New Study Proves Why Your Business Needs Local Online Advertising

Last Updated: January 27, 2017

The Pew Research Center recently published the results of a survey conducted in 2016 regarding Internet trends in the U.S. The results aren’t altogether surprising by themselves, but they do make the current state of the Internet undeniably clear: The vast majority of Americans are now interacting with the online world on a regular basis in various forms.
Again, this isn’t exactly news. However, the numbers solidify the fact that the digital world is almost on par with the real world in terms of how people engage with it. Consider this data:

88% of U.S. adults use the Internet. That’s nearly 9 out of 10! It’s unlikely this many people even venture outside every day.
77% of U.S. adults own a smartphone (a huge climb from 35% in 2011).
73% of U.S. adults have broadband (high-speed) Internet access at home.
69% of U.S. adults use social media.
51% of U.S. adults own a tablet (up from a mere 3% in 2010).

Why You Need Local Online Advertising

If you’re a business owner, you can’t ignore the fact that almost every adult in the country uses the Internet. Having a website is the first step, but you can’t stop there. Promoting your business online through local search optimization, PPC, and/or social media advertising is critical if you want customers to discover you. If you’re not controlling your web presence or putting yourself in a position to connect with online users, then you’re missing out on countless new customers.
Unfamiliar with the world of local online advertising? Here are some helpful blog posts to get you started:

3 Ways HomeAdvisor Is Unfair to Small Businesses

Last Updated: January 25, 2017

There’s one complaint about HomeAdvisor that we hear over and over from our clients: It feels like the game is rigged against small appliance repair companies in favor of larger companies with greater resources.
We’re here to tell you you’re right. Here’s why.

1. You Miss Out on Too Many Jobs

We’ll start off with the most obvious pain point: You can’t possibly respond quickly enough to leads.
The only way to be successful on HomeAdvisor is to respond immediately to every single lead that comes your way. This is doable for larger companies that have a receptionist answering the phone and responding to e-mails all day. In fact, they find a lot of success with it. But what about smaller operations like yours?
If you’re only a one- or two-person operation, you don’t have the luxury of a receptionist. Instead, you have to balance your work with answering the phone and tracking down leads yourself. Unfortunately, as you know all too well, it’s virtually impossible to capture a lead while you’re on the job. After all, how are you supposed to pick up the phone with your hands behind a dryer or squeezed underneath a garbage disposal trap?
To put it in more frank terms: A small appliance repair company like yours isn’t going to land a job unless you happen to be free at the exact moment the call comes in. This is just one way big businesses get a huge leg up on you.

2. You Pay Too Much

As if the unrealistic demand on your time wasn’t enough of a hurdle, here’s another one: the cost. Of course, you agreed to pay a certain amount per lead when you started working with HomeAdvisor. However, we’ve heard from many of our clients (who are small business owners like you and former HomeAdvisor customers) that leads are often shared with as many as 5 or 10 other businesses. Think about what that means:

If leads are shared with 5 different businesses, then that means you have a 1-in-5 chance of closing each one. In other words, you’re actually paying 5 times as much for every lead you finally do close.

In addition to that, clients have also told us that HomeAdvisor occasionally charged them more than the agreed-upon price per lead. Has that ever happened to you?
Again, if you’re a big business with a big budget, unpredictable costs may not be an issue. However, smaller companies like yours can really feel the burden.

3. You Get Terrible Leads

The high cost might be an easier pill to swallow if you knew you were getting quality jobs out of it. But you’re not, are you? Even when you’re miraculously able to capture a lead, there’s a good chance the prospect on the other end is looking for a service you don’t even provide!
This is because it’s in HomeAdvisor’s best self-interest to send you as many leads as possible, quality be damned. You’re paying per lead, so the more leads HomeAdvisor sends you, the more money it makes. It doesn’t matter that those leads are barely relevant to your business.
So, just to recap:

You have to take time away from work to track down leads.
Leads are not cost-efficient or reliably priced.
Some of the leads you get return zero income.

Doesn’t that sound like you’re losing money?
It’s easy to see why only larger companies can use HomeAdvisor without worry. You, on the other hand, really feel the costs of HomeAdvisor’s services.
No wonder HomeAdvisor has received more than 1,000 complaints with the BBB in the last three years alone!

You Can Get Online Marketing That Matches Your Needs

Prospect Genius created an online marketing approach that avoids all of the above pain points. We treat your goals as our goals, and your success as our success.
Unlike HomeAdvisor, which just gives you a small listing in their massive directory, we offer flexible options that can provide top-to-bottom online promotion for your business. With a CoreSite, we’ll build you a fully functional website that’s yours to keep. With Directory Dominator, we’ll promote you on countless different online platforms. With SocialStream or SocialBuzz, we’ll post for you on social media. The goal is to help ensure you’re discovered in every corner of the web.
With Prospect Genius:

When someone discovers your website or Google Maps listing and dials your phone number, they’re calling you directly.
The whole transaction is just between you and your customer—we don’t interfere.
You don’t have to race a handful of other businesses for the same job.
You can respond as soon as you’re able to without worrying that you’ve automatically lost a job.
The best part? Our approach doesn’t favor big businesses over small ones. Everyone has an equal shot at success.

An adviser is just someone who tells you what to do. Why not play by your own rules? Prospect Genius offers you all the tools you need and puts you in the driver’s seat. We offer a cross-section of online marketing tools that will match any budget. See what other business owners are saying about us—or better yet, give us a call for a free assessment from one of our representatives! If you’re willing to give us a few minutes of your time, we’ll happily listen to your company’s needs and figure out if we have a solution that fits.
Stop feeling powerless against the big guys, and start taking matters into your own hands!
Call now at (800-689-1273).

Are You Aware of This Threat to Your Google Maps Listing?

Last Updated: January 19, 2017

Do you have a Google Maps listing for your local business? When was the last time you checked it? Google Maps listings are under constant threat of being altered without the manager’s knowledge or consent. In this blog post, we’ll examine what’s behind this chronic problem, how it can impact you, and what you can do to protect yourself.
Let’s jump in, shall we?

Anyone Can Edit Your Google Maps Listing

First things first: How can your listing be changed without your say-so? It’s surprisingly easy these days.
Google essentially allows all of its users to edit other business’s listings with the simple click of a button. When a user clicks “Suggest an Edit,” they submit proposed changes to Google regarding any piece of information, such as phone number, street address, business hours, website URL, and business name. Google then decides whether to accept the changes or not. Typically, Google keeps a suggested edit when multiple people submit the same one, but there doesn’t appear to be a hard-and-fast rule for how it makes its decisions. However, no matter the case, Google does not involve the listing owner whatsoever in its decision. Furthermore, when Google decides to sustain an edit to your listing, it will not notify you.
Making matters worse, these community edits don’t show any information about the user who made the change. In other words, Google offers no accountability for random, unsubstantiated edits from anonymous users. Desperate businesses can easily sabotage their local competitors with zero consequence.

It Can Happen to You

In fact, a nightmare scenario played out back in November when nearly 60 listings for insurance companies all had their phone numbers changed to the same one—which had no connection to any of those companies. Instead, this new phone number directed callers to a lead provider, who would then sell these leads back to the insurance companies who owned the edited listings. Effectively, the victimized companies now had to shell out money for their own leads.
You can read all about this debacle over on Search Engine Land. Hopefully, it proves to be an extreme fluke. However, it’s a cautionary tale of the damage that can happen when you’re not paying attention to the information on your Google Maps listing. Your listing may be displaying the wrong information to your visitors while you’re none the wiser.
When Google shows users the wrong information about your business, they won’t be able to get in touch with you. You’ll lose customers as a result. Plus, since this information will now conflict with the rest of your business information on the web, your rankings could be negatively affected. When your listing is edited by another user without your knowledge, the damage can be far reaching.

Protecting Yourself Is Easy

The above example is exactly why we urge business owners to actively and regularly check on their Google Maps listings. If you check your listing just once a day, you’re likely to catch any incorrect changes, fix them, and minimize damage to your rankings and daily business operations.

1. Don’t Google Yourself

But beware: Do NOT google yourself to check your Maps listing. Few people know this, but regularly googling yourself actually causes significant problems for your search rankings. As we explained in our blog post, “The Ins and Outs of Googling Yourself”:

In your own, individualized Google results, you can drive your placement down in the listings by repeatedly searching for—and not clicking on—yourself. This certainly happens for your own personal search engine results, but if you do it enough, it’s also conceivable that you could impact your rankings when other people search as well!

Googling yourself is equally damaging to any PPC or AdWords campaigns you’re running. When you google yourself without clicking on anything, you spike your number of impressions without adding to the number of clicks. This lowers the click-through rate (CTR) of your ads, which drives down your Quality Score as a result. Read more in our blog post, “When Pay-Per-Click Becomes Pay-Per-Search.”

2. Use Your Google Account

Thankfully, getting around this problem is fairly easy: Just sign in to your Google account and peek at your Maps listing through the dashboard, instead. The whole process only takes a couple of minutes, and it’s well worth the effort when you consider the alternative and its downsides.
In addition, the majority of small business owners rarely ever check on their Google Maps listings. This is what leaves so many of them vulnerable to sabotage. So if you start checking yours on a regular basis, you’ll be way ahead of the competition!

No Excuses

Too busy or can’t remember to check your listing every day? For less than $10 a month, Prospect Genius can do it for you! Check out our MapTrax™ service to learn more.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Now that you’re aware of this problem, which is facing local business owners everywhere, you have what you need to prevent it from hurting your business. Good luck!

Do You Know What Siri and Voice Searches Mean for Your Website?

Last Updated: January 11, 2017

When we shared our online marketing predictions for 2017, we detailed how Google is doubling-down on catering to its users’ expectations and experiences. And as virtual personal assistants like Cortana and Siri become more prominent in users’ lives, Google is seeing a significant increase in voice searches.

What Do Voice Searches Have to Do With You?

You’ve probably seen someone use voice search on their smartphone. Maybe you’ve even used it yourself.
With voice searches, users speak in complete questions. For example, they’ll say out loud, “Hey Siri, what’s the best kind of floss to use?” instead of manually typing “best floss brands” into the search box. The assistant sends these questions to Google. Then, it’s up to Google to process the question and deliver relevant, informative answers at lightning speed. This is why Google continues to hone its algorithm so it can process natural language and find precisely what users are looking for.
To aid in discovering webpages that are relevant to users’ questions, Google has adapted a new system called Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). By using LSI, Google actually analyzes the content of individual webpages, assessing synonyms and context instead of just scanning them for identical keyword matches. This produces search results that satisfy a search query in a more specific, helpful way.
So, now that you have a basic understanding of how voice search has impacted Google’s nuts and bolts, we can get to what you really came here for: How will the voice search trend impact you?

Target Your Content

Because of the dominance of voice searches, your website needs to be chock full of valuable information that pertains to people’s pressing interests. This was always the case to a certain extent, but now it’s even more urgent.
If you want Google’s LSI system to capture your content and present it in the search results, your content needs to demonstrate crystal-clear relevance to the user’s query. A few well placed keywords aren’t enough anymore. This means there’s a strong chance you’ll need to rewrite—or, at the very least, expand—the content on your webpages. There’s really no way around it.
We suggest starting with a free tool like Answerthepublic.com. When you input a keyword relevant to your business, the tool will show you all the questions users are asking about it. For example, some of the popular questions related to the keyword “floss” are:

“How to floss back teeth with braces?”
“When to floss toddler’s teeth?”
“What does floss do?”
“Which is better, floss or mouthwash?”
“Who invented dental floss?”

The tool gives you hundreds of questions to choose from. To keep this example going, if you’re a dentist or orthodontist, you may want to consider writing a blog post about how to floss with braces or why floss is better than mouthwash. Or you may even want to have a whole page dedicated to flossing and answer some of the most popular questions there.
The point is, your efforts in promoting your business will go much further if these types of natural language questions influence the content on your site. This is the kind of content voice searches are targeting.

Use Keywords in Moderation

This is another rule that’s been around for a few years now. However, many business owners and some marketers still haven’t embraced it. Keyword stuffing is out.
A surefire way to make your content look like spam is to jam as many keywords as possible into it. Not only does this read terribly to humans, but it also lowers your Quality Score with Google. Search bots will recognize that your keyword-laden content isn’t bringing any informational value to the table.
Obviously, keywords are still important. However, keep your focus keyword density between 0.5% and 2.5%. Any more than that will read poorly and degrade your content’s value. Additionally, sprinkle in a variety of other relevant keywords, too, because Google’s LSI will now recognize them as synonyms in the context of your page. This means you can write naturally and still score big SEO points.

Above All, Make the Content Good

The goal of your online marketing efforts is to attract new customers. While it’s certainly important to rank well with search engines and their mystical algorithms, you ultimately want to gain the trust and interest of real people. So whatever you do, make sure you write your content in a clear, compelling way.
If you cringe at the idea of writing all your content yourself (What? You’re not a nerd like me?), you do have some loopholes available. Mainly, you can have someone else write your content for you! Many marketers and freelance writers offer ghost writing services.
A large number of business owners find ghost writing worth the small investment because it means:

They get high-quality content that appeals to both search engines and humans.
They save their energy for other projects.
They spend evenings with their families instead of on the computer.
They avoid bone-chilling flashbacks to high school essay assignments.

So whether you choose the DIY route or the ghost writing route, our advice is still the same: Create content your audience wants to read, write it naturally, and don’t overdo it with the keywords.
Good luck!
And just for fun, here’s a quote from Search Engine Land’s report on an April 2016 keynote address by Google’s director of conversational search:

Google’s goal is to emulate the Star Trek computer, which allowed users to have conversations with the computer while accessing all of the world’s information at the same time.

The future is here.

Are You in Good Shape for Online Marketing in 2017?

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

Start 2017 off the right way!
One easy way to set yourself up for a great year of online marketing in 2017 is to make sure all your online info is up to date. We’re talking directory listings, Google Maps, Angie’s List… Basically, wherever your business is listed on the Internet. Having consistent, accurate information about your business across the web is a fundamental component of your overall web presence. Double-checking that all your details are correct is worth the effort if it means you have a solid foundation for the rest of the year. So get to it!
And if you need more convincing, keep reading.

What Happens If Your Info Isn’t Updated?

Keeping outdated information online is terrible for your business on two fronts.

1. Customers Get Confused:

If prospective customers don’t have the right details about your business, they’re likely to get confused and move on to another company for their needs. For example, if you recently changed your phone number and didn’t update it on all of your listings, a prospective customer might come across the wrong one and be unable to contact you. That’s money down the drain.

2. Search Engines Penalize You:

Search engines like Google want to present the most accurate, up-to-date information to their users. That’s how they keep users coming back, after all. To this end, they continuously cross-check information from different sources across the web to verify everything is correct. If they detect a discrepancy in your online data, they’ll flag your listing for potentially incorrect information. And if there are enough discrepancies, your listing may be suspended, which means you won’t appear in search results. If this happens, your business’s web presence will plummet.

As you can see, neglecting to update your information is a surefire way to run your efforts into the ground. If you want to establish a solid foundation for your online marketing in 2017, you need to start with up-to-date information.

How Can You Tell If Your Info Is Up to Date?

If you’ve been good about keeping track of all the places your business is listed, then you may be able to double-check your online information yourself. These are some sites to start with, but this is by no means an exhaustive list:

Google Maps
Bing Local
Yelp
Manta
Better Business Bureau
Angie’s List
Citysearch

You can also do a Google search for your business name and location and dig through the search results. This will help you track down any other listings you might have forgotten or weren’t aware of. The whole process of finding your listings and verifying the information could take less than an hour or up to several hours—it all depends on how quickly you can find your directory listings.
However, there’s another option: Let Prospect Genius run a WebFax® report for you. We’ll conduct a comprehensive audit of all your online listings and find any errors that exist. Then, with our CleanSlate™ program, we can make the necessary corrections so you can spend your time and energy elsewhere.

What Kind of Information Needs to Be Updated?

Customers and search engines alike are looking for generally the same information. If any of these details have changed, update your listings accordingly:

Phone number
Street address
Company name
E-mail address
Website URL
Business category
Service offerings

Alternatively, if you’re a Prospect Genius client, let us know about your real-life changes and we’ll make the corrections online for you. It’s better if all of the updates come from one place. Not only does that ensure consistency, but it also satisfies Google’s preference for listing management to come from a single IP address.
Now that you know what’s at stake and what you need to do, updating your online information should be a no-brainer. So kick off your online marketing in 2017 the right way by making sure your web presence is in good shape for the year to come!

Prospect Genius