Tips and Tricks – Page 26

How to Make Google+ Work for You

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

As a business owner in the year 2014, you most likely have a Google+ page. If you’re enrolled in the Prospect Genius Starter or Core program, then you definitely do. But the simple act of having a listing isn’t enough if you want to truly optimize your lead generation.
To get the most out of your Google+ page, you’ll have to become an active participant. In this blog post, we’ll cover two of the easiest ways you can optimize your listing: adding photos and getting reviews.

Add Personality With Photos

Adding photos to your listing will have a number of immediate benefits for your business.
First, any prospective customers who see your listing will instinctively view your business as more legitimate if the page is populated with lots of unique, professional photos. After all, it’s no secret that people respond to images and visual aids more strongly than they do to plain text.
Second, Google values diverse, interactive content over one-dimensional content. If your listing is populated with photos, videos, and links, then your rankings will improve.
Finally, the act of adding photos isn’t something that has to remain exclusive to your Google+ page. You should absolutely add these photos to all of your social media accounts, including Facebook and Twitter. Unique photos will bring more personality to your company’s listings, which would otherwise be virtually indistinguishable from similar companies’ listings.
Whether they feature your team of technicians, your company truck, or your own family, photos add a face to your business’s name.

Get Rewarded for Your Reviews

We’ve written extensively about the benefits of customer reviews from a marketing standpoint. (We have several blog posts about the topic, which you can view here.) The value boils down to how important it is to showcase your previously satisfied customers as a way of convincing prospects that you’re worth their investment.
But did you know that there’s also a technical advantage to having more customer reviews on your listing? Google’s search algorithms highly value Google+ pages that have lots of customer reviews. Therefore, if your page has lots of legitimate, relevant reviews, it will be ranked higher on search results pages.
Keep in mind, Google+ isn’t the only important online platform for customer reviews. Yelp is equally important for Bing users, as Bing pulls up Yelp reviews in its search results for businesses. That’s why smart business owners will try to spread their reviews around to a handful of different outlets instead of putting them all in one place.
Prospect Genius recommends collecting five to ten reviews on Google+, then another five to ten on Yelp, before moving on to other platforms like Facebook and Citysearch.

Add Our Free Review Feature to Your Site

If it sounds like a difficult task to cultivate reviews and spread them to specific websites, don’t worry: Prospect Genius has a solution. We have a free review feature that you can add right to your LeadTrax™ site. We don’t have an algorithm that arbitrarily blocks or filters out reviews, which means all of the reviews that you want to appear on your site will appear (and the ones you don’t want to appear won’t).
How does it work? Customers click on the “Leave Us a Review!” button displayed on your LeadTrax site. If a customer leaves a positive review (a rating of 4 or 5), they will be prompted to spread that review around on social media outlets like Google+, Facebook, and Yelp. If someone gives you a rating of 3 or below, they will be thanked for their review and won’t be prompted to take any further action. That means you get to put your best foot forward on your own website in addition to spreading your positive reviews across various online platforms. Two birds with one stone!

No More Excuses!

You have a camera or smartphone for taking pictures. Now you have a review feature on your LeadTrax site for cultivating and sharing reviews. You officially have no more excuses for keeping a lackluster Google+ page! Get started today.

How Having a Large Number of Customer Reviews Can Save Your Business

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

At Prospect Genius, we’re pushing to improve our own web presence through increased customer reviews and social media activity. As we embark on this long-term project, we thought it would be helpful to illustrate why it’s so important for your company to have a large pool of customer reviews online.
In fact, customer reviews might be what save your business one day. Here’s how.

A Lot of Good Outweighs the Bad

Negative reviews are like vinegar. If a salad dressing or cleaning solution had too much vinegar, what would you do? You would dilute it. Diluting the solution doesn’t change the amount of vinegar, but it does change the solution’s overall composition so that the bite isn’t as strong. The same logic applies to your company’s reviews: While you can’t extract a negative review from your listing, you can flood your listing with so many other customer reviews that a negative one has very little effect.
If you can acquire a large volume of customer reviews before a negative one hits, that’s even better.
Take Conner & Sons Repair, one of our esteemed clients, for example. Serving the Detroit area, Conner & Sons has an impressive Google+ Local listing with a rating of 4.8/5.0 stars from 29 reviews. Given that the overwhelming majority of its reviews are 5 stars, one or two negative reviews read like the flukes that they are. Without 27 or 28 other positive reviews surrounding them, those negative reviews would carry more weight in the eyes of prospective customers.
Note: The owner of Conner & Sons Repair actually responds to one of the negative reviews directly, which highlights the company’s attentiveness and commitment to customer service. Responding to negative reviews is actually a very smart strategy. Read more about it in our previous post, “Keep Calm and Carry On: How to Respond to a Negative Review.”

Boost Search Engine Rankings

Reviews are important as more than just a reputation defense strategy, however. They also pack a super SEO punch.
According to Jayson DeMers, a contributing writer at Forbes, “Regular reviews are important both in terms of your organic search rankings and new customer acquisition. Businesses who have frequent reviews are seen positively by Google and by potential customers. Thus, a herd of raving customers is good for both sales and SEO.”
In the same article, “Your Guide To Customer Reviews For Organic Search Rankings In 2014,” DeMers also adds that Google’s algorithms weigh recent reviews more heavily than older ones. He even suggests that the nature of customer reviews may soon matter, as well: “Google can measure whether a review is positive or negative. While they’re not currently penalizing businesses for poor reviews, they may in future algorithm changes.”
In fact, Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s web spam team, recently hinted at a future algorithm update that might reward merchants with positive reviews and penalize those with negative ones. In Danny Sullivan’s coverage of Cutts’s SXSW conference panel, Sullivan quotes Cutts: “We have a potential launch later this year, maybe a little bit sooner, looking at the quality of merchants and whether we can do a better job on that, because we don’t want low quality experience merchants to be ranking in the search results.”

Increase Your Reviews

We’ve written extensively on this topic before, but here are the basic ideas you’ll want to keep in mind:

Make it as easy as possible for customers to leave reviews.
Ask for reviews directly (particularly from loyal, repeat customers).
Act quickly, preferably as soon as your service is completed.

For more in-depth instructions, read our full post, “Make Your Presence Known: Get More Customer Reviews Online.”

The Takeaway

Having a solid reputation with your customers is great, but it isn’t going to help bring in new business unless prospects can also find you online. Collecting more customer reviews will make your listings more visible to those who are searching for your services. And for your future prosperity, you’ll want to make sure those reviews are as positive as possible. With an update to Google’s algorithms looming in the near future, you’ll want to take action sooner than later.

Have You Checked Out the Client Portal Lately?

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

If you haven’t been utilizing the Prospect Genius Client Portal, now’s a great time to start!
Why? Because we just rolled out a whole new look for the Portal! We gave it a top-to-bottom makeover and couldn’t be more pleased with the final product. Boasting a sleek design, a user-friendly layout, and some brand-new features to boot, the Portal is better than ever!
If you haven’t yet, check it out now at https://portal.prospectgenius.com/portal/.
In honor of our new and improved Portal, let’s review some of its most useful features and how you can utilize them to your advantage.

What’s Always Been There

While the overhaul of the Portal is completely fresh, we retained all of the features you’ve grown to love. If you leverage these DIY, hands-on features as often as possible, you’ll enjoy a much greater ROI.
As always, with the Client Portal, you can:

Check your campaign on the go. Don’t wait until you’re back at home or the office: The mobile version is super easy to use!
Change your call routing to a different number. This only works for basic routing setups. (If you have custom routing, call Customer Service.)
View all of your reports, including call logs, e-mail logs, and traffic summaries. PPC reports are also available here!
Upload photos, which can be added to your photo gallery or submitted with a note stating which page you’d like them to be on.
Add blog posts. This will keep your site content fresh (which is valuable for SEO) and add a personal touch for your customers to enjoy.

These features are the cornerstone of the Portal, and they have the potential to transform the way you actively participate in your campaign. Do yourself and your business a favor by taking advantage of them!

What’s Brand New

With the launch of the new Portal come a few new functions, as well. These were designed to supplement existing features and ultimately help you get even more out of your campaign.
Now, you can:

View PPC calls separately from your organic calls, enabling you to more accurately track the performance of each campaign.
Identify the nature of each call on your call log. This way, you can look back and immediately see which calls came from new customers, which calls led to booked jobs, and which calls were irrelevant or from solicitors. This helps you organize your leads more effectively.
Listen to calls on the go with our new audio player. It still works on desktop computers, but now our audio player offers improved functionality for mobile devices.

We implemented these improvements as part of our commitment to make it easy and convenient to participate in your own campaign as much as possible.

Do Your Part With the Portal

Remember: A successful online advertising campaign requires both of us to do our parts. We’ll take care of promoting your business’s contact information far and wide, but there’s plenty that you can do from the Portal to supplement those efforts. With your help, we’ll take your campaign to the next level.
So visit the Portal today and get started!

When Pay-Per-Click Becomes Pay-Per-Search

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

We have a lot of clients who like to periodically search for their business on Google. Understandably, they’re curious as to how their campaign is performing and, if they’re pay-per-click clients, they want to see how their sponsored ads look on the search results page. But here’s the thing: Frequently googling your company can actually sabotage your campaign.
This is especially true for companies enrolled in any type of pay-per-click advertising, particularly one using Google AdWords. Here’s why.

Impressions, Clicks, and Quality Scores

The performance of your ad largely depends on the ratio of passive views to active clicks. An inflated number of views means an inflated cost per click. But why?
As we’ve discussed previously, AdWords uses a Quality Score system to ultimately determine the cost that a given account will have to pay per click of ads and keywords. Since Google only wants to endorse “quality” content, a low Quality Score means you’ll have to pay a much higher cost per click if you want your ads to be displayed.
An account’s overall Quality Score is highly influenced by click-through rate (CTR) and relevance. A low CTR or lack of relevance will significantly decrease your overall Quality Score. While it’s easy to achieve relevance—simply target ads by keyword and location—it’s a little more challenging to boost an ad’s CTR.
CTR is calculated by comparing the number of “impressions” (how many times the ad appears) versus the number of “clicks” (how many times a viewer actually clicks on the ad). So when you’re continually googling your company’s name and search terms to check out your sponsored advertisement, you’re spiking the number of impressions without adding to the number of clicks. In effect, you’re lowering the CTR of your own ad.
Unfortunately, this effect doesn’t stay exclusive to the particular ad or ad group in question. If you have multiple cases of low CTRs, then your whole AdWords account will ultimately be downgraded. As PPCHero explains, “If you have a lot of low CTR ads in your ad groups, they could be contributing to a low Quality Score since AdWords considers all of your ads when calculating your scores.”
And, as we’ve covered, a low overall Quality Score means higher costs for you. In a nutshell: By frequently googling your company, you’re driving up your own PPC costs.

Don’t Learn the Hard Way

Case in point: We’ve had numerous clients in the past who did serious damage to their PPC campaigns just by searching Google for their company’s ads too frequently. One client in particular actually spiked their cost per click from $22 to $31!
We understand the temptation to see how your campaign is performing, but you’re actively holding it back by constantly turning to Google’s search bar. Don’t make the same mistake that our client made. Don’t be an active participant in the downfall of your own PPC campaign.

Seek an Alternative to Googling

We wouldn’t tell you to stop googling yourself without having a viable solution for you.
If the reason that you’re always typing your name into Google’s search bar is that you want to track your campaign’s performance, the solution is simple: Find an online advertising company that offers tracking features as part of their program. At Prospect Genius, all of our clients have unfettered access to all of their account’s call logs, leads, and other reports so they can view their campaign’s progress right from the Client Portal—without having to resort to Google.
If you already have access to these types of features but can’t seem to kick the habit in moments of weakness, just remind yourself of all the damage you’re doing with every search. It won’t be easy at first, especially when boredom or curiosity takes over, but it will be well worth the sacrifice.
For further guidance, call Prospect Genius today!

Online Advertising Can't Always Save You

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

Time and time again, we see desperate business owners frantically sign up for online advertising services as a last resort to save their companies. Their logic is that a quick advertising push will generate the leads they need to get their business back on track.
Unfortunately, no form of advertising is going to turn your company around in one month. Here’s why.

Online Advertising Is Not a Life Raft

Online advertising can be the vessel that carries you to your destination, but it isn’t going to be what saves you once you’ve capsized.
“If running an SEO or PPC campaign is a do-or-die situation, then there are probably many more pressing business issues that should take precedence over online marketing,” says Nathan Pabich, director of paid search and expert blogger at Digital Third Coast.
We couldn’t agree more. Using online advertising as a last-ditch effort to generate more leads before your business downsizes is, frankly, a poor idea. If the state of your company is that critical, then the last thing you need to do is divert precious resources toward advertising that will take months to produce results.
Instead, SEO and PPC should be viewed from the start as necessary business expenses on the same level as new equipment for your technicians or certification courses to boost your trade skills. You should use online advertising as a way to generate a steady stream of customers on a consistent, long-term basis in order to gradually grow your company and reach your revenue goals. Plus, utilizing an Internet marketer while your business is still strong will put you in a much better position to field the eventual influx of customer calls and handle the increased demand on your staff.

Online Advertising: Slow and Steady

So why, exactly, are SEO and PPC suited for long-term solutions rather than short-term bandages?
As we’ve explained in previous posts, SEO can take up to three months to have a significant impact on your advertising campaign. While signs of progress may arise before those three months are up, those few, early results won’t be significant enough to bring your company back from the brink.
The same goes for PPC. While it may work more quickly than SEO, PPC still demands a great deal of monitoring, experimenting, and analyzing in order to reach its full potential for success. Plus, most Internet marketing professionals agree that PPC is most effective after SEO has already taken effect. (We talk about this extensively in our post, “Optimize Your Site Before You Bid on AdWords.”) That means you can’t go from having zero online presence to being flooded with leads just by using PPC for a couple of weeks.

Climb Aboard While There’s Still Time

Effective advertising takes time, expertise, and money, which are commodities you don’t necessarily have in abundance if your business is floundering. The solution is to sign up for an Internet marketing campaign before your company reaches its low point.
If you can sense that your company isn’t necessarily nose-diving but it is losing a little bit of steam at a time, jump on board with SS Prospect Genius before it’s too late!

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