Today’s Listen, from Startup Camp, features award-winning wedding photographer, entrepreneur, and college dropout Jasmine Star.

She discusses how having an eye for design made the difference in her businesses. We love the fact that she invested early on in a well-designed website and branding while still renting her camera equipment.

The conversation goes deep into design strategy and how an average person can leverage design to grow their platform. Because let’s face it, we all get pretty judgy when it comes to design.

How many times have you asked a search engine, “What restaurants are near me?”

People are using search engines to find local businesses. If your business only operates in a small area, you need to be doing local SEO. It’s imperative to rank higher than your competitors. The first company that shows up in Google search results is often the one that gets the business. Be first.

Today’s Read outlines the steps and gives real advice on how you can improve your local rankings.

What do you think of pop-ups and slide-boxes on websites? Marketers love them because they’re great at capturing new emails, but website visitors typically don’t like them because they prevent people from accessing the content that they came to the website for.

The reason we’re talking about pop-ups and similar overlays today is that they actually affect SEO. Believe it or not, Google has guidelines on how and when you can use overlays.

Today’s Watch comes to you from Rand Fishkin. In this video, he talks about how all of these elements interact with SEO. By the end of it, you’ll be asking yourself if it’s worth it to use one of these on your website.