Blog – Page 57

Do You Have a Plan for Handling Missed Calls?

Last Updated: August 19, 2015

As a small business owner, you can’t possibly answer the phone every time it rings, especially if you’re on a much-deserved vacation from work. But that’s no excuse for missing all of those incoming leads. The number of sales you close is directly proportional to the number of calls you answer, but for those times when you just can’t get to your phone, you must at least have a working backup plan. Otherwise, you’ll never even have a chance to get those leads back.
Here are some things you can do to make sure missed leads don’t tank your business.

Have a Professional Voice Mail System

When answering your phone isn’t in the cards, having a proper voice mail system will allow prospects to leave a detailed message and enable you to follow up with those leads as soon as you can.
Set up a professional greeting: The first step is to set up a professional voice mail greeting. Whether you’re frequently out on the job and can’t pick up your phone or you’re going on an extended vacation, you must record a detailed greeting so prospective customers know that they’re calling a legitimate business. Include your company name, an explanation and/or apology for not answering the phone, and assurance that you’ll return their call ASAP.
Keep your inbox empty: If your inbox is full of old voice mail messages, new callers won’t be able to leave a message. If they can’t leave a message, they’ll immediately find another local business to call. To avoid this problem, delete new messages as soon as you’ve returned the call or logged the contact info. If you’re consistent with this, you won’t have to worry about your inbox filling up ever again.

Note: A few business owners who use pay-per-call services might strategically keep their inboxes full as a way to avoid getting charged when they don’t answer the phone. However, doing this prevents all incoming leads from leaving voice mails. The amount of business you lose by doing this outweighs any pay-per-call charges you’re saving. (If you’re dead-set on avoiding pay-per-call charges, you may want to consider adding another phone line dedicated exclusively to this purpose. Ask Prospect Genius about how to do this.)

Leverage the Convenience of Technology

Because it’s 2015, you can always count on technology to pull through. There are several different ways you can use technology to keep track of missed calls without much effort. The most popular options involve receiving text and e-mail notifications on your mobile phone whenever your business misses a call or receives a voice mail. This way, when you’re out on the job and miss a call, you’ll be able to follow up right away instead of waiting until you’re back at the office. Your chances of closing a sale are much greater if you can catch that prospect before they find another business to hire.
While we do not endorse any particular company, we know that RingCentral offers great message alert and notification services tailored to small businesses. You can also ask Prospect Genius to set this up for you.

Use a Professional Answering Service

While falling back on voice mail or text alerts is cheap, it also incurs a significant risk that those prospects will find another business or service provider before you get the chance to call them back. That’s why many business owners hire professional answering services.

Answering services are much less expensive than in-house receptionists.
Operating from a remote office, they can answer the phone and deliver messages to you 24/7.
They’re professionally trained for customer service and interacting on the phone, making them especially useful if that’s not your strong suit.
To make sure they get all the relevant information from your leads, you can even give them a script of which questions to ask.
An answering service is also a useful way to screen out marketing calls so you never even have to deal with them.

Again, we do not endorse any particular company, but we know that some of our clients successfully use AnswerConnect as their answering service, so that might be a good place to start.

But Really: Pick Up Your Phone

One of the things that all successful businesses do is answer their phones when prospects call. As we’ve covered before, missed calls mean missed customers, even if you do have a backup voice mail or answering service. Signing up for a missed call notification service shouldn’t be Plan A. Forward calls to your mobile phone, set up an advanced package with multiple lines, reroute calls to ring multiple phones… Do whatever it takes to connect with a lead. That’s the only truly effective way to create new business.

With PPC Ads, Users Prefer a No-Brainer

Last Updated: August 13, 2015

Are your PPC ads making users think too much?

In a recent article for Search Engine Land titled, “PPC Ads Not Performing? Reduce Cognitive Load,” Andrew Goodman describes what user-experience experts say is an often overlooked performance factor for PPC. In a nutshell, cognitive load refers to the “amount of mental processing power” required to use a website. Applying this principle to PPC ads, Goodman explains that reducing the cognitive load of your ads will make it easier for users to process your ads and, thus, click on them.
What does “reducing cognitive load” mean in practical terms? Basically, you want to make clicking on your ad a no-brainer. Don’t make the user think. Draw a straight line from their search query to your landing page. Use an explicit and specific call to action. Most importantly, make your ad as simple to read as possible. That means minimizing the number of characters and using white space strategically. Overcrowding an ad with too many words and ideas will increase the ad’s cognitive load, which will distract the user and push them away.
For specific examples of effective vs. ineffective ads, read Goodman’s full article.

11 Simple Ways to Customize Your Online Advertising Campaign

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

Our lead generation program allows you to be as involved as you want, an aspect that appeals to many of our clients. If you prefer to be hands off and let us take care of all the details, that’s great. However, there are many clients who like to be more interactive with their campaigns. By making their own contributions and adding touches of their unique personalities to their sites, they feel more invested in their campaigns and forge a stronger connection with their own customers.

Thankfully, it’s not only easy to add custom flourishes to your online advertising campaign—it’s also inexpensive.

DIY Freebies

These do-it-yourself options are free through the Client Portal.

Add a photo gallery. Through the Client Portal, you can manage a photo gallery by uploading your own original photos. All you have to do is ask us to enable the photo gallery tab on your LeadTrax™ site, and then you can go to town! The gallery can focus on anything you want: recently completed work, before-and-after shots, items for sale, or even your team members. People love pictures, and having a photo gallery that showcases your talent or brand is a great way to take advantage of that.
Add a “For Sale” tab. Operating the same way as the photo gallery, this tab allows you to upload your own pictures and captions for items that you’re selling (once we’ve enabled it on your site). This has been very popular with appliance repair companies that sell refurbished appliances. Take a look at the “For Sale” tab at A B Appliance Services, for example.
Keep your own blog. Every new LeadTrax site comes with a fully functional blog just waiting to be filled with content. We write a couple of initial posts for you following your site launch, but after that, you can feel free to update your blog as much as you want. As long as you have a topic that your audience wants to read about, you can write your heart out. An up-to-date, informative blog proves to your prospects that you’re engaged and knowledgeable.

Complimentary Add-Ons

Our professionals will take care of these for you free of charge. Simply call or e-mail us with your specific requests, and we’ll do all the work!

Add unique tabs for extra content. This is a great option for business owners who want to include a separate “About Us” page, but it can work for almost any extra content you wish to include. You can either submit your own, original content for us to add, or our professional writers can do the job for you. Take a look at the “About Us” page for Mary Ellen Flaherty & Brendan Flaherty Realtors as an example. You may also be inspired by Yocum Shutters and Blinds, who used this tab to showcase their “Best of West Chester” award.
Add custom e-mail/service request forms. Many business owners find that their customers like to submit e-mails and service requests right from their websites, which is why we include an “E-mail Us” link as a standard feature on all of our LeadTrax sites. However, some businesses find it handy to have custom content in their e-mail forms so they can ensure they get all of the necessary information from their prospects right up front. Just tell us about the specific fields or questions you’d like to include, and we’ll create a custom form for you. For instance, we created a custom e-mail form for Acello Tax Resolution Group that asks prospective customers to provide details about their tax problems. This gives the tax consultants a baseline understanding of the case, making life easier for both the business owner and the customer.
Add a “Leave Us a Review!” button. As we’ve covered extensively, customer reviews are a crucial part of your online presence. When you have us add this button to your site, it will be more convenient for past customers to click on it and submit a quick review of your business. Then, the feature will automatically upload the positive reviews straight to your Google+ listing.

Low-Cost Additions

These options require the hands of our professionals, but they’re well worth the minor investment.

Upgrade your template. If you’ve been with us for a few years, then you might be sick of looking at the same ol’ layout all the time. Or you might want a more updated look to keep up with the times. Whatever the reason, if you’re interested in upgrading your LeadTrax site template, just let us know! Right now, we have several brand-new templates hot off the presses.
Request brand pages. If you work in an industry like appliance repair, you might find that customers are often seeking a repairman who specializes in specific brands. You can easily address this by having us write a brief, targeted page for any brand you wish to highlight. Morris County Appliance Repair, for example, chose to add pages for quite a few of its most popular appliance brands.
Request a press release. Has something newsworthy recently happened with your company? Why not announce it? We can write a press release on your behalf and distribute it to boost your SEO. At the same time, you’ll have a tangible news item that you can share with all of your friends and fans on social media.
Use MapTrax™. MapTrax is a tool that monitors your Google listing for you. It will alert you if the content or status of your listing changes so you can be aware of any red flags. MapTrax saves you from having to manually check your listing daily, which means you can focus your time and energy elsewhere.
Use AdTrax™. AdTrax allows you to laser-focus the way you track your campaign. Instead of giving you a broad picture of how many leads your campaign is generating per month, AdTrax lets you see how your site is ranking on Google for specific keywords of your choosing. This way, you can make sure you’re attracting your ideal audience and make adjustments as you see fit.

Take the First Step

Your online advertising campaign won’t customize itself! Why not browse the Client Portal and try out some of those free tools yourself? If you’re having trouble with the technology or you need some guidance, don’t hesitate to call your campaign coordinator for help. That’s what we’re here for! Similarly, if a few of the paid options appeal to you but you can’t decide which one is best, feel free to discuss them with us. We’ll help you figure out how to get the best value for your campaign.
The bottom line is, we’re here as a resource for you. However you decide to proceed, let us in on the conversation so we can help you make the wisest decision possible. Good luck!

Is Your Google My Business Listing Being Sabotaged by… Google?

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

If you have a Google My Business account, the greatest force working against you may be Google itself. Here’s what you need to watch out for.

Google Makes Updates Without Your Knowledge

Many local business owners and advertising providers alike have noticed that, every so often, little details on their Google listings are suddenly changed without their consent. For users who have been affected, it’s incredibly frustrating. You spent a lot of time and energy setting up your listing and making sure all the information was filled out accurately, but now it looks like someone else updated your account with a totally different street address or phone number. As it turns out, that “someone else” was probably Google.
Around 10 years ago, your local competitors were your biggest threat online. It didn’t require much technical savvy to sabotage each other’s listings. They could go into Google, claim your listing as their own, and alter all of the information in it without much difficulty. As Google’s interface and security features became more sophisticated, the frequency of these sabotage incidents dropped significantly. Now, however, Google is the one you have to watch out for.
While Google’s intentions aren’t bad, the outcome is the same: your listings are being altered without your consent. Why is this happening? Ironically, as Google pushes for accuracy above all else, it’s chasing its own tail. It automatically scans the web for citations of your company—i.e. mentions of your company name, address, phone number, or URL—to make sure everything matches. If there’s a citation out there that doesn’t match what’s on your listing, Google might decide to update your listing for you so it does match. Unfortunately, this conflicting information is usually from an outdated listing on an old directory site, so the update is incorrect.
Google might also update your listing in response to a user who reported that the information in your listing was incorrect. Little does Google know, its effort to maintain accuracy on all of its listings often backfires.

Google Un-Verifies Listings at Will

While the automatic updating is certainly frustrating, it’s nothing compared to Google’s automatic un-verifying of your listing. It may do this for multiple reasons, but it most often happens when Google deems an account “inactive.” In the Google and Your Business Help Forum, Google’s Jade Wang explains:

In some cases, we may contact Google My Business users via email to confirm that they are still actively managing a business page. If a user is unresponsive to our attempts to contact him or her and has not logged into Google My Business for a significant length of time, then we may unverify pages in the account. We’re doing this in order to continue to provide users with the best experience when they’re looking for local businesses like yours.

Matt McGee of Search Engine Land confirms that this “significant length of time” of inactivity is at least six months. Although Wang claims that Google will notify a business owner before un-verifying, this doesn’t always happen, as we’ve seen firsthand with many of our own clients.
While inactivity is the most prominent reason for Google to un-verify a listing, other reasons include multiple listings and multiple advertisers. Sometimes, if a business has a listing for each of its multiple locations, Google sees the various addresses and phone numbers as “conflicting” with one another and randomly chooses one listing to un-verify.
Other times, Google will un-verify a business’s listing if it is being accessed and updated by more than one advertiser. That’s because it thinks something fishy is going on if account managers are logging in from disparate locations. (This is just one of the many reasons we advise against working with more than one advertiser at a time.)

Constant Vigilance Is Crucial

To avoid trouble, Jade Wang advises, “It’s a good idea to keep an eye on the inbox associated with your Google My Business (Locations) account. It’s also a good idea to regularly log into Google My Business (Locations) to confirm that your business information is current and accurate.”
We’ve always said that business owners have to be more proactive about their advertising, and this is just another reason why. You must track your listing(s) frequently to make sure it’s always accurate and in good standing.
However, we also understand that most business owners don’t have the resources to constantly track their listings. Frankly, after you been out on the job all day, it’s hard to find the time or energy to scan your Google My Business account for any red flags—and that’s if you can even remember to do it at all.

MapTrax™ to the Rescue

Thankfully, there are services out there like MapTrax that will do all the tracking for you. MapTrax monitors your listing daily and automatically alerts you of any changes to your company’s address, phone number, or URL, and if the listing has been suspended or un-verified. This way, you can immediately address any problems that may arise.
For only a few dollars per month, MapTrax provides insurance and peace of mind without requiring you to lift a finger. Our system does all the work for you! It will protect you from spammers and other wild cards, as well as Google itself, that could do harm to your company’s listing.
If you sign up in July, you can get MapTrax for just $5/mo. That’s 50% off! It’s very reasonably priced insurance that will save you time, money, and future business.

READ: Why a Team of SEO Specialists Is Superior

Last Updated: July 9, 2015

When searching for an online advertising provider, business owners must decide between hiring a single SEO professional or hiring a team of SEO professionals. As with any scenario, there are pros and cons for each side. However, according to Jayson DeMers’s latest column on Search Engine Land, “The Case for Niche SEO Specialists,” a team of SEO specialists is the best choice.

Essentially for DeMers, it boils down to whether you want a jack-of-all-trades operating on his own or a group of masters working together. DeMers calls solo professionals “generalists” because they have a well-rounded, generalized set of SEO skills. However, generalists don’t have the in-depth knowledge or precision that experienced specialists have. According to DeMers, since they haven’t spent a great deal of time perfecting any specific skill, it takes them longer to perform tasks and keep up with the field’s latest advancements. Due to their lack of experience, they’re also not as quick to diagnose problems or create solutions.
On the other hand, a team of specialists will typically have a designated specialist for each task. Content writing, site designing, link building, social media maintenance, and local reputation management are each delegated to their respective specialists. This ensures that each task is executed efficiently and accurately.
DeMers concludes:

When you start using niche experts to execute your business’s SEO strategy, you should notice an almost immediate difference. You’ll worry less about your performance on individual tasks, and you’ll see a bigger picture perspective on how everything else ties together.

Prospect Genius is proud to be such a team. We have separate writing and development teams driven by talented specialists who know the ins and outs of their niches and can perform their jobs with total precision.
Read the full article for more details.

Prospect Genius

Do You Have a Plan for Handling Missed Calls?

Have a Professional Voice Mail System

Leverage the Convenience of Technology

Use a Professional Answering Service

But Really: Pick Up Your Phone

With PPC Ads, Users Prefer a No-Brainer

READ: Why a Team of SEO Specialists Is Superior

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