Generally, no. Most of our services are a month to month arrangement so you can quit at any time you like. In the event that you've chosen to finance your upfront fees over time, you're then contracted to pay that amount. You can pay off the installments early and quit at any time, if you so choose.

Yes! Every business that uses our program gets direct calls and/or emails from their prospective customers. No middleman!

NEVER. When a customer finds you online and decides to contact you, they are contacting you directly. They’re not submitting their info to a directory that then shares their lead with five other businesses.

We provide every client with detailed reports and logs each month that shows how much traffic your site is getting and how many incoming calls and emails you’re receiving month over month. You can track your results in real time from the convenience of your smartphone or desktop by logging in to the Client Portal.

• • Our Grow As You Go program has several levels, and we’ll use it to meet you where you’re at. However, it’s most popular with business owners who are just starting out with no web presence and aren’t yet ready for a long-term investment. This is because the first level gets you set up with a foundational landing page that you can use as your business’s virtual storefront. From there, you can keep adding features as you grow and begin to want more out of your web presence.
  • Custom plans, on the other hand, are more suited to businesses that already have some semblance of a web presence and just need to fill in the gaps where their previous advertising attempts have fallen short.

Your CallTrax number is a unique phone number intended to help measure return on investment (ROI). It can be used on your CoreSite and any promotional listings that we create for you. When you log in to the Client Portal, you’ll see exactly how many calls came to you through this number. In other words, it’s a way for you to track how many calls are being generated by your Prospect Genius marketing campaign and determine whether you’re getting a positive ROI from our services.

The most important thing to know about us is that we are not a “set it and forget it” kind of program. Although we do manage your campaign and perform all of the promotional activities for you, we need your participation at different stages. For instance, we need you to give us your Google and Bing PINs, let us access your listings, and answer us in a timely fashion when we have questions about your company. The more you participate, the more successful your campaign will be.

The time it will take for your campaign to perform it's best will vary greatly depending upon which service(s) you've signed up for. In general, those people who sign up for the creation of a website and the recommended off-page services to promote that site, will start to see some results within the first 30-90 days. Typically, peak performance will not occur until some time after that period. These timelines are almost entirely outside of our control because the majority of the delay is due to the need to wait for Google and the other search engines to take action on their end. We unfortunately do not control their operations and cannot expedite their efforts. If you sign up for a PPC campaign, you can expect to see results within the first couple of weeks and to see peak performance within about 90 days.

We do not offer a single, one-size-fits-all solution. Therefore, pricing will depend upon which services are required to fit your particular needs. Please contact us to determine what requirements you have and we'll put a quote together for you to consider.

This is a promise only Google can make because only Google controls where you rank. The vast majority of our clients enjoy very strong rankings for a wide variety of their targeted search terms. If someone is promising you particular ranking positions, you need to ask the following questions because each one is a different type of scam:

1. Are you talking about the map results, organic results, or paid results?
2. For which search term(s)? Something unrealistically long and specific or one that I'm actually targeting? For my unique business name?
3. How can you guarantee what Google will do? Do you control Google?

Having customer reviews on your Google listing and other directory listings is a great way to appeal to prospective customers. It's also a key ranking signal that Google and other search engines use to determine who gets the coveted first page rankings. This makes it essential in improving your SEO. Read more in our blog post, “How to Get More Customer Reviews Just by Asking for Them.”

• Creating an optimized listing on Google is crucial if you want to be as visible as possible to people searching for your services locally. Your listing’s optimization is one of the factors that influences the ranking of your website, while your website’s optimization influences the ranking of your listing. Each informs the other. Therefore, it’s vital that you optimize both.
• Google sends PINs to listing owners as a way of verifying that the listed business address is, in fact, correct. Prospect Genius needs you to give us that PIN so we can verify your listing and continue with the optimization process.

Yes, it matters. A lot. A messy web presence will have lots of conflicting information about your business, like different addresses, phone numbers, and even spellings of your company name. It makes your company’s legitimacy questionable in the eyes of Google, and your local search visibility plummets as a result. Our CleanSlate program will clean up your web presence and make sure all of the information about you across the web matches perfectly, priming you for local search success. Visit Google to learn more about its guidelines for representing your business.

Our Directory Dominator package gets you into 411 directory assistance, GPS navigation units, and hundreds of directories. We do this by putting your business details into the four major listing data aggregators, which intelligently distribute this information where it needs to go. This will also keep your company out of the internet’s “bad neighborhoods”—i.e. sites that directly defy Google’s quality guidelines—so you remain in Google’s high esteem.

You may be surprised to learn that directory listings require continuous maintenance. We regularly check your listings to make sure no information has been altered or removed. This maintenance brings you the consistency that keeps your business in good standing with Google.

NO. We cannot stress this enough. Working with more than one SEO company at the same time will actually hurt your campaign. It’s in your best interest to either stick with your current provider or swap them out for a new one. Whatever you do, it’s critical that you avoid adding another SEO provider into the mix while the original one is still involved.

Filling up your site with informative, well written content that’s optimized for specific keywords is the most effective and affordable way to perform SEO. It may seem like a lot of words, but it’s necessary to appeal to both search engines and human readers alike.

You do! When you purchase a CoreSite, you own the content and the URL. (Clients taking advantage of our financing option secure ownership of the site once the final payment has been made.)

There are several things you can do with paid Facebook and Instagram ads, ranging from promoting an event to spreading the word about a new product to increasing traffic to your website. More and more, people are crowdsourcing information and advice from friends and relatives on social media rather than looking to Google for the answer. This means an increasing number of people will never see your search-specific marketing efforts. Social marketing offers a way to tap into the massive number of people that search engines never see.

Yes, there’s a big difference. They are two separate entities: one for your own personal use, and one for promoting your business. When you sign up with Prospect Genius, we’ll create a Facebook for Business page for your company, which we will also manage. You maintain sole ownership of your personal profile—we don’t touch it. Read more about Facebook for Business here.

We need to be the manager of clients’ Facebook for Business pages because that designation allows us the required access to perform our promotional activities effectively. We share posts on your page to keep your presence consistent. If you’ve hired us for a paid Facebook ad campaign, then we also need to run, test, and rotate ads. Being the manager of your page allows us to perform all of these tasks.

SocialStart is for social media beginners who just want to establish a basic presence on a few social media sites. After creating accounts for you on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, we write a starter post and share it on your accounts. Then, we hand the keys over to you. SocialStream, on the other hand, is a continued service in which we share in-depth posts on a regular schedule. This will keep your company engaged on social media without requiring you to take time to generate or manage content. Like SocialStream, SocialBuzz provides ongoing posts on your social media pages, but rather than providing lengthy business-related posts, SocialBuzz offers short updates focused on building your online personality.

This is totally up to you. If you’re a SocialStart user, we generate one post. If you’re a SocialBuzz client, we generate four posts per month. But if you’re a SocialStream user, then you pay us per post, so that number could be anywhere from one post a month to 20 posts a month—it’s up to you and your budget.

Content for posts can come from anywhere. Our writers might be inspired by something specific about your company and choose to write a short blog post about that. At the same time, you could call us and tell us about an exciting job you recently performed, and that could become the focus of our next post. Ideally, the content of your blog and social media will be a collaborative effort between you and our writers so your unique personality and knowledge are showcased in the best light.

Social media engagement is one of the ways people vet businesses these days. If you don’t have an active social media presence, many people will conclude that you’re non-responsive and out of touch. Not only is social media a way to spread the word about your business in a more efficient way, but it’s also a terrific showcase for your business’s unique personality. When prospects get a glimpse of what your company is about and see that there are real people behind it, they’ll be much more likely to connect with you.

Page “Likes” are becoming more and more important in establishing credibility online. Businesses without a significant number of Likes on their Facebook page are similar to restaurants without patrons. People passing by will not go in because the restaurant is empty, implying that it’s unpopular. We can help you establish the needed level of credibility by increasing the number of Likes on your page.

While we do all of the writing for you, we still need your help in making sure we have all the facts. We need you to give us as much information as possible about your company and your services, and we also need you to respond to our requests for additional information in a timely manner. We can’t do our job unless you give us something to write about!

Although paid search does take effect much more quickly than local search, it still requires a bit of time to generate maximum results. It will start producing right away, but it may take a few weeks until your PPC campaign is performing at its peak.

When you pay for an AdWords (PPC) campaign, your money goes to two separate places: Google and Prospect Genius. You pay Google for clicks each month, and you pay a management fee to us that covers our overhead during your campaign. To make your PPC campaign successful, we have to perform lots of regular tasks, such as A/B ad testing and ad rotation. Since you get two separate bills—one from Google, one from us—our PPC package offers far more transparency than that of other providers.

The simplest way to think of an “ad group” is that it’s a group of ads promoting the same, single service. (Google’s AdWords Help page offers a more technical definition, but it means the same thing: “An ad group contains one or more ads which target a shared set of keywords.”) A collection of ad groups is what forms an AdWords (PPC) campaign. When you sign up with Prospect Genius for PPC, you must designate at least one ad group (service offering) to promote. We’re more than happy to assist you in deciding which ad group(s) to run, based on cost estimates, traffic estimates, and any other insights that we’ve gained from experience.

First, don’t Google yourself to see your own ads! You’ll actually wind up inflating your costs. (Read more about this in our blog post, “When Pay-Per-Click Becomes Pay-Per-Search.”) Instead, you can simply log in to the Client Portal and view all of your ads, including their performance, right in one place.

You have the option to pause your PPC click traffic at any time. When you notify us that you’d like to pause, you no longer pay for clicks but continue to pay our management fee to keep your account active. While click traffic is paused, we’ll monitor the account to make sure it isn’t affected by any bugs, Google updates, hackers, etc. The advantage of pausing over canceling is that you’re able to stop paying for clicks while keeping your existing rates (because you never actually quit). You also don’t have to pay a setup fee to turn the same ad groups back on when you resume. Furthermore, you can retain access to the Client Portal the whole time.

Other paid search options include Facebook ads and remarketing campaigns.

PPC puts you in front of new people while remarketing keeps you in front of the people you’ve already met. While both are powered by Google AdWords, they serve very different purposes. With PPC, your goal is to generate traffic and drive visitors to your site. With remarketing, your goal is to promote awareness of your company so you remain at the top of people’s minds when they’re in need of your services. The results can be quite potent when PPC and remarketing are combined.

You get to dictate where your ads are displayed. If you want your ads to be hyper-focused, then you can select a specific town for them. If you want to reach the whole surrounding county, you can do that, too. You can even have your ads appear in different states if that’s what fits the goal of your campaign. Working with Prospect Genius and telling us what your goals are will help us decide on the best radius for you.