local online advertising

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:

Why Changing Your Company Name Isn't Easy

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

It’s frustrating to hear that your plans to change your company name aren’t as feasible as you thought. We get it. But online advertisers aren’t just being uncooperative or lazy when they tell you that a company name change isn’t as easy as just switching the header on your website.
“Why,” you ask, “in the age of high-speed everything, does it take so much time and effort to make a simple change? Isn’t the Internet supposed to make life easier?”
The hard truth is that the Internet’s blessing is also its curse. The unlimited spread of data makes it that much harder to revise an established piece of information—in this case, your company name. Essentially, all of the work that your SEO company initially did when they launched your campaign will have to be redone with your new company name. That’s why we usually advise against name changes.

The Name-Change Process Is Neither Simple nor Quick

The name-change process is extensive, complicated, and unpredictable.
Let’s say the owner of Tony’s HVAC wants to change his business name to “Tony’s Heating and Air Conditioning.” The process doesn’t begin and end with editing their website. If Prospect Genius were their online advertiser, we would have to do the following in this exact order (and keep in mind, every Internet marketing team has its own unique way of dealing with a name change):

Revise their website from top to bottom
Edit their listings on all of the major search engines, like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing (which often requires re-verification via postcard or phone)
Log in to client accounts on all of the popular business directories (such as Yelp, Angie’s List, and Citysearch) and update the company’s info
Log on to all of their social media accounts and edit their name
Write and publish a press release announcing their name change
Wait for Google and other search engines to register the changes

Meanwhile, the owner of Tony’s HVAC would still have to update state licenses, signage, flyers, and so on. It’s an arduous process, to say the least.

Machines and Humans Think Differently

Online advertisers do all of that work because machines and humans see things very differently. Twenty years ago, if a new flyer read, “Tony’s Heating and Air Conditioning,” while their old phone book listing still said, “Tony’s HVAC,” locals would assume that these referred to the same company, especially if the same phone number were attached. Sadly, machines aren’t equipped with human intuition. On search engines, the two names would register as two very distinct entities and ruin all of the SEO work completed so far. That’s why all accounts must match and all changes must occur simultaneously.
In fact, Google has strict rules about mismatching information, down to spacing, capitalization, and punctuation, so you’ll need to be sure that your name is identical everywhere it appears. That takes a lot of time and an even greater amount of scrutiny, which is why it’s best left to a savvy expert.
That’s also why you’ll need to disclose whether you’re working with more than one SEO company or online advertiser at the same time. Since every instance of your name must be identical across the board, it’s imperative that all of your advertisers are on the same page.

Talk to Your SEO Company First

As you can see, changing your business name isn’t a decision you should make lightly. If you’re considering it, we advise you to discuss it with your web marketing professional first. They’ll be able to go over your advertising campaign’s performance, why you want to change your name, how extensive their name-change process will be, and how much it will cost. Changing your name may temporarily encumber your site’s performance while Google deciphers the changes, so they’ll generally help you decide whether the potential pros outweigh the cons.

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.

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.

Changes to Google+ Local That YOU Should Know About

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

Surprise, surprise: Google is revising its local search policies again. At Prospect Genius, it’s our responsibility to stay on top of these ever-changing policies and how they could potentially impact you, our valued clients.
As Google adapts their policies, we must adapt ours to ensure the ongoing success of your business’s lead generation program. Fortunately, we haven’t had to make many changes on our end this time, but there are certain things that you and we will have to do a bit differently in order to accommodate Google’s demands.
Below, we’ve outlined the latest policy changes as they stand at the time of this writing. We’ve also included the ways in which they could affect your business and our suggestions for how to deal with them.

New Policy: Google Gives You 30 Days to Submit Your PIN

In an attempt to crack down on fake addresses and businesses, Google+ Local mails a postcard (or, on rare occasions, calls you directly) with a PIN to your physical location as soon as you attempt to create a new listing or claim an existing one. They require you to submit that PIN on Google+ Local as a means of verifying that the address exists and that you live or work there. Your PIN is set to expire in 30 days as a way of preventing spam and fraud.

How Will It Affect You?

Because Prospect Genius is in charge of maintaining your company’s Google+ Local listing, you need to provide us with your PIN as soon as you receive it. The timeframe used to be much more flexible, but now that Google is getting strict, they’ve instituted a concrete limit on how long you can take. Now, you only have 30 days to call Prospect Genius with your PIN so that we can verify your listing. If you don’t get it to us in time, your listing could be suspended indefinitely.
Bottom line: Call Prospect Genius as soon as you receive your Google PIN!

New Policy: Google+ Local Will Call Your Business Directly

This is the most important policy to keep in mind. Google+ Local has begun calling business owners directly in order to confirm whether the business is actually where it’s supposed to be. When Google representatives call businesses, they ask difficult questions about the company location that are meant to trip up the individual who answered the phone. Ultimately, Google’s aim is to catch fraudulent business owners in their lies and take down their listings.

How Will It Affect You?

With this policy, you’ll need to be on your toes. You might think you don’t have anything to worry about, given the fact that you’re being honest about your business, but that’s not necessarily true. The Google representative on the phone will ask you specific questions about your location (e.g. What’s the nearest intersection? Is there a CVS nearby? Are you close to I-95?). Any hesitations or inaccuracies in your answers could lead Google to become suspicious and flag your listing.
When navigating any interaction with Google, it helps to think of them as the judge, jury, and executioner. They have sole discretion when assessing the quality of a website or business listing’s content, and they have the final say in what ultimately makes it (or stays) on their results pages. In this way, Google is very much like the federal government of local search. This means that you don’t have to incriminate yourself—instead, you can “plead the fifth” and remain silent, at least temporarily. Rather than answering their questions right away and inadvertently incriminating yourself, you can postpone talking to them until you’ve sought counsel with Prospect Genius, your “defense lawyer,” if you will. Simply tell the Google representative to call you back in a couple of hours (for any reason you like), and then call your Prospect Genius campaign coordinator right away. We’ll walk you through the questions that they’re most likely to ask you and help you prepare the correct responses. Then, when Google calls you back, you’ll be able to answer their questions with honesty, accuracy, and confidence.
Some of you may have already received a phone call from Google. Hopefully it went well. For the rest of you who have not yet had the pleasure of being grilled by a Google+ Local representative, we’ve included snippets of real phone calls that our clients have received. The below audio clips from real conversations should give you an idea of what to expect.

Click to Listen
This first conversation is relatively straightforward: the Google rep asks for the address of the company’s main office and then for the website. Pay attention around the one-minute mark, when the business owner pauses to take out his Prospect Genius wallet card and read off the URL of his website.

Click to Listen
In the above clip, a business owner is rightfully suspicious of a Google rep who fails to verify his identity. Ultimately, the conversation is anticlimactic: when the business owner refuses to divulge personal information, the call ends. It’s important to remember that you have this option.

Click to Listen
This truncated clip is simply intended to show you that there won’t always be a language barrier between you and the representative. Some calls will go more smoothly than others.
However, Google will sometimes go the extra mile to trick you through flat-out deception. Listen to this clip of a Google+ Local representative posing as a prospective home restoration customer.

Click to Listen

Bottom line: Study your business’s surroundings, call Prospect Genius for assistance, and be prepared to answer any questions about your locale. When you receive a phone call from 650-253-2000 in Mountain View, CA, you’ll know that Google+ Local is on the other end.

New Policy: Changed Addresses Will Get New Listings

Not so long ago, you could change the address on your company’s listing without much of a consequence. This was helpful for businesses that moved locations or wanted to counteract an unfavorable reputation. However, there were also a lot of spammers who took advantage of this and created listings for locations in every nearby city. To crack down on this, Google+ Local has implemented a new policy for changed addresses. Now, instead of simply updating your current listing with the new address, Google will create an entirely new one that will have a note indicating that your company relocated from its previous address. Simultaneously, a note that says your company moved to a different location will be tacked onto your old listing.

How Will It Affect You?

This will only have a major effect on clients who have exhibited spammy behavior (e.g. creating a different listing for each city) in the past, as you will no longer be able to hide the number of times you’ve changed your address. But if you’re a business owner who has never moved or has only changed addresses once or twice in your entire time of operation, then there’s not much to worry about. For now, we’ll just reiterate how important it is for you to make certain that you input the correct information in the first place, since it’s nearly impossible to cover up any mistakes or revisions, as honest as they might be.
Bottom line: Get your address right the first time and don’t commit any factual errors on your Google+ Local listing, or else you’ll have a highly difficult time covering your tracks.

New Policy: Poorly Managed Listings Will Be Suspended

In addition to monitoring your address changes, Google+ Local carefully watches how your listing is being handled in general. If it seems like there is more than one entity in charge of your listing, Google will grow suspicious and most likely yank your listing until it gets sorted out. Most commonly, this happens when more than one person tries to edit a listing or gain access to the account by requesting another PIN.

How Will It Affect You?

When you began your campaign with Prospect Genius, we asked you to tell us about any Google+ Local listings that may exist for your business. That’s because if we try to gain access to your listing without knowing that you or another SEO company is managing it, then the validity of the listing will be called into question. For the same reason, it’s equally important that you don’t attempt to edit the listing yourself while Prospect Genius is managing it. If at any point it appears to Google that multiple parties are vying for control over the same listing, then that listing will be pulled.
Bottom line: Tell your Prospect Genius campaign coordinator about all of your existing listings and don’t attempt to edit listings yourself. Instead, call us and request a revision; one of our content specialists will take care of it.

When in Doubt, Call Prospect Genius!

Our team is here to help. If you ever encounter a situation that you don’t know how to handle or you simply need some clarification on these new policies, don’t hesitate to contact us! Your campaign coordinator, account manager, and content specialists are all standing by to ensure your business’s total success.

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