small businesses

For Businesses, Facebook Is Now Pay to Play

Last Updated: March 16, 2015

If you’ve been paying attention to our blog lately, you’ll know that Facebook is starting to replace Google as the destination for local search. That’s because it’s easier to ask your Facebook friends for personal recommendations than it is to comb through Google’s search results looking for a seemingly well-reviewed business. If you think about it, it’s a logical reaction against the overwhelming amount of information that comes from a Google search. Plus, the feedback you get from Facebook crowdsourcing is often much more reliable because it comes from people you actually know and trust.

That’s why Facebook ads and promotions are so popular right now. Local businesses are taking advantage of how many ready-and-willing customers are right there, searching for a plumber, electrician, or handyman for their latest project or emergency. But Facebook is smart, and it now wants you to pay for that advantage.

Sites, They Are A-Changin’

Just like all other marketing platforms, Facebook is rapidly growing and changing. We’re all taking advantage of Facebook as much as we can until it fades out of relevance and a more vital, effective platform comes along. After all, it wasn’t so long ago that Facebook was a small site populated only by college students. Then, Facebook opened its doors to everyone over the age of 13. Soon after, companies and organizations were allowed profiles, and advertisements quickly followed.
Now, Facebook is swimming in content and status updates, and it has realized how much money there is to be made in advertising. As a result, Facebook has significantly limited the “organic reach” of business Pages—in other words, they’ve restricted how many people a Page’s content will reach for free. This forces businesses to pay for sponsored ads and “boosted” posts in order to reach their fans and followers. (When Google rose to power, it did a similar thing by launching AdWords.)

Small Businesses Are at a Disadvantage

But here’s the kicker: Most small business owners aren’t well versed in the complexities of paid online advertising, so they’re at quite a disadvantage with this new restriction. And even if a business owner is somewhat familiar with paid advertising from working with Google AdWords, they’ll face some confusion because Facebook’s model is substantially different from Google’s.
The difference is that Google uses a CPC (cost-per-click) model, while Facebook primarily uses a CPM (cost-per-impression) model. CPM is based on how many times Facebook shows the ad to a user, rather than how many people click on it. Facebook’s advertising options also allow you to choose an “objective,” but your ad will only perform well if you optimize correctly for that objective. That means, in some cases, you can choose a CPC model if it makes sense to do so; however, you’re all but guaranteed to spend a lot more money. At the same time, if you stick with CPM but fail to target the proper demographic, or fail to write an ad that’s compelling, you will still spend a lot of money and get dismal results.
And these are only the basics! It gets much more complicated as you dig deeper.

Grabbing Attention Is Hard

Aside from the payment models, sponsored advertising also presents another difficulty: creating effective ads. This is particularly important if you’re paying for impressions, because you want the people who see your ads to actually be affected by them. Many small business owners are exceptionally skilled at their trade but don’t necessarily know how to create attractive, eye-popping ads or how to write powerful calls to action.
Even if local businesses are able to figure out which payment model works for them, they face a whole new battle in creating ads that will stick in people’s minds—and that’s before even worrying about generating new leads!

Act Fast, Be Smart

While Facebook’s new pay-to-play model may seem like a giant hurdle, that shouldn’t stop you from using it. The reality is that Facebook is the most fertile ground for local advertising these days.
But while it’s crucial to get in on the ground floor of Facebook advertising while it’s still relatively affordable, don’t be too hasty. Make sure you do plenty of research and know exactly what your plan is before putting down your company credit card. If you don’t have a plan for ad messaging, testing, rotation, and bids, then you aren’t ready to do it yourself.

Don’t Be Afraid to Call for Backup

If that all sounds like a lot of work, that’s because it is. The time-saving alternative, of course, is to hire an advertising professional. This decision might even save you money. The reason is simple: By specializing in online advertising and doing it all day, every day, professionals have gotten really good at it. In this case, “really good” means driving down the CPM and making your dollars work harder for you.
As a prime example, take a look at what Prospect Genius achieved with the last campaign we ran for ourselves. We spent less per Page “Like” than 99% of other Facebook advertisers. Why? Because we eat, sleep, and breathe online marketing. By doing it every day, we’ve reached a level of expertise that, according to Facebook itself, 99% of other people have yet to reach. In fact, by the time we ended this campaign, we drove that cost-per-Like down even further to just $1.65 over the life of the campaign!

Whether you decide to advertise on your own or with a professional, make sure you aren’t missing out on the endless possibilities that an effective Facebook advertising campaign can create for your local business.

Yelp's Review Filter Poses Unfair Disadvantage for Many Businesses

Last Updated: January 27, 2015

frustrated man punching computer monitor
Are you frustrated because Yelp is hiding all 10 of your positive reviews, and showing just the one, bogus, negative review? You’re not alone. Thousands of businesses have suffered through the exact same situation. In fact, Prospect Genius is one of them! While Yelp may often succeed in its purpose—”To connect people with great local businesses”—it actually hurts many of those businesses with much the same frequency.
This is to say nothing of the countless businesses who have publicly voiced complaints about Yelp’s practices, which include hiding all of a business’s positive reviews and then reportedly offering to display them if that business agrees to pay for advertising. If that sounds an awful lot like extortion to you, you’re not crazy. What’s worse, you could be one of the unwitting victims.
Although Yelp denies all of those extortion claims, there’s no arguing against the fact that its review-filtering system hides perfectly legitimate reviews and leaves many small business owners out to dry.

First, Some Background

Yelp started out as the West Coast’s favorite source for restaurant reviews. Through savvy marketing, organic growth, and a lawsuit against Google (for what we believe are unfounded claims), Yelp has spread to both coasts and has grown to be a significant player in the local search space. That said, it still gets the most activity in the restaurant sector and struggles to get any real traction for service providers like plumbers, electricians, and the like. We suspect this is largely because the people who use Yelp tend to be young urbanites, not homeowners.
Yelp is making a lot of headlines these days. Most of the headlines are regarding the questionable quality and balance of reviews on its listings. It’s a well-known fact across the web that many online reviews are unreliable. They’re either completely fake or at least prone to being one-sided hyperbole. For that reason, Yelp had to figure out a way of evaluating the authenticity of the customer reviews left on its site. It somehow needed to identify reviews that may have been left by the business owner and his/her friends, as well as reviews that may have been fabricated by a competitor looking to hurt a rival. Yelp’s solution: a review-filtering algorithm.

The Problem With Yelp’s Review Filter

Unfortunately, Yelp’s review-filtering algorithm very clearly holds newer accounts in low esteem. While the filter is designed to cut down on questionable or spam-like reviews, it winds up targeting brand-new listings, brand-new accounts, and accounts that have left very few reviews previously. One of the side effects is that you and many other small service providers find the majority of your positive reviews blocked by the filter. It’s a preemptive strike against spammers on Yelp’s part, but it actively hurts honest businesses like yours.
We don’t pretend that accurately filtering reviews is an easy task, but Google and others have somehow managed to find much, much better ways of handling this same problem. Perhaps it’s because, by strategically hiding certain reviews, Yelp discovered a new method of “hard bargaining”?

So, What’s the Solution?

You have two options. Option 1 is that you fight the good fight by constantly monitoring your Yelp listing and responding to all of your reviews, both positive and negative. In this option, you’ll pour time and energy into collecting as many good reviews as possible and hoping that some of them stick so that when the inevitable happens—an unhinged person leaves you an entirely undeserved bad review—it doesn’t bring your score below a 4-star rating.
Option 2 is to stand up for yourself and demand removal from Yelp entirely. If you determine that you’re getting little to no traffic from your Yelp listing, and you’re not a restaurant owner, then you probably will be just fine if your Yelp listing is vaporized. This is the path that Prospect Genius chose and we’ve never looked back. A huge upside to this path is that it’s one less place where you need to monitor your listing and maintain your reviews. You can channel that saved energy into your Google+ reviews, which carry more SEO value, anyway. Alternatively (or additionally), there’s always your Facebook Page, where you can work on collecting “Likes” and reviews, as well.
Don’t have a Google My Business or Facebook account? Don’t worry: They’re free to set up if you have the time and skills to do it right.
Don’t have the time or skills to optimize your accounts effectively? Ask us about SocialStart, a unique Prospect Genius program that’s designed to hatch your social media presence and give it a good, swift kick out of the nest.
Don’t let imperfect review filters slander your reputation and dictate your company’s online success! When you let Prospect Genius outfit you with the right tools and resources, your web presence will speak louder than any Yelp listing ever could.

HomeAdvisor: Helping Large Companies Crush Small Ones

Last Updated: December 22, 2014

Are you using HomeAdvisor to locally market your appliance repair company? You’re joined by hundreds of other nearby appliance services, many of which are at a huge disadvantage. You’ve probably gotten this feeling already—that the game is rigged in favor of larger companies with greater resources—and we’re here to confirm your suspicions. HomeAdvisor is bad for small businesses like yours.
Let’s start off with the most obvious pain point: the speed at which you’re forced to respond to leads. By now, you’ve realized that the only way to be successful on HomeAdvisor is to respond immediately to any and all leads that come your way. However, as a small, one- or two-man operation, that means you have to balance your work with answering the phone and hunting down leads. As you know firsthand, it’s awfully difficult to answer the phone when you’re already on another job with your hands inside a dishwasher or squeezed behind a refrigerator. Frankly, it’s unrealistic for a small appliance repair outfit like yours to land these jobs unless you happen to be free at the moment the call comes in. This is where big businesses get a huge leg up on you.
While this unrealistic demand for immediacy is enough of an obstacle, there’s another major problem with HomeAdvisor: the cost. At the start of your program, you agree to pay a certain amount per lead. But based on the feedback we’ve heard from many of our clients (who are small business owners like you and former HomeAdvisor customers), leads are often shared with as many as five to ten other businesses. You probably already had a feeling that the odds were stacked against you, but let’s do the math: If leads are shared with five different businesses, then that means you have a one-in-five chance of closing each lead. So, if you think about it, you’re actually paying five times as much for every lead you finally do close. On top of that, we’ve heard reports from our clients that HomeAdvisor would occasionally charge them far more than what they were told they’d be charged per lead. Has that ever happened to you? Clearly, HomeAdvisor is rigged in favor of big businesses with big budgets, because most small companies like yours are hurt by such an expensive, unpredictable investment.
But that’s not even the most frustrating part, is it? You know that even when you do respond to a lead in time, there’s a significant chance that the prospect on the other end is looking for a service that you don’t even provide! That’s because HomeAdvisor is fundamentally incentivized to send you as many leads as possible, even if they’re barely relevant to your company. The reason for that is simple: The more leads HomeAdvisor sends you, the more money it makes. Since HomeAdvisor will still charge you for a bad lead, you’ll not only be taking time away from work to track it down, but you’ll actually be losing money on it, too. Again, big companies might not have a problem with this, as they have plenty of room in their budgets. You, on the other hand, really feel the consequences of HomeAdvisor’s poorly designed services.
It’s no wonder HomeAdvisor has a one-star rating on ConsumerAffairs.com.
Prospect Genius took all of the above pain points into account when we created our lead generation program. We take great care to ensure that our goals are the same as your goals, that our success is dependent on your success. Unlike HomeAdvisor, our Core package uses SEO (search engine optimization) to generate leads and only requires a flat, monthly fee. We provide you with your own fully functional website and metered phone number. This way, when a prospective customer discovers your website or Google listing and dials that phone number, they will be calling you directly. You won’t have to go on a wild goose chase for leads that four or five other businesses are also hunting down. You can respond at your earliest convenience (although promptness should always be a priority) without worrying that you’ve automatically lost a job. Best of all, it doesn’t favor big businesses over small ones. Everyone has an equal shot at success.
You don’t need an “advisor,” you need a partner! Prospect Genius champions small businesses like yours. We offer a wide variety of online marketing tools that will match any budget. Go ahead and browse our advertising services—or better yet, give us a call for a pressure-free chat with one of our representatives! It’ll only take five minutes to figure out if we have products that make sense for your particular situation.
Stop working harder than you have to—and stop lining the pockets of a company that’s only helping your larger competitors get a leg up on you!
Call now at (800-689-1273).

SEO Can Take Months: A Hard Lesson in Planning Ahead

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

Back in 2008, Bob got laid off from his full-time desk job during the economic downturn. Frustrated with the corporate world and itching for more independence, he decided to strike out on his own and do something that he loves: working with his hands. He always had a strong work ethic and often found himself cutting down trees and planting bushes for friends and family, so he figured, “Why not open my own landscaping business?”
The following year, Bob made a minuscule living while his wife’s nursing job covered the majority of their household expenses. That’s usually how the first year of owning a brand-new business goes. Over the next several years, he tried out some advertising on his own to boost his business. He made a small website and a Facebook page, posted flyers, and distributed his business card. Business picked up a little bit, but it wasn’t enough.
Four years later, in 2012, his wife told him that their finances were getting too tight and that they needed to be saving more money. After all, they wanted to be able to send their kids to college some day soon. Bob’s phone still wasn’t ringing much come springtime, when he should have been getting slammed with landscaping jobs, so he hired an online advertiser. The advertiser, realizing that Bob needed jobs immediately, fixed Bob up with an expensive pay-per-click (PPC) campaign and promoted Bob’s Landscaping on various business directories and social media. As a result, Bob’s phone did ring with more jobs; however, the jobs weren’t pouring in like he’d hoped, and he found himself having to book jobs with flaky customers who often cancelled their services at the last minute or wound up not being able to pay in full. Not only was Bob frustrated, but he was also hemorrhaging money.
Finally, at the end of 2013, his wife’s voice of reason chimed in. She told him that they couldn’t keep losing money every year: There was college tuition and a mortgage to think about. He would have one final year to turn the business around, or else they would have to shut it down for good. This agreement lit a fire under Bob, and that very same night he started researching other advertising options. That’s when he came across search engine optimization, or SEO.
The next morning, he found and called a reputable advertising provider, who explained that SEO usually takes about three to four months to start producing measurable numbers of leads. That meant Bob’s Landscaping would start receiving good quantities of leads right around April—the start of Bob’s busy season! He signed up and, sure enough, come springtime, Bob’s phone was ringing off the hook. This time, he was able to book contracts early in the season with reliable customers who actually planned ahead. This was the type of customer he’d always wanted but was rarely able to find. Even to this day, instead of having to take any flimsy job that comes his way, he’s able to cherry-pick those enviable customers and turn down jobs that don’t seem worth the service call. His company’s finances are on the upswing, and he’s been able to keep his doors open ever since.
In short, Bob is exceedingly glad that he set up his SEO during his business’s downtime.

The Early Bird Gets the Worm

That’s the moral of this story: If you want to become like Bob and be able to cherry-pick quality customers, then you need to plan your advertising well in advance. By giving yourself a good three months for your web presence and SEO to ramp up, you won’t miss out on those valuable, early contracts. Plus, those early jobs could easily become lifelong customers if they’re satisfied with your work.

The Sooner You Act, the More You Save

When you plan your advertising in advance, not only will you get higher quality leads, but you’ll get them for a much better price. That’s because you won’t have to go into an advertising frenzy at the eleventh hour in order to get enough leads to sustain you through your busy season.
For example, let’s say you want to get 50 calls per month from May through July.

If you sign up for SEO in January, you’ll be able to reach that goal and pay roughly $300-$500 per month.
If you sign up for SEO in February, you’ll be able to reach that goal only if you also add a small-scale PPC campaign for one of your services. This will cost you roughly $600-$800 per month.
If you sign up for SEO in March, you’ll be able to reach that goal only if you also add a full-scale PPC campaign for at least two of your services. This will cost you roughly $900-$1,200 per month.

Take a look at the table below, which shows how much extra you’d have to pay if you waited to start advertising in February or March.

In other words, if you sign up for SEO in January in anticipation of the coming spring’s busy season, then you’ll end up paying the lowest price—and you’ll probably land the better customers to boot!

Learn From Bob

This year, don’t go through the hardships that Bob went through. Take a lesson from his story and skip straight to your happily-ever-after.
Note: Though based on very real experiences of several of our clients, “Bob” is a fictional character presented here for instructional purposes only.

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.

Prospect Genius

Yelp's Review Filter Poses Unfair Disadvantage for Many Businesses

First, Some Background

The Problem With Yelp’s Review Filter

So, What’s the Solution?

HomeAdvisor: Helping Large Companies Crush Small Ones

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