (or will) display to the users.

Google, much towards the shock of every SEO pro, is just not obsessed with making our life more difficult, but instead, will be obsessed with providing their customers with the best user encounter possible. Organised data on websites are definitely used by search engines in order to provide more info to users, plus they will continue to achieve this. Using schema markup to supply data about events, payment strategies as well as review ratings to research engines will push local SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION rankings higher in 2018. As considerably as SEO, he offers this particular post from 2017: 18 SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION Tactics that Take Only thirty Minutes Each” Tactics here range between getting set up on Search engines My Business to checking your own site speed (with speed becoming even more important now compared to when Patel first wrote their post), and from enhancing your own site's URL structures to including internal linking to your advertising mix and much more. Our in-depth guide provides the latest SEO most readily useful practices so you can improve how your content appears in search results, and get more traffic, leads, and sales.

In today's rapidly moving world, SEO techniques can alter on the dime—and the most severe part is that you basically might not even know this. Hacks which could have received you a front-page result mainly because recently as 2016 are outdated now, but they may also hurt your website's rankings. It's a really good and knowledgeable blog to enhance your SEO ranking. Take some time plus find out about your Meta titles, description, URL readability plus how to earn featured thoughts and site links SEO's close to the globe are taking click through rate seriously claiming it in order to be one of the best ranking signals. Bing has confirmed that will they track unlinked brand says and use them as the ranking signal — and the patent by Google (along along with observations from many SEO experts) indicates that Google may become doing this as well. I've seen success with producing videos lately and am searching forward to making use of your SEO suggestions to help my videos position on page 1. Plus SEO professionals are absolutely thrilled about this new opportunity mainly because featured snippets provide a opportunity for low-ranking pages to get at the particular top of search results along with almost zero effort. With more than 200 ranking factors in Google's search algorithm, SEO is right now a highly complex process. A SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION process may involve a web site's coding and structure, content plus copywriting, site presentation, as properly as fixing other issues that will will prevent search engines through indexing your company website. Just because Google and other search motors are using personalization more regularly in order to get more accurate search outcomes for their users, user customization has become more prevalent within SEO. The particular need to learn about fresh entrants like Siri, Alexa, Fb, Linkedin, and specialist search motors (like, for example) will maintain SEOs on their toes regarding years to come. It took me plenty associated with time to organize for it, in order to conduct the research and therefore forth. It is very helpful to have the information upon how the very best professionals use SEO at hand. Affected sites along with poor onpage and offpage SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, and has a massive impact on location related search.

These spiders lack ears. But they can hear you, study says

Francesca Giuliani-Hoffman

October 29, 2020

Ogre-faced spiders can hear both low frequency and high frequency sounds, according to new research.

Spooky season is here -- so let's talk about spiders.

Ogre-faced spiders are believed to have the largest eyes of all known spider species, and they are known for their reported ability to see in the dark 2,000 times better than humans. That formidable eyesight, however, is just one of the sensory tools these arachnids can use when they hunt for food, a new study has revealed.These spiders can hear, too. In fact, ogre-faced spiders can hear both low frequency and high frequency sounds, according to the study, which was published Thursday in the journal Current Biology.Using receptors on their legs, these spiders can detect sounds from at least 6.5 feet from the source, and are sensitive to frequencies up to 10 kilohertz, the research team said.Through laboratory tests and observations in the field, the scientists showed that auditory stimuli in the same low frequency range as the wing beats of moths, mosquitoes and flies prompted the spiders to perform a "backward strike," one of their signature hunting moves. This, according to the researchers, showed that the spiders use auditory cues to detect and capture flying prey."These spiders are a gold mine of information that have just gone untapped for a really long time," said study coauthor Jay Stafstrom, a postdoctoral researcher in neurobiology and behavior at Cornell University. "The visual capabilities that they possess are off the map, and now, showing they can hear quite well, I think there's a lot more to understand about them going on in the future."Like 'Jekyll and Hyde'Ogre-faced spiders are tropical critters found all over the world, including in the US, where they are present in Southern states like Florida.You are unlikely to have noticed them in your backyard though, as they spend the day hours camouflaging as plant fronds, and only become active at night. "The metaphor is Jekyll and Hyde," senior study author Ronald Hoy, a professor of neurobiology and behavior at Cornell, told CNN. "By day, this creature acts dead. By night, this creature kills, preys, hunts. Its personality is set by the sun or the moon."Dramatic huntersUnlike other spiders that build a web that captures their food, ogre-faced spiders are net casters and hunt in a more active, rather dramatic fashion. They build an A-shaped frame web from which they dangle upside down at night, and use a net they hold with their legs to trap prey when it's within reach.

The ogre-faced spider uses its developed sense of sight and hearing to actively hunt and capture prey.Ogre-faced spiders strike forward to capture prey below them, and strike backward to capture prey flying above them, Stafstrom said. The two hunting methods rely on different senses, he explained."It seems to be that there's this nice partition of sensory systems where they are depending on vision to catch things off the ground specifically, and their ability to hear allows them to catch things out of the air."Spiders don't have ears, but ogre-faced spiders are able to listen to sounds through receptors on their legs, including leg hairs, according to the researchers. Sounds and threat detectionOgre-faced spiders reacted differently to sounds depending on their frequency, the study showed.They would perform a "backward strike" to hunt for food in response to low frequency sounds in the same range as the wing beats of animals they prey upon. But when they heard high frequency sounds matching the range of bird calls, the spiders didn't move. This doesn't mean the spiders couldn't hear sounds at high frequencies -- lab experiments the scientists conducted to monitor the spiders' brain activity in response to sounds confirmed they could, in fact, hear them.Rather, the scientists suspect the spiders might ignore these sounds in self-defense, something they are looking to investigate further in the future."We know that birds eat a lot of spiders. I've seen a lot of birds in the palms that these spiders are in, and they happen to chirp in these high frequency ranges that these spiders can detect. So it might be an early warning sign that, OK, something might be coming to eat me soon," Stafstrom said.Testing spiders' hearingMonitoring the spiders' response to auditory stimuli through nanotechnology electrodes inserted in their brains and legs, as the researchers did, is no easy feat. The process of inserting electrodes into a spider's brain without killing it requires highly skilled prep work and "a watchmaker's hand," Hoy said. He credited study coauthor Gil Menda, a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell's department of neurobiology and behavior, with this special talent.Developing a method to record brain activity in spiders, Roy explained, allowed the Cornell research team over time to show convincingly that spiders are not just sensitive to vibrations, but also to sound from a distant source.Looking for spiders in their natural habitatThe researchers also conducted observations in the field, studying the spiders' behavior in their natural habitat. Hanging out with nocturnal spiders in their habitat is not the most comfortable experience, but Stafstrom does it with a passion. For this study, he spent a week in the woods in Gainesville, Florida, equipped with a headlight, a Bluetooth speaker to play sounds for the spiders through his smartphone, and a camera to film their reactions.Stafstrom gained experience camping with the spiders throughout his studies. As a doctoral student at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln, "I was down in Florida by myself, in a tent, for two months, in the middle of summer. It was rough, my sleeping schedule was very weird, but it's definitely the best way to study these spiders," he said.During a different field mission in Costa Rica, Stafstrom was actually bitten by an ogre-faced spider. "I might have the world record of the only person to have ever been bitten by these spiders," Stafstrom said.The bite was harmless, he said -- just itchy for some time. Spiders and techThere is still so much we don't know about spiders, and that's a gap we need to fill, according to Hoy and Stafstrom.Studying how spiders and other small animals are able to see and hear can further new discoveries and nanotechnology applications, the researchers argued."If we can figure out the equipment they are using, and how they are processing information, we should be able to translate that through biomimicry into better bio-sensors, better directional microphones, or visual processing algorithms," Stafstrom said."The point is any understudied, underappreciated group has fascinating lives, even a yucky spider, and we can learn something from it," Hoy added.