Tips and Tricks – Page 28

SEO Is Crucial. Make Sure You Can Afford It.

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

Signing up for an SEO program is a long-term financial investment. Many small business owners mistakenly sign up for SEO services without considering that they’ll need to pay for several months of lead generation before they see a return on their investment. Instead, they rearrange their budget just enough to pay for the initial setup fee and the first month, hoping that will be enough to amplify their web presence. Unfortunately, that’s not the way SEO works.

SEO Is a Slow Build

SEO, especially for lead generation purposes, takes time. Business owners are typically looking at a baseline of three months before they can expect to see results. That’s why most online advertising experts recommend hiring a company that offers services on a monthly retainer, which means a business owner pays a monthly fee to have an SEO company perform regular site maintenance, analytics, call reports, keyword research, link building, and more. (This is the model that Prospect Genius follows.) But if you do opt for a monthly retainer, then you’ll need to plan for at least three months of payment before seeing any tangible improvement in your web presence.
Note: Sometimes, the process can take up to six months, depending on the condition of your web presence before you hire an SEO company. If you have mismatching information on business directories, social media pages, and Google+ listings, or you’ve previously participated in dubious or spam-like behavior, then three months may not be a sufficient timeline for resolving these problems and boosting your rankings.

Why Does SEO Take So Long?

Effective SEO requires repetition. Social media listings must be routinely populated with fresh content, press releases have to be syndicated, and directories must be updated as needed. However, not all of these tasks can be done at once. There’s a strategically tiered system of steps to be completed by your SEO specialist for optimal results, and proper spacing and timing of these tasks is essential. Once this foundation has been completely set, a few months have gone by.

Do Not Leave Your SEO Provider High and Dry

The initial setup period of your SEO campaign takes more than just your time—it also consumes the time and resources of your SEO provider. Signing up for your campaign is a tacit agreement that you’ll be patient for the first three months, and during that time, your SEO company is hard at work promoting your business. Make sure your budget allows for several months of payment. If you’re forced to quit early, all that work, and the money you’ve invested in it, is for naught.

Prospect Genius Has Options

If you have trouble predicting what your budget will look like through the next fiscal year, that doesn’t mean you must abstain from an SEO program entirely. Instead, you could opt for a service that sticks to the bare essentials or one that will give you a temporary push. At Prospect Genius, we’re addressing this need for options by rolling out a new selection of packages. From our lower cost Starter package to the bells and whistles of our Premium package, our offerings provide different types of service and kinds of online advertising at a range of price points.
Here’s a quick overview:

Starter—This basic, cost-effective package builds you a LeadTrax™ site and adds a Google+ Local listing on your behalf. There’s no off-page promotion included; we simply get your web presence up and running. This compares to many of the low-cost “lead generation” programs out there.
Core—This is our bread-and-butter SEO lead generation package. We build you a LeadTrax site and optimize it with plenty of off-page promotion, including social media, directory listings, a Google+ Local listing, and more.
Boost—This package is a targeted, three-month pay-per-click campaign that focuses on one of your major service offerings. It’s used in conjunction with our Core program to give your campaign a temporary boost, just like the name implies.
PPC—With a pay-per-click program, your site is displayed in sponsored ads on Google and other search engines. This can be a stand-alone package or it can be combined with Core in our Premium package.
Premium—This package brings you the best of SEO and the best of PPC, combining Core and PPC to augment your organic rankings with the help of sponsored ads. It’s like a permanent Boost to bring you high value today and in the future.

These packages are designed to provide you with an Internet marketing program that’s tailored to your budgetary needs. If you’re a business owner, you must have an online advertising strategy to succeed in today’s market, so make room for one in your budget, whatever it takes. You can’t afford not to. Just make sure that you’re able to afford the strategy you select—stretching your budget won’t get you very far if you can’t maintain your SEO program long term.

Keep Calm and Carry On: How to Respond to a Negative Review

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

Customer reviews are a blessing and a curse. When you have countless satisfied customers leaving you glowing reviews on directories like Google+ Local, Yelp, Facebook, Angie’s List, CitySearch, and so on, your business gets a huge boost and your self-esteem soars. But as soon as you notice one negative review, a record scratches and the party stops. You can’t believe what you’re reading.
It’s upsetting to read negative things about your company, especially when you try so hard to satisfy every customer. Sometimes, after you’ve given it some thought, a complaint might be justified; other times, it feels like you’re dealing with an irrational individual who can’t be pleased. Whatever the case may be, don’t leave a negative customer review unanswered. Instead, take initiative and respond by following these steps.

1. Keep the Right Audience in Mind

Remember that prospective customers will be reading your response; it isn’t just for the one person who left the review. In fact, the person who left the review will probably never see your response! Prospective customers are doing their research, carefully reading about others’ experiences, and they’ll want to gain insight into how you treat your customers. Bearing that in mind, your response should address the issue at hand by explaining what went wrong and how similar problems will be prevented in the future. Prospects want to be sure that you’re aware of your weaknesses and that you’re actively working to mitigate them. Reading these points in your response will reiterate to them that you’re an honest, hardworking company.

2. Don’t Get Defensive

When dealing with a negative customer review, it’s best not to be reactive. As business owners, it’s easy to get defensive. A bitter response might be the first thing that comes to mind, especially if the reviewer included false information, but that’s not an effective course of action. Just take a few hours, maybe even a whole day, to gain some perspective and to form a rational rebuttal before you post anything online for public viewing.

3. Demonstrate Accountability

In your response, you should try to put your company in the most flattering light while still accepting responsibility for the customer’s unfavorable experience. Instead of merely explaining your side of the story, you should also present an idea for how you might fix the problem and use this as a learning experience. This demonstrates to prospective customers that you’re serious about providing top-quality work and customer satisfaction, and more importantly, that you’re always striving for improvement.

4. Just Respond

Don’t ignore a negative review. Any response is better than no response, with the exception of an aggressive, personal attack written in the heat of the moment. Given the current state of social media and the fact that everyone has a virtual megaphone now, a review that’s left uncontested could quickly spread beyond your Facebook page or Google+ listing. That’s the last thing you need. A quick response to the reviewer, and the wider public audience by extension, could keep a potential mess at bay.
For an entertaining look at some of the biggest social media splashes made by passionate customers, check out this slideshow from DailyFinance: “When Customer Service Goes Viral: The Good and the Bad.” As you can see, all it takes is one instance of poor service to create a public relations nightmare. In fact, public complaints against high-profile brands like United Airlines and FedEx have received hundreds of thousands of hits online! While local service providers like you are operating on a much smaller scale, you see the point: Word of mouth travels at the speed of light these days. Don’t let one rotten review spoil your whole clientele.

5. Counteract With More Positive Reviews

In addition to responding verbally, you can also respond by taking action. If you talk to your satisfied customers, you can collect a handful of more positive reviews that will push the negative one toward the bottom of your listing, thus minimizing any serious impact. In doing so, you’ll also make the negative review seem less glaring and more like a fluke. If prospective customers see just one bad review surrounded by numerous good ones, they’ll do the math.
For ideas on how to harvest those positive reviews from your customers, stay tuned for our next blog post at the beginning of October!

For SEO Companies, Two’s a Crowd

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

At Prospect Genius, we’ve seen countless businesses destroy their Internet presence by working with more than one SEO company at the same time. To hardworking small business owners, doubling their efforts just makes sense, especially with the logical assumption that extra manpower and resources will generate even better results. Unfortunately, online advertising is unlike most other business ventures. With more than one SEO company on the job, you could actually be harming your prospects, not helping. Here’s why.

Two Heads Aren’t Better Than One

Think about it this way: You wouldn’t hire two real estate agents to sell your house. You wouldn’t hire two appliance repairmen to fix your broken refrigerator. You wouldn’t hire two moving companies to move boxes and furniture out of your house. The real estate agents would have different marketing strategies in mind, the repairmen would have two different techniques for performing the same job, and the moving companies would literally get in each other’s way. Plus, in each of these scenarios, you would be paying twice as much for a job that could easily be done by just one company.
The same logic applies to hiring two separate SEO companies to advertise your business.
When you have more than one SEO company working on your online advertising campaign, conflicts are inevitable. Why? Because every company has a unique approach to SEO and a rigidly structured process that must be followed in order to support that approach as effectively as possible. An SEO specialist must have unrestricted access to all of your business listings in local directories, social media sites, and local search engines. Having more than one company editing your accounts could lead to inaccurate information, conflicting messaging, and even duplicate content. This is true even if one company does SEO and the other handles social media because, with Google’s latest algorithms, social content is now merging into SEO territory.

A Lot of Risk for No Reward

Conflicting activity is particularly detrimental for listings on Google+ and Google+ Local. As it attempts to prevent spam, fraud, and other black-hat tactics, Google is very watchful of its users’ activity. If your business listing is being edited from multiple IP addresses and is revised too frequently, it will be flagged or, worse, suspended. A penalized or suspended listing is extremely difficult to recover from, and the recovery process usually takes about six to nine months. During that time, your web presence will be virtually nonexistent, and these days, you simply can’t afford for that to happen.
So don’t take your chances—simply stick with one SEO company at a time.

You Have to Commit

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to settling on just one SEO team is the fact that online advertising is not yet a matured market. There’s no standardized SEO method, which means you can’t be certain that you’re going to get an effective Internet marketing campaign. Compare this to a matured market, like appliances. When you go to the store to buy a vacuum cleaner, for example, you can be reasonably confident that the item you end up purchasing will work on a very basic level. But because the online advertising market is still in its infancy, you can’t assume that you’re going to receive quality SEO services from any given company. Instead, you have to hire a company and wait and see if you eventually get your desired results.
This leads many small business owners to experiment with multiple SEO companies. If the first campaign isn’t working, why not add a second one? The “all hands on deck” approach is certainly understandable for business owners and service providers who are accustomed to completing large-scale jobs on a tight deadline—but in the world of Internet marketing, the fewer hands, the better. You have to decide which marketer will provide you with the best results and stay exclusively with them. However, since it’s not a matured market, you can’t just go with the lowest price and expect sufficient results. You actually have to do your research by talking to multiple companies about their services and seeing which one fits your marketing goals best. Honesty and a proven track record should be at the top of your list of traits to look for.

Honesty Is the Best Policy

While adding a second SEO company is a bad idea, it’s not the worst thing you could do. The worst thing you could do is to add a second company to your campaign without disclosing it to either party. We’ve seen this happen numerous times, and it always ends poorly for everyone involved, particularly the business owner. When SEO companies aren’t aware that another team is on the job, they’ll spend extra time and effort combating each other’s work without even knowing it. As we previously explained, each Internet marketer has their own unique plan, and they won’t be able to execute it if another marketer’s plan is inadvertently sabotaging it. That means your waiting period for leads and rankings will last even longer. Plus, if you hide one company from the other company, then they’ll both make mistakes with Google that could have otherwise been avoided. These missteps on Google’s territory will inevitably lead to serious depreciation of your web presence, which will take the better part of a year for you to restore.
Ultimately, with two SEO companies on your payroll, you’re spending twice as much for a greater headache.
So, if you’ve been working with a different Internet marketer for a while and you’re satisfied with their results, then please—please—don’t hire us, too. At the very least, don’t lie to us. On this point, we speak for all honest SEO teams.

6 Common SEO Practices That Will Get You in Trouble

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

Day in and day out, we encounter small business owners who are completely misinformed about Google’s policies. In particular, there seems to be a lot of false information about the legitimacy (or lack thereof) of certain online advertising practices. We hate to see trusting business owners get in trouble with Google by making honest, albeit misinformed, mistakes. That’s we’re dedicating this post to highlighting popular online advertising behaviors that are sure to provoke Google’s retribution. Below, we’ve compiled a list of the most illegitimate SEO practices that are somehow still being used.

1. Using a fake address.

Google has street-view images of virtually every U.S. address in existence, so they’ll know immediately whether it’s really your business’s location. Moreover, you must be able to receive mail at the address you give, as Google will send you a postcard to verify your location. If there’s any question about your address, Google might even have someone drive by to check it out in person!

2. Creating multiple listings for the same company.

Some business owners try to market their company in every surrounding city to optimize their search traffic. Don’t ever do this. More than likely, Google will quickly recognize what you’re doing as spam, and your listings will be suspended. You may even be slapped with a longer-lasting penalty that will haunt you into the future.

3. Using shady back-links.

Sure, links from elsewhere to your own website are highly valuable as far as search engine optimization goes. But if those links aren’t authentic, or from relevant sites, then they won’t do anything to increase your website’s value. Plus, if Google catches you (which they likely will), your site will be suspended from search results. (J.C. Penney was caught with thousands of shady back-links in 2011. Click here to read the New York Times article with the full scoop.)

4. “Keyword stuffing.”

Have you ever seen a website jam-packed with what seems like every relevant keyword and nearby location imaginable? This is what’s known as keyword stuffing, and Google views it as spam. It’s obvious and easy for Google to spot, so don’t do it.

5. Using the same address for multiple, related companies.

Trying to double your traffic by creating two different company listings, both at the same address, will backfire. If you’re the owner of Bob’s Appliance at 123 Main Street, then you can’t also create a listing for Tom’s Appliance at 123 Main Street. This is grounds for suspension of both listings.

6. Publishing deceptive customer reviews.

That means you should never write reviews of your own company, nor should you pay others to write them. Google tracks the IP addresses of all incoming posts, and they’ll notice if there’s anything unnatural about the “who,” “where,” and “when” of customer reviews. If your reviews are questionable, your listing will probably be suspended.

You Can’t Outsmart Google

Unfortunately, many business owners hear rumors that they can find ways around Google’s guidelines, but the fact remains that Google will always be at least one step ahead. They have superior technology and an incredible amount of manpower, so it’s simply impossible to pull the wool over their eyes—at least, not for long. Your best bet is to study the rules and do your best SEO work without breaking them.
If you need clarification about any of the above points, don’t hesitate to contact a Prospect Genius representative today! We’re here to help.

Leverage Your Customer Feedback

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

Customer Reviews Are Invaluable

When a customer gives you a glowing review of the work and service you provided, you’ll want to spread the word as much as possible. In doing so, you’ll let prospective customers know that one of their peers has already vouched for the quality of your company. This kind of exposure is invaluable to any business.

Reviews Lead to Better Rankings, Too

Now, more than ever, is a good time to start utilizing social media outlets and business directories for customer reviews. Since the major search engines’ algorithms are starting to weigh social content more and more heavily, they’ve actually begun crowd-sourcing data from customer reviews in their regular search results. For instance, if one of the query’s keywords appears in a customer review from a business’s Google+ Local listing, then that listing is likely to rank higher on the results page.

Think Before You DIY

Not surprisingly, there are quite a few online platforms that make it easy to advertise businesses and showcase reviews. Some of them include:

Facebook
Google+ Local
Yahoo! Local
HomeAdvisor (formerly ServiceMagic)
Yelp
Bing Places

At this point, you might be thinking that you could do all of this work yourself. After all, how hard could it be to gather your customer reviews and dump them into an account? Well, it’s a lot more complicated than it looks.

First of all, it’s important to remember that you should never use one of these platforms exclusively. It’s not a good idea to put all of your eggs in one basket, anyway, but it’s also true that these platforms each have their downsides. For example:

Yelp uses very inconsistent review-filtering software to weed out “questionable” customer reviews. This often backfires on businesses with only a handful of reviews.
HomeAdvisor pools customer reviews from every business and highlights them on their site without attribution. This means your review could show up on another business’s listing, which would give all the credit for your stellar services directly to a competitor.
Google+ is notorious for “accidentally” deleting reviews from business accounts, and they frequently flip-flop on their review policies. You could be penalized for actively collecting reviews despite the fact that this practice was actually encouraged by Google+ not long ago.
Facebook often has apps and other features that work one day and malfunction the next. With Facebook, your account and reviews simply aren’t stable.

Plus, if you store all of your reviews on only one directory or social media outlet, then you could lose them for good if something ever goes wrong with your listing. Relying on several platforms instead of just one is an effective way to avoid these pitfalls.

Some ideas:

Store your reviews in a variety of places.
Start off with Facebook, as its partnership with Bing means that customer reviews and “Likes” will push your listing closer to the top of Bing’s results.
For the same reason, encourage customers to “Like” your Facebook page.
Once you have about 10 reviews on Facebook, move on to Google+ Local and store the next 10 there.
Then, use Bing Places, Yelp, Yahoo! Local, and so on.

Add a Feedback Feature Into the Mix

Asking customers to take a chunk out of their day to write a review of your business isn’t easy. They lead busy lives, and any free time is precious. If you’re going to request reviews from satisfied customers, the least you can do is make it as easy as possible for them.
That’s where an on-page feedback feature comes in. Let’s use ours as an example. When a customer goes to one of our clients’ LeadTrax™ sites and leaves a review, they won’t have to create an account or go through any of the rigmarole that usually comes with using an online business directory. They can simply rate their experience with our client, write a brief description of the services provided, and hit “Submit.” Done. And if that customer was so happy with our client’s services that they’d like to spread the word even further, we provide convenient links to our client’s Facebook and Google+ accounts, where their customer can copy and paste their review.
Here’s how our feedback feature looks:

Our favorite part of the feedback feature is that it only prompts customers to share their review on other sites when they give a positive rating:

If they claim a negative experience, they will just see a page that thanks them for their feedback:

Positive reviews will appear automatically on our clients’ sites as soon as they’re submitted, while negative reviews remain hidden. And with only satisfied customers being encouraged to share their reviews on other sites, our clients don’t have to worry quite as much about unhappy customers going to every corner of the Internet and sullying their good name.
If our feedback feature is something you’re interested in learning more about, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

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