Blog – Page 75

Catch More Customers with Coupons

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

Coupons Make You Money

It may seem a little backward, but adding a coupon to your website can actually help you make more money. You may be thinking, “Wait. How can I make more money if I’m offering customers a discount?” But the math really does work out. Sure, you will be collecting a little less money per customer, but enough individuals may like the gimmick to dramatically increase your customer base. That means if you’re charging each client a little bit less but you have 5 or 10 percent more customers, you’ll be making a lot more!
Adding a coupon to your microsite is also beneficial for advertising your services. Not only can the Prospect Genius SEO team publicize your coupon—and your company—on a whole new list of websites, we can leverage these sites to increase your microsite traffic. In short, we can maximize the benefit of a coupon to boost the number of calls and e-mails you get.
Here are a few coupon ideas to consider for your company (and why they’re a great option!)

5% Off for Cash Payment: When customers pay in cash, you won’t have to pay the credit card fees you might otherwise have been charged. That means this discount doesn’t really cut into your profits: you’re simply passing the savings along to your customer and generating interest in your business at the same time.
10% Off for Veterans, Active Members of the Armed Services, and/or Senior Citizens: Okay, so this coupon does mean you’ll lose out on 10% of your revenue, but many customers view senior/veteran discounts as a charitable donation for the people who have served our country. This generosity toward these highly esteemed groups can enhance a customer’s perception of your business and go a long way toward encouraging a prospective client to choose you over the competition.
10% Off for Existing Customers: Every business owner knows finding new customers is far more expensive than keeping the customers you already have. This kind of coupon encourages your current customers to keep your number on hand—the more customers you retain, the fewer new customers you have to find, and the savings add up!

And remember, fancy graphics are good and fine, but coupons are more about the message than the picture. All you need to create an effective online coupon is the offer itself. If you want to dress it up, go for it, but the discount is all that really matters.

Great Promotions Are All About the Gimmick

Among the more successful promotions we’ve seen from local businesses was an offer from a bathroom remodeler. He advertised at $5,995 complete bath remodel: using a one-page list of specifications regarding fixtures, counters, and flooring, the customer could select upgrades beyond the $5,995 base price.
Two things made this idea so effective:

It caught the customers’ attention. The advertised price for the bathroom remodel was so low that it jumped out at prospective clients.
All of the options were laid out simply and clearly. Bathroom remodels can be daunting, complex projects, but by reducing it down to four or five packages, the buying process is simple rather than overwhelming. Limiting options also limits both cost and confusion, making it straightforward and hassle-free for the buyer.

We’ve seen tons of coupons and promotional gimmicks over our years in the advertising business, but here are a few of the more popular ones we’ve come across: A free GPS system with the purchase of more than $3,000 in flooring; and $500 off more than 3,000 square feet of flooring. Pairing up a specific dollar amount with a particular service or product can help snag a reader’s attention when we’re promoting your coupon, so be as exact as you can about the details. Generating interest in the coupon—and making your phones ring or e-mail in-box overflow—is what it’s all about.

Getting Started

Have a coupon or special discount you’d like us to promote for you? Just let our SEO pros know. If you’re already signed up with the PG lead generation program, there’s no charge for adding a coupon to your site. We’ll even help you brainstorm if you’re looking for coupon ideas! Take advantage of our experts by making us do more work for you: call (800) 689-1273 or e-mail customer.service@prospectgenius.com to get your coupon up and start reeling in the customers!

SEO Firm Creates Integrity Pledge to Emphasize Commitment to Honesty and Customer Success

Last Updated: January 7, 2011

Prospect Genius, a local online advertising company, is proud to announce their new employee integrity pledge program. This integrity pledge was created to articulate Prospect Genius’s long-standing commitment to supporting the success of local businesses as well as illustrate for their clients what sets PG apart from other, less scrupulous search engine optimization (SEO) marketing companies.
Alex Pelli, Prospect Genius president, states, “We always look out for our customers. Their success is our priority, and we make sure our entire team follows the search engine guidelines so our whole campaign is aboveboard. Our integrity is what sets us apart from black-hat companies that take businesses’ money and then destroy their website’s chances by breaking Google’s rules. Prospect Genius has always been dedicated to our customers, but we’ve recently developed an integrity pledge that communicates these values and commitments clearly for ourselves and for our clients.”
Internet advertising often gets a bad name due to the underhanded tactics of many online marketing companies. Known as “black-hat SEO,” many of these so-called web marketers use strategies that are clearly against the guidelines outlined by the major search engines like Google. These techniques can produce positive results in the short term, but when the search engines discover that these rules have been violated, they dole out hefty penalties. This puts a website at a major disadvantage, and, ultimately, businesses who advertise with companies that use these deceitful tactics are left worse off than when they started working with the black-hat SEO company.
On the other hand, white-hat SEO companies like Prospect Genius work within the strictures put in place by the search engines to provide local businesses with long-term solutions for online advertising and far better value for their marketing dollars. As Pelli comments, “Black hat can get a site to the top fast, but only for a day or a week until the penalties stomp on the site and send it way down the results, sometimes permanently. That’s why we do it right. Following Google’s rules, we take the approach of treating our customers like long-term business partners and make our goal their success both today and tomorrow. We’ll never promise our customers results we can’t produce, and we’ll go about building their SEO campaign in a way that can produce increasingly positive results over time. At Prospect Genius, we hold ourselves to the highest standards of quality and integrity to bring our customers the SEO experience they deserve.”
In recent weeks, all Prospect Genius employees have signed the new integrity pledge, committing themselves as individuals to following the rule of always putting the customer first. The full text of the integrity pledge can be found on their website, here: http://www.prospectgenius.com/integrity-pledge.
Prospect Genius is a local, online advertising company that uses SEO to connect clients with area customers searching for their services on the Internet.

The Mysteries of Online Advertising Explained

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

PPC or SEO: Which Is Best?

When it comes to advertising online, most small businesses realize they need to have a strong Internet presence. But with all of the different options—and acronyms—out there, it can be hard to determine which tactics will work best for your specific needs. Let us help clear up some of that alphabet soup confusion for you…

PPC = Pay Per Click

Unsurprisingly, this type of Internet advertising involves paid ads. These small ads appear on the top and/or side of the search engine results pages and contain a link to your website. That way, people can see the ad and then visit your site simply by clicking on the ad. Although a variety of factors can affect which place (1 through 10) your ad will occupy on the results page, it boils down to two main issues:

How much are you willing to spend on each click? The more you pay per click, the higher your ad can be placed. If one of your competitors wants to pay more, they’re typically going to rank higher than you do.
How closely does the topic of your website match the topic of the search? If, for example, your site is about plumbing services, but the search was for “wedding rings,” your website is not particularly relevant to the search performed. The more relevant your site is to the search, the lower the price per click…That makes relevancy extremely important for PPC campaigns.

SEO = Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization involves maximizing the relevance of your site content to the searches being performed. The good news is that you don’t have to pay for your placement like you do with PPC: That means all the traffic is FREE. But there is a catch. There are practically infinite factors controlling which sites are chosen for positions 1 through 10 in the middle of the search results page, and their order is all based on how much Google believes that your site is what the searcher is looking for. Because of this inherent complexity, most small business owners find the game of SEO to be even more overwhelming than PPC. It also takes considerable time and resources to optimize your site properly. In fact, simply optimizing your site often isn’t enough.

Nerd Alert! Here’s the Scoop…

SEO has two main parts:

On-page optimization: This involves optimizing the content of your own site. Let’s not get into the gory details, but the basics include properly constructing the structure of the site, its navigational links, and its text.
Off-page optimization: This involves maximizing how your site interacts with other websites.

Here’s where the nerdy part comes in: Google regards links to your site like votes. If person A links to person B’s website, person A must think that person B’s site is of some value. Creating that link functions like a vote, and according to Google more votes equal more value.
That’s the basics, but the reality of the situation is somewhat more complicated. Off-page optimization is all about increasing the number of quality links pointing to your site. The tricky part is that not all links count, and not all links are of the same value. Off-page optimization involves figuring out which links will help boost your website’s results ranking in the best way!

That’s Nice, But Which One Do I Pick?

Choosing between PPC and SEO depends a lot on your goals but also on your budget. Let’s look at it like opening a store in the real world: Do you want to quickly set up a kiosk in the mall to capitalize on holiday shoppers, or do you want a storefront that you can build value in over time?
Like the kiosk, PPC is the clear choice if you’re looking for immediate results. You can set it up, turn it on, and get traffic the next day. There are already shoppers in the mall (and on the web), so you just have to rent some space to get to them. The downside is that the kiosks tend to have high rent because they’re prime real estate. The same is true for PPC. The rates are high, and increasing all the time because more and more companies are using PPC and consequently bidding up the prices.
Opting to construct a storefront is more like SEO. You can leverage a storefront for years to come—you have control over your own space and your business will become more recognized and trusted as the years go by, just like with SEO. Although there are costs involved with building a store (or website) and getting people to visit it (online traffic), the long-term cost is far less than with PPC. It also becomes harder and harder to knock you out of your spot the longer you’re in business.

What This Means for Your Business

In an ideal world, you would have an unlimited budget for online advertising—and if you did, we would recommend that you do both SEO and PPC! This would ensure you get the best of both worlds. As the SEO ramps up, you can cut back on the PPC campaign: That way you get immediate results but also long-term stability.
However, most small businesses are operating on a limited Internet marketing budget. If that’s the case, we generally recommend SEO. That’s because SEO can be looked as more of an investment than an expense. The simple truth is that it is a more cost-effective strategy. Of course, it all depends on your goals, but most of our clients find they’re happy they went with our program over a PPC campaign. That’s generally because the cost is lower and the overall value just can’t be beaten by PPC.

Dip Your Toe in the Water

If you’re ready to try out a little of this SEO thing but don’t want to jump all the way in, Prospect Genius has a great way for you to sample it. Our Ad Blast program can promote your website in all sorts of local places online. We use this strategy for our Lead Generation customers, but we now offer it as a stand-alone service. For a low, one-time fee, we’ll generate a whole pile of links pointing back to your site. We leverage directories, newspapers, classified ads, online magazines, and a bunch of other site types to make your business more visible to people the web.
This program is especially effective if you have a seasonal special or sale that you want to advertise online. Give us a call (800-689-1273) if you’d like to learn more about how SEO, our Ad Blast campaign, and the PG team can help your business!
Prospect Genius has other services that can complement the Ad Blast program as well. For details, visit our website.

The Ins and Outs of Googling Yourself

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

Googling Yourself: Too Much of a Good Thing
Are you one of those people that googles themselves every day? Then you might want to reconsider. Of course, googling yourself isn’t going to make you go blind or anything like that, but it can skew the results you see. That’s because Google is designed to provide each person with individual results. Factoring in things like search history, what particular search terms you favor, where you are searching from, and other data, Google search results are tailored specifically for you. So if you search for something, you’ll get different results than your next-door neighbor or even your coworkers.
If you continually search for one term or keyword—say, your name or a service like “Hardwood Flooring in New York City”—and then don’t click on any of the results, Google will assume you did not like the listings it returned. The next time you perform the same search, Google will give you slightly different results. If you don’t click on any of the results again, it will again assume you don’t like the results and try another variation the next time. This cycle will just keep continuing and continuing…
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!
So while there are certainly valid reasons to occasionally search for yourself online, the key is to not get carried away! Constant searching for your name or company will ensure you don’t get a good representation of your actual placement on Google.

Everything in Moderation
So now you know why it’s important to not google yourself all the time, but there are some good reasons to search for yourself every once and a while…
1. Reputation management. For local companies, your reputation is everything. Bad PR can run off potential clients, so you need to know what’s being said about you online. Occasionally googling your company’s name or services can help you see what people are putting on the Internet about your business. At Prospect Genius, our lead generation service encompasses a lot of reputation management elements: by distributing press releases, articles, blog entries, and social networking posts about your local company online, we generate a positive buzz and make sure that prospective customers can see the great things that are being said about you on the web! If you’re interested in finding out more about reputation management online, check out this article about how to be both proactive and reactive.
2. Checking on the competition. Did you know that some unscrupulous companies use their competition’s names in their own advertising? That means that your competitors could be using YOUR company’s name as part of their PPC or AdWords advertising strategy. And according to this article, it doesn’t seem like Google is willing to do much about this nefarious practice! However, searching for your business’s name online every so often can help alert you to when your competition is using this underhanded tactic. If you do see this happening, you may wish to contact both us here at Prospect Genius for online advertising help as well as an attorney for legal assistance.
Just like with so many other things, you’ll need to find the right balance when it comes to searching for your company online: too often can have negative effects, but too little can leave your business vulnerable. Occasional Google searches can help you stay on top of your online reputation and competitors without causing any major setbacks.
For more information on how Prospect Genius can help your company navigate the treacherous waters of online advertising, give us a call at 1-800-689-1273 or visit our website today.

Prospect Genius

SEO Firm Creates Integrity Pledge to Emphasize Commitment to Honesty and Customer Success

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