How to Slow Down in the Summer Without Losing Fall Business

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

Summer is a time for family vacations, relaxing afternoons at the beach, and fun adventures with the kids. And when you own a business and make your own schedule, it’s easy to take as much time off as you want and enjoy every last ray of sunshine. However, if you plan to slow down during the summer months, you won’t be bringing in much revenue. That means you won’t want to be paying for things you don’t need, including certain online advertising services. At the same time, you don’t want to do anything that will jeopardize your business come fall.
Here are our recommendations for when you want to slow down in the summer and pick right back up once fall rolls around.

Do NOT Stop Your SEO

Even if you’re planning to take an entire month’s vacation, don’t stop your SEO. It’s not something you can just pause and resume. If you stop your SEO, all of your progress will be deconstructed and, when you want to restart your program, you’ll have to rebuild from the ground up. It may seem like you’re saving money by skipping a month’s payment, but you’ll actually cost yourself more money in the long run when your campaign loses momentum and you have to wait for it to ramp up again. If you want your fall season to start strong, you simply cannot afford to stop your campaign.
Look at it this way: If you were to go away for a month, would you sell your house and then re-purchase it when you returned? We’re betting no.

DO Pause Your PPC

While you can’t pause your SEO, you can feel free to have us pause your PPC campaign. Since you’re not going to be taking calls or booking jobs while you’re on vacation, there’s no need to pay for people to click on your ads. Once you’re back in the swing of things and ready to work, you can have our specialists resume your PPC campaign. The leads will start rolling in again in no time.
This doesn’t just apply to when you take an extended vacation, either. You can do this if you’re taking a weekend off or even if you’re just booked up for the next few days. We have a particularly astute client, Marvel Appliances Service in Miami, FL, who has this down to a science. He runs his PPC campaign during the week and then pauses it on the weekends when he’s all booked up and can’t handle any more calls. He saves money without sacrificing leads.
It’s kind of like turning off your air conditioning when you leave for the weekend.

DO Reroute Your Phone Number

Rerouting your phone number is super easy to do right from the Client Portal. If you’re spending quality time with your family at the beach one day, you can quickly set your calls to forward to e-mail or to a different phone number so that your cell phone isn’t ringing off the hook. Once you’re ready to take calls again, you can return to the Client Portal and set your phone number back the way it was. But don’t forget to follow up with all those calls you missed!
If you’ll be unavailable for an extended period of time, you can take this a step further by “renting” out your LeadTrax™ site to a local friend in the same industry as you. You would forward your incoming calls to their phone number, and they would pay you a small fee for those calls. It could be a great way to earn a little money while you’re away and help out a friend at the same time.

DO Change Your Voice Mail Greeting

Before you go on vacation for weeks at a time, be sure to change your voice mail greeting so your customers are aware of your availability. You can simply tell them the range of dates that you’ll be away and the date that you’ll be back in business. Giving them this information will ensure that they don’t feel ignored when their calls aren’t returned right away. If they’re existing, loyal customers, they’ll most likely wait for you to return. Prospects might even be willing to wait if they know you’re a reputable company and that you’re just on vacation for a short time.
This puts you in a great position for the fall because you won’t leave any former customers feeling spurned.

Remember to Follow Up

No matter what you decide to do while you’re away, following up with any missed calls is a must. Don’t make your prospects or current customers feel unimportant. The best way to ensure recurring business in the fall is to remind customers how much you value them. As soon as you get back from vacation, return their calls or reply to their e-mails and do your best to fit them into your schedule as soon as possible. While some of those leads might have moved on this time, they’ll remember your attentiveness and may very well call you again in the future.

READ THIS: "4 Things Most Leaders Don't Know About SEO"

Last Updated: June 11, 2015

By now, you’ve heard of the term “search engine optimization” (SEO for short), and at least recognize that there’s a lot of significance behind it. However, according to a recent article on Search Engine Land, there’s still a lot about SEO that business owners don’t know.

In his article, “4 Things Most Leaders Don’t Understand About SEO,” columnist Trond Lyngbø describes a major problem with business owners and SEO—mainly that they perceive SEO as a quick fix, an add-on, instead of the holistic approach to online marketing that it should be.
Here are the five most significant points from Lyngbø’s article:

SEO should be incorporated into every aspect of your marketing, including PPC.
Before you can begin creating optimized content, you must do your due-diligence and research your audience’s needs and interests. This way, you can attract your ideal prospects. Then, once they’ve visited your website, your content will demonstrate an understanding of why they need your product or service. This is what will grow your conversion rate.
In order to optimize your content and get the highest click-through rate, your company’s branding (i.e. messaging) must connect with what your prospects want to hear. In your advertising, you should be offering answers to their questions and solutions to their problems. Lyngbø writes, “Your story becomes more interesting when you talk about what they are already interested in.”
But SEO means more than just targeting the right keywords and content. It also means structuring your website so that the code is search engine friendly, pages load efficiently, navigation is easy, and internal links are sound.
However, SEO is not a cure-all. You must have a good product at the center of your marketing. That’s not only because you want your customers to spread the good word, but also because customer reviews will soon become a crucial ranking factor: “[Google] wants its users to keep coming back, so it will ultimately strive to suggest only high quality products and services which their users will love.”

Read the full article for further details, and feel free to check out additional columns by Trond Lyngbø on Search Engine Land.

The Four Most Commonly Misunderstood PPC Metrics

Last Updated: April 16, 2015

Confusion
Look. Online advertising isn’t easy. Not only is it time consuming—it’s downright confusing. Why else would there be an entire industry made up of professionals who have devoted their days and years to studying the nuances of online advertising? If it were easy, every business owner would be doing it themselves, and everyone would be successful at it. Unfortunately, that’s just not the reality.
PPC is a prime example of how confusing online advertising can be to the uninitiated. With so many metrics and data points to look at, the majority of DIY users often wind up misunderstanding what they’re looking at, or they put too much emphasis on a single metric.
Here are the four most commonly misunderstood PPC metrics and what you should really know about them.

1. Click-Through Rate (CTR)

Click-through rate (CTR) measures the ratio between people who see your ad and people who actually click on it. If you only focus on CTR, which is presented as a percentage, then you’re not seeing the total number of people who are actually looking at your ad and engaging with it. A percentage is not representative of the big picture. It doesn’t give you actual numbers, and it certainly doesn’t tell you whether or not you’re getting a good return on investment.
For example, let’s say you have a 90% CTR. That sounds incredible on the surface, but what if it turns out that that 90% is really just 9 clicks out of 10 impressions? Already, you realize that those numbers aren’t very good. But it gets worse, especially if your goal is to be closing jobs and generating more revenue than what you’re paying for PPC. In this scenario, if we consider that converting clicks into customers at a rate of 10% is the standard, then you’re probably only gaining one new customer per month at best. As it turns out, that 90% CTR isn’t good at all. But if you hadn’t looked at other data points, then you would’ve had no idea and you would have continued to throw money at a flailing campaign.
Conversely, you could have a 1% CTR, which seems pretty low at first glance. However, it could turn out that you’re actually getting 100 clicks out of 10,000 impressions. And when you apply the 10% rate of converting clicks into jobs, then you should be getting around 10 jobs per month. That 1% CTR isn’t so bad, after all.

2. Cost per Click (CPC)

Cost per click (CPC) is exactly what it sounds like—it’s the amount you pay for each click. You can set your own CPC budget to not go over a certain dollar amount (either per click or as a daily average each month) if you’re concerned about keeping costs low. However, it’s important to note that focusing exclusively on your CPC will lead you to ignore other important factors, like industry standards. If your company is in a high-demand industry, then all of your competitors will be paying a high CPC. You’ll need to adjust your budget accordingly if you want to remain competitive. Saying that you only want to spend $10 per click, no matter what, won’t do you any good.
Focusing solely on CPC might also stop you from thinking outside the box when it comes to ad spending. First, think about why you want to keep costs so low. Is it because of a small budget? There are better ways to handle a small budget than by arbitrarily setting CPC limits. For instance, you could focus your ads on super-specific, targeted keywords that won’t cost too much but will get you better leads. You could also spend a higher amount for a shorter period of time (like $30 per click for the first 9 days of the month) instead of paying for clicks the entire month. If that’s still too pricey, then you might want to opt for the more economical advertising options on Facebook instead of using Google AdWords.

3. Monthly Spend

We have a lot of clients who wish to set a constant number (usually around $300) for AdWords spending each month. For budget-planning purposes, this makes sense to us. But we have a lot of clients who also say that they want their $300 budget to be spent evenly throughout the whole month. This doesn’t make as much sense to us. Frankly, it’s a terrible idea.
To a person who doesn’t deal with AdWords and countless metrics on a daily basis, it probably seems like a reasonable request: You want to make sure your money lasts the whole month. But that’s not really how AdWords works. If your budget runs out by the twentieth day of the month, that means lots and lots of people were clicking on your ads. In other words, your ads were successful.
Plus, with all of the data we collect on a daily basis, we know that there are natural spikes in impressions throughout the day and week. We want to be capturing as many clicks as possible from these spikes—but if you’ve put a cap on the amount we can spend per day, then your ads won’t reach their full potential. It’s important to stick to a monthly spending budget, but you should be flexible when it comes to how those dollars are used.
Moreover, if your budget does run out early, you’ll get the chance to decide whether you want to expand your budget before the end of the month. This would allow you to reach even more people than you anticipated. Remember, the more you spend, the more people you reach. And isn’t that the whole point?

4. Ad Position

It’s a very common myth that having the #1 ad position is the ultimate advertising goal. In truth, you really don’t need to have the #1 position—and you might spend way too much money trying to do so. Being high in the ad rankings is not always best. In fact, there have actually been studies reporting that position #10 gets more clicks than positions #4-8. It’s a surprising finding, but it makes sense when you think about your own browsing habits. Don’t you usually scan right over the middle of a page, focusing mainly on the top and bottom? As it turns out, that’s what most Internet users do, too. In many cases (especially when your monthly budget is the most limiting factor), there’s no sense in draining your budget trying to get your ad in the higher positions.

See the Forest for the Trees

The bottom line is that you have to make sure you’re looking at the full picture in addition to individual PPC metrics. While AdWords metrics are extremely helpful when taken in the right context, remember that there is inherent value in raw data, as well. The more numbers you look at, the more accurate picture you’ll have of your campaign’s performance.

The Do's and Don'ts of Expanding Your Campaign

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

Thinking about expanding your Prospect Genius campaign in 2015? It’s not uncommon for clients to want to take their campaigns to the next level after being with us for a certain amount of time and achieving a certain level of success. You want to see how far you can take your online advertising campaign, and we can’t blame you!
You should feel free to make upgrades and additions to your Prospect Genius campaign, but be careful: more does not always mean better. Here’s what to do and what not to do.

Goal: Expand Service Offerings

If your goal is to expand your service offerings…

DO NOT just add any old service to your site.

It may be tempting to stack up your services as a way of offering the widest selection possible, but that strategy could actually backfire. Google likes specificity. The more laser-targeted your offering is, the more credible you’ll be in Google’s eyes. Love it or hate it, it’s just the reality of dealing with Google and their expectations. Google likes to put things in tidy boxes, so even if you do offer an eclectic range of services, your Internet marketing strategy should focus only on advertising what’s relevant to your main category.

DO add specialized service pages to your LeadTrax™ site.

Instead of just tacking on extra services, a more effective way to generate leads from your service offerings is to offer specialty services. Think depth over breadth. By offering a specialized service like Samsung or LG appliance repair, you’ll be able to capture attention from prospects who have highly specific needs and corner that niche market. Google likes this approach, too, so the hyper-specific search terms targeted by these pages rank really well. We’ve had many clients see fantastic success by adding specific brand pages and specialty pages to their LeadTrax sites.

Goal: Expand Your Market

If your goal is to expand your market or service area…

DO NOT create a fake Google listing.

If you want to reach a different geographic area, do not under any circumstances create a new Google My Places listing with a fake address. It may seem like a shortcut to getting listed in a different area, but this trick would only work if you actually had another physical location at that address. Google uses Google Earth technology, their own cars, and even local volunteers to check out new listings and determine whether they’re valid. If you try to pull the wool over Google’s eyes, you’ll pay the price with a suspended or penalized listing (which can take up to 12 months to rectify). So while faking an address may give you a temporary improvement in rankings, it’s not worth the risk of what could be a year or more of penalties and other problems.

DO use a pay-per-click campaign.

This is the smarter alternative to creating a fake listing. Did you know that pay-per-click (PPC) isn’t as geographically limited as organic SEO is? That means adding our PPC package to the mix will help you to expand your geographic market, regardless of whether you’re already a Prospect Genius Core member or you’re using one of our à-la-carte services. While local search is dictated by the address on your Google listing, PPC is much more flexible. You get to decide on how broad or narrow your targeted geographic area is. For example, you could choose to target ads specifically at Schenectady, NY, or you could choose to widen your ads’ reach to all of Albany County. It’s totally up to you. In other words, PPC will allow you to reach a wider audience without hurting your organic local search rankings.

Goal: Maximize Results From Online Advertising

If your goal is to get even more out of your online advertising efforts…

DO NOT use two SEO companies.

You might think, “My campaign is doing well. I’ll add another one to get even better results!” That couldn’t be farther from the truth when it comes to SEO. While combining organic search optimization and paid search optimization typically generates great success, combining two organic search campaigns from two different providers will do the opposite. Working with two separate SEO companies at the same time will essentially sabotage both your campaigns. Read more about this in our blog post, “For SEO Companies, Two’s a Crowd.”
This principle applies to all forms of online advertising: You don’t want to hire two different companies that provide the exact same services. Whether it’s two SEO providers or two social media specialists, they’ll counteract each other’s work, get in each other’s way, and create a disaster for your web presence.

DO leverage social media.

If you want to get more out of your online advertising without sabotaging your own campaign or paying for PPC, then optimize your social media presence. By leveraging all the social media tools available to you for free, or even taking advantage of our specialists who can do the work for you, you’ll be able to reach customers in a whole new way. Not only will you be able to spread the word about your business more efficiently, but you’ll also create 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. Plus, the more “Likes” you have on Facebook and followers you have on Twitter, the more credible your business will seem to prospective customers.
To that end, consider taking advantage of Prospect Genius’s SocialStart or SocialStream packages. If you’re looking for an even greater push, we also perform Facebook ad campaigns that will boost your posts and get more “Likes” for your page.

Always Ask Questions

If you want to expand your campaign but you’re having trouble setting goals or deciding where to start, give us a call! We’re always happy to discuss your company’s needs and work on a solution that fits perfectly.

Actionable Lessons From 2014 That You Need to Know

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

Did you feel overwhelmed this year by what seemed like a constant barrage of Google updates? You’re not the only one. A series of new guidelines, new dashboards, and new search algorithm updates made it a full-time job to stay on top of Google in 2014. As a business owner with your own hectic schedule, you probably weren’t able to keep up with those changes as much as you would have liked. That’s okay. Prospect Genius is here to highlight the most important points to take away from all of 2014’s changes.

Person jumping over 2015 What’s the underlying lesson? As Google continued to refine its search algorithms, and search engine optimization continued to adapt, we were reminded that it’s just as important for your campaign to have a solid foundation as it is for your campaign to evolve with Google’s changes.

Here, we give you some of the actionable insights we gleaned from 2014 so you can have an even stronger campaign through 2015.

Oldies but Goodies

The more things change, the more they stay the same. This year, we saw firsthand that some of the old, tried-and-true ways for business owners to lay the groundwork for a campaign still work. Here are a couple of classic ways you can take initiative and make sure you’re primed for a strong campaign, no matter what updates Google throws your way.
GET REVIEWS
We’ve said it over and over again on this blog, but we can’t say it enough: Customer reviews are a crucial aspect of your online presence. When prospective customers see a significant number of reviews and a positive consensus about your company’s services, they will be exponentially more likely to hire you for a job.
In 2014, we saw many clients experience great success with their SEO campaigns after fortifying them with strong customer reviews. Take a look at a few for yourself:

Conner & Sons Repair — This Michigan-based appliance repair company has a 4.9 rating (out of 5.0) from 34 reviews on its Google listing. Its first year with PG, this company got approximately 65 calls per month; the second year, it averaged over 100; the third year over 200. In August 2014, it received a whopping 551 calls! That number hasn’t dropped below 300 since.
Ace Appliance Repair, Inc. — Based in New Jersey, Ace Appliance Repair has a stellar 5.0 rating from 23 reviews! Not surprisingly, these appliance repair pros went from around 75 calls per month last year to 120-160 calls per month this year.
Jimmy Gusky Heating & Air LLC — This D.C.-metro outfit boasts a 4.6 rating from 14 reviews. That’s a slightly lower number than the two clients above, but this company is already pulling in around 75 calls per month!

While there’s no way to definitively prove that the high number of reviews in these cases caused the high number of leads, we certainly don’t think it’s a coincidence. The takeaway? You should always be asking customers to leave reviews on your Google listing. Your company’s success may depend on it.
SHARE YOUR LOCAL BUSINESS LISTINGS
This is another topic we’ve written about extensively, and it still holds true: Prospect Genius—or any online advertiser, for that matter—needs access to clients’ Google My Business accounts in order to properly optimize and manage them. We need to keep tabs on your local business listing’s performance and update it whenever necessary to remain in compliance with Google’s ever-changing guidelines.
We understand the hesitancy to share log-in information in this day and age, but that’s why Google instituted the Google My Business platform, which allows you to name a manager of your account without requiring that manager to have your password. But if you don’t name Prospect Genius as the manager of your listing, then we’ll have difficulty tracking your campaign performance and making sure all of your online information matches. This could result in conflicting information (something Google will penalize you for) and poor visibility.
As we said in our April 2014 blog post, “Hand Over Your Google+ Local Listing to a Pro“:

If you’re paying for professional online advertising services, it’s wiser to let your money work for you. You’ve made an investment in an online advertising company, so why not facilitate that company’s job to the best of your abilities? Rather than complicating matters by actively interfering with your own listings, you’re better off relinquishing a little control and letting your hired specialist do the work.

You’ve trusted Prospect Genius to perform your online advertising, so let us do the job right.

Today’s Top Hits

So, you’ve laid a strong foundation. Your content is valuable, your online reviews are glowing, and your advertiser has access to your listings. Now, it’s equally important that you make the necessary upgrades in order to adapt to Internet marketing’s ever-evolving landscape. It’s imperative to keep up with Google’s changes, or you’ll get left behind.
In 2014, we were able to examine the latest algorithm updates and determine some of the most significant actions our clients can take to boost their campaign performance going forward. Here are the highlights.
USE PAID ADVERTISING
Paid advertising became even more prevalent in 2014. Pay-per-click, or PPC, is widely recognized as a valuable investment, and it’s even more effective when combined with SEO. (Read more about that here: “Optimize Your Site Before You Bid on AdWords.”) PPC and SEO complement each other, as a site with optimized content will have a higher “Quality Score” and therefore see greater PPC success. Having an optimized site will also allow you to pay less for bids on AdWords. The best way to integrate PPC with your existing Prospect Genius campaign is to upgrade from Core to the Premium package.
In fact, PPC has grown so much in popularity that Pauline Jakober, a leading paid search strategist, recently published a whole article on Search Engine Land dedicated to extolling its benefits. Titled “5 Incredibly Practical Reasons to Do PPC in 2015,” Jakober’s article cites PPC’s consumer-targeting capability and lightning-fast results as top reasons to start using PPC this year.
Paid advertising can be leveraged outside of search engines, too. Many social media platforms, most notably Facebook, offer some form of paid advertising. In Facebook’s case, a business can create sponsored posts, which are posts you pay Facebook to target at a specified demographic. The sponsored post will then appear in the news feeds of individuals within that targeted group. Ultimately, as your posts reach more and more people, you’ll see an increase in your number of Page “Likes.”
PUBLISH MORE CONTENT
These days, Google’s algorithms favor websites that have a continuous flow of fresh content. The way Google sees it, the more up-to-date content is for its users, the better. This doesn’t mean you have to add a new page to your site every week; it just means you have to make updates every once in a while.
The best and easiest way to do that is to add a few short blog posts every month. (Every Prospect Genius LeadTrax™ site comes equipped with a fully functional blog you can update at will.) Posts don’t have to be lengthy or detailed—they just have to show prospective customers that you care about them and that you’re passionate about your work. You can recount a recent job so prospects can get a glimpse at what your process looks like, or you can give a few handy tips to homeowners. An updated blog will show off your knowledge about your trade, and it will boost your site’s SEO value to boot.
TARGET YOUR CONTENT
Specificity has become hugely important with the latest search algorithm updates. To use this to your advantage, try adding a couple of pages to your LeadTrax site that are specific to one brand or product. This way, you can capture targeted searches for things like Maytag appliance repair, Trane furnace repair, and so on.

Your Participation Is Key

Prioritizing user experience, Google constantly seeks to improve the quality of its search results. That means Prospect Genius has to make a continuous effort to elevate the perceived (and actual) value of our clients’ websites. But while we’re hard at work on your site, it’s just as important for you to do your part. Take initiative.

Make a concerted effort to get more reviews from your customers.
Give us access to your Google (and Facebook) listing.
Let us display your address on Google+ Local.
Write your own blog posts.
Add more specific pages to your LeadTrax site.

No matter how many updates Google makes to its guidelines and search algorithms, there’s one thing we’ve learned that will never change: When you take an active role in your campaign, the results will grow exponentially.
Here’s to a prosperous 2015!

Prospect Genius

READ THIS: "4 Things Most Leaders Don't Know About SEO"

The Four Most Commonly Misunderstood PPC Metrics

1. Click-Through Rate (CTR)

2. Cost per Click (CPC)

3. Monthly Spend

4. Ad Position

See the Forest for the Trees

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