Optimize Your Site Before You Bid on AdWords

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

Google and Michael Jordan: Not So Different?

Think of Google as a celebrity sponsor: His or her mass appeal will sell a product, but they don’t want to advertise a brand that they can’t vouch for, lest they ruin their own reputation. This rule applies to PPC ads shown on Google’s search results pages. To protect their brand, Google tries to ensure that the ads they display are actually related to the searches performed. So even though your PPC (a.k.a. “AdWords”) ad might match the keywords in a search query, Google won’t show it unless it seems to promote something valuable and relevant to the searcher. That is, of course, unless you’re willing to pay them a boatload of money to display it.
That’s where an optimized website comes in. If your ad is linked to a site that has informative content related to the search term, then the ad will be much more successful without costing you an arm and a leg. So optimize your site before you bid on AdWords.

Google AdWords and the Quality Score

The way Google AdWords works is that Google sets a minimum price for each ad group, and advertisers then bid on the maximum amount that they’re willing to spend per click. Generally, higher bids will appear closer to the top of the search results pages. However, there’s another way to have your ad appear higher in the search results without spending a fortune: You can also strive for a higher Quality Score. An ad’s Quality Score is determined by Google’s complex algorithm and is awarded according to the relevance and specificity of your ad. An ad that appears highly relevant and is targeted to a specific keyword will achieve a high Quality Score, which is deemed more valuable than a high bid.
According to Google’s AdWords guide, “Even if your competition bids more than you, you can still win a higher position—at a lower price—with highly targeted keywords and ads.” In other words, you could wind up paying a lot less for an ad with a high Quality Score than you would for an ad with a low one.

Where Does SEO Fit In?

While specific keywords within an advertisement will improve its Quality Score, an additional boost will also come from a linked webpage that relates strongly to those keywords, the corresponding search terms, and the ad itself. If Google’s algorithm detects that your ad sends prospective customers to a page with valuable, relevant content, then your ad will get an even more optimal position, which means a higher volume of clicks. And how do you achieve web content that’s specific, targeted, and relevant? SEO, of course!
To put it simply, a PPC campaign is infinitely more successful when it’s attached to a site with ongoing SEO. Not only will you pay less for bids, but you’ll actually see more effective results and therefore a greater return on investment. It’s a win-win!

Prospect Genius Provides PPC and SEO Services

At this point, the case for using both PPC and SEO together in your online advertising is clear. The only remaining question is, where can you find both? Well, you’ve come to the right place. Prospect Genius specializes in a cross-section of online advertising tools, including PPC and SEO, and we tailor our services to serve each individual client in the best way possible. When you sign up for our Premium package, which combines organic SEO services and targeted PPC ads, your company’s marketing campaign will be primed for optimal, long-lasting success.
To learn more about Premium or our other customized online advertising packages, don’t hesitate to contact us by phone or e-mail!

Take Full Advantage of What Prospect Genius Has to Offer

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

You’ve already taken the perfect first step in signing up for Prospect Genius’s online advertising services. But are you doing everything you can to optimize your campaign’s success? Work gets busy, and it’s easier to just leave your campaign in the hands of our specialists. While you can enjoy some success by doing that, you’ll get much more bang for your buck if you become an active participant in your campaign.
In this post, we’ll highlight some of the services and features available from Prospect Genius that you could be using right now to get the greatest return from your online advertising campaign.

Take Advantage of Included Features

The Client Portal is an invaluable tool, providing a handful of free features that can empower you to boost your LeadTrax™ site, manage your leads, and improve your business’s success.

Company blog and photo gallery — You can access both the blog and the photo gallery through the Client Portal to post fresh content on your LeadTrax site on your own. Write a quick blurb about a recent job in the blog, and add accompanying pictures in the gallery. It’s a great way to frequently populate your site with new content, which will boost its SEO value overall.
Call monitoring and recording — Through the Client Portal, you can listen to and record all of the phone calls on your CallTrax™ line. By going back and listening to how you handle customer calls, you’ll be able to improve customer service and make sure that you’re closing the most deals.
Call tracking — Our CallTrax feature displays all of the calls that come through your phone line. It’s especially useful because you can track calls by time and date, which means you can see any patterns in the time of day or day of the week when customers tend to call most often and prepare accordingly.
Advanced phone package — This upgrade enables you to add extensions to your CallTrax line. You can also set up special call routing, wherein one phone line will ring for a few seconds, and if the call isn’t answered, it will roll to the next line, and so on. This can help you make certain that your company never misses a lead.
Call forwarding — You can choose to have calls forwarded to your mobile phone when you’re out on the job so you don’t have to miss valuable leads.
E-mail harvesting — This feature enables you to retain customer e-mails that have been archived in the portal and build your own address list for the future.

Invest in Upgrades

If you really want to go the extra mile with your campaign, it can make sense for you to invest in one or two additional add-ons. While it will cost you a little extra, the results can provide great ROI.

Boost and PPC — Most customers know about our SEO lead generation service (our Core package), but did you know that we also offer two pay-per-click (PPC) advertising options? You can emphasize a particular service or promote seasonal offerings with our Boost package, while the PPC package offers long-term and larger-scale PPC advertising. PPC can help bring immediate results to enhance your SEO efforts.
Directory visibility — Directory listings increase your company’s visibility and boost your site’s online exposure. Our directory visibility package is available in three different levels, each designed to pack a specific punch. If you are already signed up for our Core or Premium package, then the first level (which includes up to 175 directories) has already been completed. However, you still have the option of adding levels 2 and 3 to gain access to even more valuable directories. If you are a customer using one of our other packages that doesn’t include directory visibility, you can add one, two, or all three levels to your existing services.
Press releases and AdBlasts — Have us draw additional attention to your site by syndicating a press release about a new service you’re offering or issuing an AdBlast to promote your seasonal discounts.

Even using just a few of these services can give your Prospect Genius campaign a big leg up. So call your campaign coordinator today to discuss your options and take even more control of your company’s future!

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.

Page One Guarantee? No, Thanks.

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

“We’ll put your website on the first page of Google!”
“Guaranteed page-one rankings!”
“First-page placement guaranteed!”
You’ve heard it all before.
If you search Google for SEO services, it won’t take long for you to find a slew of SEO companies making these types of guarantees. In fact, these guarantees are so pervasive, you could easily conclude that they’re the basis of most companies’ business plans. However, when it comes down to it, these companies are guaranteeing something that is 100% out of their control. Sure, there are a handful of tricks and paid programs (e.g. AdWords, pay-per-click) that will automatically boost a website’s rankings, but there are too many factors at play for anyone to predict a certain outcome with any accuracy. Yet, that doesn’t stop countless SEO companies and local online marketers from making these empty promises time and time again.

Here’s why you should always be wary of a page-one guarantee.

Magic Cures Don’t Exist in the World of SEO

Online marketers are like doctors. Does that sound like a stretch? Maybe. After all, marketers aren’t required to endure eight years of rigorous medical training and they certainly don’t save lives on a regular basis. But they’re similar to doctors in one fundamental way: They prescribe treatments but cannot guarantee a cure.
There are a couple of reasons for this. First…

The Solution Relies Heavily on Your Participation

Think about the last time you visited the doctor’s office. Did you expect a guarantee that you would be restored to full health by the time you left? No, of course not. No doctor is all powerful, and the success of the treatment relies heavily on your earnest participation in it. You must be 100% honest about your medical history and your symptoms before the doctor can make any diagnosis.

In that same vein, an online marketer must get the full picture of your web presence and history before devising any sort of SEO plan. If you were experiencing chest pains, wouldn’t you tell the doctor about your heart condition? By the same logic, if you’re having trouble ranking on Google, then you should notify your online marketer about any previous missteps, particularly any penalties or suspensions that you’ve been slapped with. These types of run-ins with Google will certainly affect your website’s rankings, and no SEO specialist is able to counteract them—whether they’ve made a guarantee or not. When it comes to SEO, Google’s word is law.

It Also Demands Time

But let’s say that you don’t have any strikes against you. If your SEO specialist checks out your website and decides that top-to-bottom revisions are necessary to increase your content’s relevance and readability—which is usually what happens—you’ll still be left with a sizable waiting period before your site will show any progress in the rankings. For most small business websites, changes aren’t detected by Google for 30 to 60 days. Some changes to your website or to directory listings can even take 120 days or more to be detected!

Once changes have been made, your specialist will have to wait until they take shape before any outcome can be determined. From there, you’ll be able to take the next steps. Medical treatments work the same way: A doctor assesses your ailment, provides you with medicine, and then waits to see if the problem clears up. If that rash or cough goes away, great. If not, then the doctor will need to adjust the diagnosis and start treatment again. Likewise, the ideal situation is that your online marketer improves your Google ranking within those first 60 days; however, if the original plan doesn’t work, then your SEO professional will need to reassess your keywords, targeted search terms, accuracy of information, and other factors before moving forward.
In other words, there are many moving parts that all contribute to your search engine rankings, and many of them are completely hidden to anyone outside of Google and Bing themselves. This means that there is always an element of trial and error in SEO.

Guarantees Are Ambiguous

When an online marketer guarantees page-one rankings for your website, several questions should come to mind:

For which search terms?
In what time frame?
Who is performing the search?
- Is this person logged in to a Google account?
- Does his/her IP address have an extensive search history?
Will this search be conducted on Google, Bing, Yahoo!, AOL, Ask.com, Best of the Web, or another minor search engine?
Does “page one” refer to maps, pay-per-click, or organic results?

Online marketers who have no qualms about making bogus guarantees also have no problem leaving the details as vague as possible. Your website might show up on page one after their IP address is associated with countless searches for the same keywords. The keywords that you rank highly for might be super specific and not very valuable. You might have to pay additional exorbitant fees for clicks or AdWords. Or they might deliver first-page rankings, but on some third-rate search engine that means nothing for your actual web presence.
Speaking of things that mean nothing…

Rankings Aren’t As Important As They’d Have You Think

When it comes down to it, what are you really spending all that money on an online marketer for? Is it so that you can see your company’s website jump to the top of a very narrow search results page? Or is it so that you can ultimately generate more leads, find more business, and increase your revenue? As business owners ourselves, we’re betting it’s the latter.
If your goal is to get more prospective customers to call your business and book services, then it won’t help you to pour all of your time and money into getting a first-page ranking while ignoring every other platform out there. You need to find an online marketer who will utilize popular business directories like Yelp and Angie’s List and promote your company all over social media, namely Facebook and Twitter.

SEO companies that understand just how much goes into effective lead generation will never guarantee a first-page ranking for your business. It would be a guarantee of something outside of their control, and it’s dishonest to pretend otherwise.

Prospect Genius

Contact Us

Business Hours

Let’s Connect!

What Drives Us?

Client Portal App

Helpful Links

Sign up for our newsletter!