(800) 689-1273
Facebook Twitter Youtube Linkedin
Prospect Genius logo

Prospect Genius

Menu
Log In
You are here: Home / Archives for seo

How to Keep the Holidays From Ruining Your Online Marketing

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

It’s no secret that most of us stretch our budgets a little thin over the holiday season. With parties to host and gifts to buy, money disappears quickly. And for many small business owners, the slightly blurred line between personal and business finances means the holidays can impact some of your company’s operations—like online marketing.
If you’re feeling the squeeze of the holidays on your small business’s budget, it’s fine to tighten your belt—but don’t let it affect your online marketing. Canceling your marketing campaign temporarily or skipping a payment may reduce your expenses in the short term, but did you know there can be seriously negative consequences? The fallout will outlast the holiday season and your savings may turn into losses.
How can that be? Keep reading to find out.

Canceling Your Campaign Sets You Back for Months

Canceling an SEO-based campaign, even just for a month, can jeopardize your future profits. To explain how, we’ll use the way Prospect Genius works as an example.
When a client cancels their campaign with us, it’s our policy to immediately take down their website, pull down their listings, and halt all lead generation services. (Most advertisers have a similar cancellation policy.) Your business will stop receiving traffic and leads right away. So canceling your campaign for the holidays will likely cause you to stop getting new customers for at least a month, or however long it takes for you to restart your campaign.
There’s more. Now, whenever you decide to restart your online marketing, you’ll have to wait another few months for your web presence to ramp up again. Why? Because SEO is not something you can drop and pick up where you left off. As soon as you stop SEO, everything goes back to zero.
As Prospect Genius clients may recall, there’s typically a 90-day buildup period after you start a new campaign. This ramp-up window is unavoidable, regardless of how many times you’ve started and stopped your online marketing. So after all is said and done, you lose several months of business even though you only canceled for one month.

Skipping a Payment Is Hard to Bounce Back From

Another thing that some business owners do is let their marketing payments slide for a month. They think it’s the harmless alternative to canceling entirely. While it’s true that making a late payment is better than canceling, it’s far from harmless. For example, when you miss a payment with Prospect Genius, your account is partially disabled until payment is received, causing a dramatic decrease in leads received.
But the real kicker comes later: After delaying one payment, most business owners find it difficult to get back on track with their monthly billing cycle. This is because they now only have a couple of weeks, instead of a full month, to save up for the next payment. Often, this begins an unfortunate pattern of falling behind that’s difficult to stop.

What Can You Do?

We aren’t trying to scare you. We understand there are peaks and valleys in every fiscal year and that the holidays can be especially trying. If money is tight, here are some things you can do that won’t hurt you in the long run:

  • If you’re doing AdWords or any other PPC campaign, pause it. While you can’t turn SEO off and on again easily, PPC can be started and stopped with ease.
  • Budget wisely. Plan out all of your income and expenses for the month to see how much money you’ll realistically have for gifts, decorations, food, and, yes, marketing costs.
  • Pay in advance. If you think there’s a chance you’ll overspend on holiday goods and not have enough money at the end of the month to pay your bill, be safe and pay your bill ahead of time—before your money runs out.

Remember: You’ve invested a lot in your online marketing. Don’t let your web presence come crashing down by canceling your campaign or not paying your bills. You might save a monthly payment, but it will cost you much more down the road.
Questions or concerns? Please don’t hesitate to reach out for help.

5 Quick and Easy Tips to Improve Your Site's Ranking

Last Updated: September 7, 2016

Your site’s ranking is important. That goes without saying. It’s not the be-all and end-all, but it’s definitely a top concern for businesses that want customers to find them.
So, let’s say you’ve already worked hard to fill your site with informative, relevant content and captivating images. It’s frustrating to discover that this isn’t quite enough to get your site ranking. Are there any other simple tweaks or adjustments you can make to improve your site’s ranking?
Absolutely!
In this post, we’ll take a look at five quick and easy ways you can improve your site’s ranking today.

1. Make sure your site loads quickly.

It might surprise you to learn that load speed has a significant influence on ranking.
Indeed: Google and other search engines actually factor your webpage’s load speed into your overall ranking.
Why? Because when a page loads quickly, the user experience is more pleasant. Therefore, the user is more likely to stay on your page, which increases dwell time and potentially the number of pages they visit on your site. This signals to Google that your site is worthwhile.
On the other hand, if your page is loading too slowly, the user is far more likely to get frustrated and move on to another site. This increases bounce rate, decreases dwell time, and stops the user from browsing other pages on your site. All of these are bad news for your ranking.

Slow load speeds will drive users crazy

Easy fix:

Use Google’s own PageSpeed Insights to see how efficiently your webpage loads. If your pages aren’t loading quickly enough, reduce the size of your images. This makes a huge difference. The best part? It’s super simple to do.

2. Don’t overwhelm users with big chunks of text.

If you have a lot of written content on your page, break it up into smaller paragraphs with subheadings.
When users see a giant wall of text, they get overwhelmed. In turn, they often scan the page quickly before they move on to another page or a different site altogether.

Too much to read is overwhelming

But with catchy subheadings that break up your text, you can draw the user in and capture their attention more immediately. At the very least, the user will read over your subheadings and skim the content under each one. Even if they don’t read your content word for word (and very few will), they’ll at least stay on your page for substantially more time. And, as we explained above, a higher dwell time will improve your site’s ranking.

Easy fix:

Create appropriate subheadings by using Heading 1 (H1) and Heading 2 (H2) tags. This helps your page appeal to search engines, as well. For SEO best practice, add at least one target keyword to each subheading.

3. Feel free to link to other pages on your site.

Do you have multiple pages of useful content on your site? Use them to your advantage! Internal links are a great way to boost your SEO value and improve your site’s ranking.
If there’s a logical way to link one page to another—i.e., the content is related with similar keywords or they offer supplemental information—then you should absolutely do so. Not only does this provide information to the user and keep them on your site, but it signals to search engines that your site contains valuable content. That’s a surefire way to ramp up your ranking!

Easy fix:

Give your site content a quick read and determine if you can make any connections between pages. Once you’ve decided which pages to link to each other, the rest of the work is a breeze.

4. Keep your outbound links in good shape.

When you want to improve your site’s ranking, outbound links are just as valuable as internal ones. But you need to make sure you’re following best practices if you want them to give you that extra SEO oomph.
One common mistake is leaving broken or dead links up on your site. Most websites are constantly updating, so it’s not unusual for a specific webpage to be taken down or for its URL to change entirely. However, it’s your job to make sure your site doesn’t link to nonexistent pages. Otherwise, users will get frustrated when they’re led to 404 pages, while search engines won’t trust you as a reliable site.

broken link

Easy fix:

If your site doesn’t contain all that many links, you can check them manually by sitting down and clicking on each individual one. However, if your site has lots of outbound links, it’s much more efficient to use one of the countless, free link-checker tools online.

5. Add a “Contact Us” page.

You already know search engines want to see that your site is trustworthy. That’s why you went through all the trouble of writing informative, relevant content in the first place. But did you know there’s a super-quick way to add legitimacy and trustworthiness to your site?
With a “Contact Us” page or something similar (like an “About Us” page), you’ll prove your authenticity by including verifiable NAP (name/address/phone number) information. NAP data is specifically for the search engines. But this page will also make users feel more comfortable with you, knowing you exist in the real world.
Bonus points if you add a contact form so users can e-mail you directly!

Let users e-mail you directly. Everyone's doing it.

Easy fix:

Hopefully, you already know your own contact information. That should make this a very quick project.

Consider user experience along with search engine preferences.

You might have noticed that all of our tips to improve your site’s ranking combine two things: users and search engines. Your ranking depends heavily on appealing to both.
This is because Google and other search engines are generally aiming to make user experience a ranking factor. That’s why Google favors mobile-friendly sites and will soon start docking sites that have pop-ups, for example. Simply put, Google’s long-term mission is to improve user experience, so they penalize sites that don’t cater to it.
So if you want to improve your site’s ranking, you must start by improving your site’s user experience.
Good luck!
Note: This is not a comprehensive guide to SEO or site rankings. These are just a few easy and quick things you can do to improve your site’s ranking.

Local SEO: To DIY or Not to DIY?

Last Updated: May 12, 2016

After reading up on Google’s countless webmaster resources, you’ve managed to put together a pretty decent-looking Maps listing for your local business. Feeling confident, you wonder, “How hard could the rest of my online advertising really be?”
This is usually the gateway that leads small business owners into handling their own local SEO and online advertising. Some business owners who take the DIY route wind up realizing they bit off more than they could chew. Yet, others discover a hidden talent for online advertising and learn that they’re more tech savvy than they thought. It can go either way.
If you can’t figure out whether you should try your hand at DIY online marketing or bite the bullet and hire an outside company to do it for you, this post is for you. We’ll highlight the major pros and cons of each avenue to give you a better idea of what you might be getting into.
Let’s jump in.

DIY: Pros and Cons

Pros

Performing all of your own local SEO and online advertising can be a big money-saving measure for small business owners, helping you avoid monthly payments to an outside company.
Other benefits of DIY SEO include:

  • Having intimate knowledge of your business’s online advertising strategies, since you’re the only one working on them.
  • Having immediacy when it comes to online advertising work. You can make any desired changes without having to wait for someone else to do it.
  • Having complete oversight (read: control) of your company’s online strategies. You can easily keep track of all of your logins, directories, and other pertinent info because you’re the only one who has access to them.

Cons

However, many small business owners decide the above perks aren’t worth dealing with the numerous obstacles that come with performing your own SEO. Some of these obstacles are:

  • Only working with one data point: yours. For SEO, where you need as much data as possible to monitor trends and conduct A/B testing, this can put you at a disadvantage.
  • Not devoting enough time or attention to SEO. Since you’re balancing this work with running a business full time, you may not notice any issues or strange hiccups in your campaign right away.
  • Diverting time away from your job. You essentially lose revenue every time you work on your online advertising instead of providing service for a customer.

Internet Marketing Company: Pros and Cons

When a small business owner decides the obstacles facing them in DIY online advertising are too much, they usually opt to hire an Internet marketing company instead (or they forego online advertising altogether).

Pros

So, what are the benefits of hiring an outside company that appeal to small business owners?

  • More data. The Internet marketing company probably has hundreds of other clients, which means hundreds of data points to pull from and sharpen their expertise. They can tell if something is an isolated case or a broader trend.
  • Optimal strategies. A professional company will have developed multiple approaches to maximize efficiency for various online advertising needs.
  • Combined experience. Because it’s a team made up of multiple individuals, the online marketing company has lots of combined experience and various fields of expertise to draw from.
  • Constant monitoring. It’s their full-time job to monitor online advertising campaigns, so they notice right away when a new issue crops up. They also know as soon as Google updates its algorithm and can determine how wide-reaching the update is.

Cons

Hiring an outside company may sound like an ideal scenario, but, as with anything, it does come with certain drawbacks. For example:

  • Waiting period. Depending on the size of the company you’ve hired, it’s unlikely you can get immediate results for whatever work you need done. You’ll almost definitely get someone on the phone, but you won’t necessarily be able to see the work instantly completed. (Note: A smaller company can probably provide you with a faster turnaround time.)
  • Less control. When you hire an outside company, you don’t have much control over your online advertising strategies. Plus, you won’t be able to replicate their system on your own because each marketing company uses its own “secret sauce” when performing local SEO.
  • Monthly payment. If your budget is super tight, then it might be difficult to afford a premium SEO service. Luckily, some of the smaller online advertising companies offer packages that tend to be more budget friendly.

Do a Gut Check

Ultimately, the decision between doing your own web marketing or hiring a professional comes down to your gut. Ask yourself questions like:

  • How comfortable do you feel learning the numerous webmaster tools involved?
  • How willing are you to devote your leisure time to online advertising tasks?
  • How much wiggle room is in your monthly budget?

If the mere thought of spending hours on Internet directories, social media, and Google Maps makes you cringe, then maybe the DIY route isn’t for you. But if you enjoy learning and challenging yourself and you’ve got plenty of spare time, then it just might be worth a try.
 

Why Do Rewarding SEO Campaigns Demand Your Patience?

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

Wouldn’t SEO campaigns be so much easier if you could just flip a switch and watch them go? Alas, the Internet simply doesn’t work that way.
Launching an online marketing campaign takes a lot of time. To ensure extended success, Prospect Genius—and many standup companies like us—must run through an exhaustive, time-consuming process when setting up any new campaign.
If you’ve been asking yourself why your Core campaign took so long to get off the ground, then this blog post is for you. Here, you’ll get a thorough explanation of all the work Prospect Genius typically does when launching a Core campaign. You’ll also find out why this process is worth the wait.
Let’s jump in!

How We Create a Campaign

As soon as a new client accepts our terms of service, we pull the lever and get the ball rolling on your campaign. Each step leads to another, and they must be completed in the right order. We cannot skip ahead. Remember the game Mouse Trap? It’s kind of like that.
Here’s what the process looks like from beginning to end. By the time you get to the bottom of this list, you’ll understand how much work goes into getting a campaign off the ground:

  1. Basic background check. Before beginning any work, we investigate what kind of information and listings are already out there for your company. This will inform us on how to proceed.
  2. Address check. We need to ensure you can receive mail at the address you gave us. This is how Google verifies your business’s location. If you can’t receive mail there, we must figure out a legitimate workaround before we can continue.
  3. Call forwarding setup. We order your call forwarding number, a.k.a. your CallTrax™ number, which allows us to track your incoming leads for you. Once we receive this number from our provider, we set up call forwarding and add it to our system.
  4. Photo collection. We gather photos of your business found during our background check or submitted by you. We save these photos in a collection so we can use them when we build your LeadTrax™ site. If you don’t have any photos, we will find relevant stock photos for you.
  5. Review collection. We search the Internet for reviews of your business. We record and save all of the positive reviews so we can display them on your LeadTrax site.
  6. Google Maps setup. We find out whether you have an existing Google Maps listing. If you do, then we try to gain access to it by having you name us manager or by submitting a claim to Google.

And that’s just the initial setup! Now, your campaign moves on to the writing and assembly stage.

  1. Keyword research. We do research to discover the most appropriate keywords for your site. This enables us to formulate the best approach for on-page SEO.
  2. Fresh content creation. We write all of the copy for your LeadTrax site from scratch. No content is duplicated for new clients. You get totally unique content for your site.
  3. Error proofing. Writing content from scratch means it has to be meticulously combed over for mistakes. We double- and triple-check your content to certify its accuracy.
  4. Site building. Once your content has been crafted and carefully edited, we design and build your site based on our templates. Our templates leave plenty of room for customization, though, so it’s never a one-size-fits-all scenario.
  5. Quality control. Before we launch your site, we check it one more time to make sure it looks great and represents your business accurately and positively.
  6. Resource setup. After your LeadTrax site has been launched, we create Bing and Google accounts so we can set up Webmaster tools and resources for your campaign.
  7. Social media setup. We also create social media pages for your business on Facebook, Twitter, About.me, and Foursquare.

This covers the first several weeks of your campaign. Then we move on to the trickiest part:

  1. Online promotion. Over the next 60 days, we create and/or claim a series of online listings using the most up-to-date information about your business. However, this process is performed in multiple stages, spread out over weeks. (Find out why below.) The efficiency of this process is partially dictated by your cooperation in claiming and verifying listings.

Once this phase is complete, you’ve reached the end of what we call your “ramp-up period.” It usually takes about 90 days, or three months, to get here.

Why Does It Have to Be Done This Way?

We aren’t the only ones who take our time establishing a campaign. Any reputable Internet marketer knows a campaign can’t be launched overnight. Building the foundation for a long-lasting presence takes weeks and weeks and weeks of meticulous, strategic work.
Why do we thoroughly examine your company’s web presence before we even begin? Because we need to correct any past missteps and start your campaign on a solid footing. Otherwise, the actions of your campaign may contradict existing information and inadvertently work against you.
Why do we write all of your site content from scratch? Because we understand that your business is unique, and your content should represent you. Plus, copying content from other campaigns is a surefire way to get penalized by Google. Duplicate content is a huge no-no any way you look at it.
Why do we perform your online promotion in multiple stages? Because creating or updating all of your listings at once will lead Google to mark them as spam. We strategically spread out the creation of your listings week by week so your growing presence appears more organic. This nurtures your site’s rankings without risking penalties from Google.
In other words, we take our time because that’s the only way to do online advertising right.

How Come Other Companies Get It Done Faster?

It’s true—some companies can get your campaign up and running in a week. And after reading all about our setup process, you have to ask yourself, How is that possible?
There’s no simple answer to this, but it boils down to the fact that it’s easier to take shortcuts. Many Internet marketing companies sacrifice long-term presence for quick results. They set up your campaign as fast as they can, and then they forget about it.
But here’s the thing: You only get a super-fast turnaround when your web history hasn’t been thoroughly examined, when your content has been copied and pasted, when your business is promoted like spam, when your campaign is just another carbon copy.
So if an online advertising company is promising you unbelievable success within mere weeks, it’s because they’re cutting corners. Don’t take the bait.

A banner we proudly display in our office.
A banner we proudly display in our office.

How to Make the Right Change in Advertising for Your Small Business

Last Updated: January 21, 2016

Are you planning on switching up your online advertising? Nervous about making the transition? Whether you’re switching to a whole new advertiser or just setting a new advertising goal, taking the next step involves a lot of uncertainty. However, with the right tools and mindset, you’ll be able to confidently change directions and put your small business in the ultimate position for success.
Moving escalators stairs, good bad sign
In this post, you’ll discover how to make sure your next step is the right one—no matter which direction you’re headed.
Let’s get started.

What Kind of Transition Will It Be?

First things first: Decide what kind of transition you’re going to make.
For example:

  • Do you want to transition away from a trackable microsite and build your own, high-level website?
  • Do you want to shift your focus toward a different kind of campaign, like paid advertising instead of organic?
  • Do you want to change your advertising provider entirely?

Once you’ve set a specific goal, you’ll be on the right track.

If You Want a Higher-Level Website…

Small business owners often dream of having a dazzling, fully customized website to impress potential customers and blow the competition out of the water. Their budgets, on the other hand, often squash that dream. Most small business owners have to settle for a practical, streamlined website without the bells and whistles.
It’s not unreasonable for you to want a jaw-dropping website for your company. However, you must maintain realistic expectations. If you’re seriously considering upgrading your website and, subsequently, your SEO campaign, then you need to make sure you can afford to pay thousands of dollars per month for top-level web design and SEO.
We aren’t exaggerating. That kind of work costs a pretty penny. Make sure you know what you’re committing to before you make the jump.
In the end, you may be better off asking your current SEO provider if they can add some razzle-dazzle to your site for a smaller price. They just might have a cost-effective solution you aren’t aware of!

If You Want to Shift the Focus of Your Campaign…

Sometimes, it feels like organic advertising moves too slowly. You wish you could strap a jet pack to your campaign. Sadly, until Google launches its new jet pack feature, paid advertising is the closest you’ll get.
Paid advertising, usually in the form of PPC (pay-per-click), generates leads much faster than SEO alone. That’s why it’s fairly common for small business owners to want to ditch SEO and go for PPC, instead.
However, did you know that you can’t just switch from SEO to plain PPC? You can add PPC to your campaign, but you can’t use it on its own. It won’t work. You need SEO along with PPC to boost your AdWords Quality Score; otherwise, you’ll be bidding too much on ads that won’t even display prominently.
If you want to shift to paid advertising, then the first thing you should do is see if your current provider offers a PPC package. This way, you won’t have to completely switch providers. Your current provider already knows all the ins and outs of your business’s online presence and history, so it’s wiser to stay with them if you can.
If your current provider does not offer PPC, then you’ll have to make an even bigger switch…

If You Want to Switch to a New Provider…

Do you feel like your current provider’s limitations are holding you back? Do you feel like you aren’t getting enough out of your campaign? It may be true that your provider can’t deliver the results your small business needs. However, it’s more likely that your feelings are due to a lack of communication, instead.
Before you make any decisions, have a candid conversation with your provider. Whether you aren’t satisfied with your service or you have new goals for your advertising, tell them. Talk about it. They might have the perfect solution for you in their tool kit.
So often, we see clients who are dissatisfied with the direction of their campaigns, only to discover they simply weren’t using the right packages for their needs.
But what happens when your current provider doesn’t have a solution for you?
Transitioning to a new advertiser can be a complicated process; however, it’s well worth it if you find the right advertiser to switch to. So, first things first: Vet your next advertiser thoroughly.
Once you’re ready to make the jump, notify your current advertiser and work with them to transition all of your backlinks. You should also have your web presence cleaned and tidied from top to bottom. Most advertisers offer cleanup services specifically for this purpose.
When you’re organized and forthcoming with your old and new advertisers, the transition process will be relatively pain free.

Brace Yourself for Change

Change is hard. Regardless of your new direction, make sure you’re mentally prepared to navigate unfamiliar terrain. Whether you’re working with a brand-new web designer or setting a click budget for the first time, be open to collaboration and discovery.
And if you do end up switching over to a whole new website and corresponding campaign, be aware that you’re going to see a slight dip in leads as a result. This is because it will take time for your new URL to gain traction with the search engines. Don’t worry, though: It’ll pick up again before you know it.
When you follow our advice, you’ll make a smart decision for the next phase of your small business’s advertising!

Sign up for our newsletter!

Join our mailing list and receive regular updates on how to effectively market your small business, along with exclusive service promotions.
Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.