How to do SEO and search engine optimization. Search optimization tactics and SEO tools, all of the proven basics of the best SEO strategy.

mobile optimization

Create Mobile Friendly Content

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Is Your Content Mobile Friendly?

Does your content mirror mobile user behavior? Do you develop generic all encompassing content for your website or do you create mobile friendly content as well? There are industry benchmarks indicating mobile users searching with a high volume of branded terms that include location or activity based keyword modifiers. This search query behavior does vary from common desktop search that leaves out many of the branded terms. Sources below. This is yet another compelling reason to consider creating mobile friendly content specifically for your mobile audience.

mobile optimizationThe theme for mobile optimization success is to keep it simple. Keep the code simple, keep the design simple, and keep the content simple. To counter the difference in mobile search, it is imperative that your mobile SEO strategy accounts for these differences with tactics and techniques that include location and or activity optimization. Most importantly, make your mobile friendly content easy to find.

Think Fast and Short For Winning Mobile Content

Make sure that your mobile content is not blocked by robots.txt.    If you are all good there, then audit your mobile search critical content to verify that it supports location or activity optimization. Let’s use the example, “Bike Shop, Portland”. If you are targeting a mobile audience for this phrase, begin with a focus on speed and shortness. When possible, deploy short form  factors to the URL of the landing page, the page title, and the meta data. Think about the mobile platform that will display the results, does your page provide concise relevant content to the query and will it render in a readable format on a mobile sized screen?

Microformat Your Mobile Content

A great way to promote your location, category or time sensitive information, is to apply microformatting standards to your content. Terms may vary but, microformat and semantic markup use strict standards to enable your online content to be parsed and repurposed by search engines, browsers and apps. Depending upon the search crawler in use, these bots can recognize the micro-formatted code and provide your encoded mobile content in ways making it easy for your mobile audience to engage and utilize on their mobile device. The application of micro-formatted mobile content helps promote your site as mobile friendly and mobile focused. Additional microformat information can be found in the sources listed below.

Silo Mobile Content

Now that you have made sure that your mobile code is clear, take the next step and make fast and easy to understand. Similar to the way humans process and read mobile web pages, search engine crawlers tend to read the same pages rapidly and value the way the information is presented at least as much as the mobile content on the page. Site architecture is mission critical for mobile success, simple navigational hierarchy is the optimum way to proceed. Don’t forget that your mobile users usually have a different agenda when they are on your mobile site, they don’t need to be bogged down with to many links to click to get to the information they are after. Remember that your mobile visitors want to complete tasks quickly and easily, so your navigational structure for mobile must make this possible. This is commonly referred to as task oriented responsive design. So keep it simple, page titles, headers, micro-content and images should be short, concise and aligned to both your business objectives and visitor goals. This is an excellent way to promote mobile friendly content and a positive mobile experience. #mobilefriendly #mobileSEO

Sources:

  • http://www.accuracast.com/search- daily-news/mobile-7471/uk-local-mobile-search-rankings/
  • http://www.google.com/intl/ en/press/zeitgeist2007/index.html
  • Microformat information: http://microformats.org
  • Mobile compliance guideline information: http://www.w3.org/TR/mobileOK-basic10-tests/

Mobile Optimization – Location Factors

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Mobile optimization: Location Variables That Influence Mobile SEO

Mobile optimization location variables are one set of factors that make the mobile experience different. The vast majority of searches performed on mobile devices are task completion driven or location specific; and Bing, Yahoo and Google continue to refine their mobile search results to generate a more positive mobile experience that accounts for this time sensitive search behavior. Understanding that these mobile queries have constraints from device screen size, OS platforms, predictive search, and the browser search bar limits, it’s not a bad idea at all to make results more readily accessible to your mobile audience.

Some of the top performing searches on mobile include the phrase “near me” such as; “restaurants near me,” “pizza near me,” “auto repair near me,” and “lawyer near me.” Google has even recently suggested including “near me” in active Adwords campaigns with a click to call extension because these types of mobile searches deliver excellent ROI. Learn more here

Important Mobile Optimization Variables

mobile-seo-tacticsMobile users are driven to task resolution as quickly as possible, and speedy results leave less time for a deeper dive into browser results. This means second page results suffer and are rarely viewed. The enhancements to mobile predictive search functionality as mentioned above, strive to deliver quick accurate results using *location* and *category* biased search parameters in the algorithm. These mobile location variables are only one way that mobile search differs from desktop search. Account for these variables in your mobile SEO.

Screen Size Drives Design Layouts

Mobile devices have smaller screen sizes than their desktop counter parts and this directly impacts the size of the browser search bar and the returned search engine results page. The major search engines compensate for these challenges by altering the results page layouts into new location-based and category-based designs. This criteria bolsters the need to correctly deploy micro-formatting to all location content and whenever possible to schema.org category content as well. Learn to use micro-formatted content to your advantage and represent your brand in the best light possible to your mobile customers and clients. Embrace and use structured data to push your site up the mobile ranks.

The Many vs The Few

Yet another unique mobile seo variable includes the mobile browsers themselves. Laptop browsers have standardized themselves over time and consolidated into a few major platforms like Internet Explorer, Safari, Chrome and Firefox. Mobile search browsers are numerous, and they remain a “Wild West” of offerings, with multiple features and options with little standardization. Add in the many apps that incorporate “in-app” search functions, and it becomes clear that new search parameters are needed to provide the best search engine results.

Ranking For Mobile SEO
What mobile SEO conversation doesn’t have a reference to rank? Add up mobile browsers, mobile user behavior, predictive search,  results page mobile designed layouts, page speed and location and category algorithm bias, and it becomes evident that mobile page rank is different from desktop / laptop search. These new mobile search dimensions “urgency,” “nearness,” and “category”  are key elements in mobile search relevance.

Awesome mobile optimization begins after “normal” search engine optimization ends. Mobile search engine optimization starts with the assumptions that your site has an established baseline of clean code, architecture that invites craw-ability, search guideline compliant and your content is high quality. Only then can you factor in the mobile variables that take advantage of the current algorithm biases that help your brand be competitive in the mobile space. Continue developing your mobile SEO strategy, with a standards compliant site featuring markup for location and category. All of your mobile users will love you for it!

#mobileoptimization #mobileSEO

social media

10 Mobile SEO Tactics

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10 Mobile SEO Tactics To Add To Your Mobile Strategy

Today’s explosive mobile growth, especially with the abundance of smartphones, mobile OS and apps, makes mobile SEO a very big deal. Knowing that most mobile users use their mobile devices for communications with others (1 to 1 and 1 to many), consumption of media (videos, texts, images, games), and location based searches, here are a few mobile SEO tactics to help keep your business mobile strategy on track for success.mobile seo

  1. Know your mobile traffic Use your analytic data to monitor the size of your mobile audience and learn how they engage with your brand on mobile platforms and mobile devices.
  2. Become friends with bots Google implemented a mobile specific user agent to diagnose mobile site structure and technical issues that may impede a quality mobile user experience. Use this data to refine your mobile SEO strategy. Do not block Googlebot from your mobile site, allow access for all crawlers to both standard and mobile websites to fully index site architecture and to consolidate popularity signals. Check your robots.txt file!
  3. Be responsive For most small businesses, responsive design provides a cost effective way to deliver your brand massage to your mobile audience. Task oriented responsive design further improves the visitor experience.
  4. Hurl a single URL For most businesses, a single URL strategy, deployed via responsive design, is the best approach to deliver your brand message online. Other options are available, dynamic serving or parallel subdomain or subdirectory work as well, but they may require additional technical expertise for implementation and can increase long term costs to maintain.
  5. Mobile canonical A nice to have idea, on regular URLs, add rel=alternate pointing to corresponding mobile URLs. Correspondingly for mobile URLs, add rel=canonical pointing to corresponding regular URLs.
  6. Make indexation crayon clear Do you have a mobile XML site map if your mobile site is considerably different from you regular site? Make it simple, mirror your URLS, make mobile URLs the same as regular URLs.
  7. Be fast, be clean To best prevent crawlability obstacles, keep your code, avoid “code bloat”, don’t use Flash, excessive JavaScript or too much heavy tracking and analytics packages. Search for speed improvements with lighter code, mobile specific content, compressed imagery, smaller slide shows, and improved video platforms. Remember that most mobile visitors are frequently restricted by slower connections and have little patience for slow loading pages.
  8. Understand Referral Sources This is similar to know your mobile audience. If many of your mobile visitors are heavily engaged on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, knowing this fact matters. Some social platforms are geared towards mobile more than any other platforms. Email falls into this category too, as more than 2/3 of emails are viewed on a mobile device.
  9. Concise Content Optimize your mobile content to support mobile visitor intent. Make it easy and simple to complete tasks in as few actions as possible. Make sure your most important page elements and content is identified with short mobile friendly keywords.
  10. Mobile visitors are different Many mobile interactions happen at home or work as a second screen engagement, often while using a laptop or watching TV. When mobile sessions do occur on the go, consider how you have positioned your brand locally. Hyper-location rules in the mobile world, semantic markup using schema.org can improve your visibility for business category identification, business location, positive reviews and special events or promotions.

Mobile SEO is ever changing and rapidly evolving. The dynamic nature of mobile platform change requires some effort of monitoring and willingness to embrace change rapidly. Be on the lookout for emerging social networks or hot apps, they often power a tremendous amount of mobile user engagement. Your mobile SEO strategy needs to account for the high degree of volatility in the mobile space, be every ready to apply new mobile SEO tactics and techniques to succeed by offering the best mobile user experience to your audience. #mobileseo

related: Mobile SEO Strategy

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Understand Mobile User Behavior

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Mobile Users: Your Most Valuable Customers

“It’s easier for a rich man to ride that camel through the eye of a needle directly into the Kingdom of Heaven, than for some of us to give up our cell phone.”
― Vera Nazarian

Each year, industry experts and analysts make a prediction that this year or the  following year will be “The Year Of Mobile”.  As often as you hear the phrases  “links for rank” or  “content is king” which are more or less true to some degree, the real value of keeping these phrases in all conversions helps to create awareness that these ideas are important and you need to pay attention to them. So pay attention now, “The Year Of Mobile” is here!

Mobile User Behavior: Why Is It Different?

The two key distinctions about mobile are #1-the device and #2 — mobile behavior. In early 2015, the landscape in which businesses operate changed forever when Internet usage on mobile devices exceeded PC usage. Mobile visitor requirements are different simply by the nature of the device, smartphones are not laptops. Other mobile differences are that smartphones are always at hand, always on the move. 67% of people have used their smartphones EVERY day in the past 7 days.  More than 83% of smartphone users don’t even leave home without their mobile device. While 96% of smartphone are used at home, 84% are used while the run; the most common places include in a store (83%), in a restaurant (82%) and at work (82%). Smartphones are so ingrained into peoples daily lives that a recent poll showed that 36% of people would rather give up their TV than their smartphone, queue the loud roar from the cord-cutter crowd.

Why The Mobile Platform Is Different

#mobileSEO

Smartphones are everywhere, various styles are available for sale, most are more than capable of browsing the web. Screen sizes, like people’s fashion sense, vary widely, but the vast majority of today’s  smartphones are able to keep us connected to each other and the cloud. Most smartphones have limits due to processor speed, storage restraints, and screen size. They make up for these limits by offering touch screens, instant on features, quick apps, and of course mobility. Many laptop computers are fighting back by offering similar feature sets to mobile devices (instant-on, app stores, even touch screens) and our mobile devices continue to pressure traditional laptop boundaries with speedier processors, high resolution screens, and keyboard flexibility.

Smartphones Rely On Universal Seamless Connections

Broadband connectivity, WiFi hotspots, improved cellular towers, all of these Internet access points help our connections to our cloud based data and point to point communications. Mobile combines many features into an integrated omnipresent user experience. Mobile allows us access to applications, data, websites and communications that improve our daily lives both at work as well as at home. What further powers mobile growth includes:

  • Omnipresent Device – you can use the same device everywhere. A rapidly growing trend with the millennial generation is the ability to bring your own device to work.
  • It Gets Personal –  your device is a reflection of you (small screen vs big screen, iOS vs Android) and you have control over privacy settings and the apps you use.
  • Mobile Is Always On – always on and always nearby, people rarely turn their mobile phone completely off.
  • Instant On Touch Screens – fast access to data, sites, and communications with features designed for rapid interactions.

Mobile User Behavior Is Different

The real major difference between mobile smartphone usage and desktops or laptops can be seen in mobile user behavior. Mobility offers a device that allows people to communicate, consume and query all from the same device. There’s no such thing as “mobile” as far as most users are concerned. Basically mobile user behavior is reflected by these actions; communications, one on one or one to many, consumption of data, media, or entertainment, and finally search queries looking for fast answers.

3 Ways Mobile User Behavior Is Unique

What are the common characteristics of mobile users? They often share these mobile behaviors:

  1. Location Based – this only makes sense that the internal GPS will influence search outcomes. Searches that answer “find a business type near me” will drive very local results. 50% of all local search are search done on mobile devices.  94% of smartphone users have searched for local information.
  2. Task Oriented – with a bias towards action, 84% have taken action as a result of that search. 64% connect with a business — 48% called the business 47% looked up business on map or got directions stressing the importance that location plays in the results as well.
  3. Time Sensitive – action happens more than 90% of local users take action within 24 hours. 70% of mobile searches lead to action within one hour. It takes one month for the same percentage of desktop users to take the same actions.

Now that you know that mobile users are task oriented, location based and biased towards action with time sensitivity, you can see why mobile users are your most valuable customers! They are ready to engage with your brand’s  products or services. So your mobile presence will need to grab their attention quickly and offer an awesome user experience that makes it fast and easy to focus on completing tasks. If this sounds like speed is a virtue for mobile, that’s because it is. Get speedy with concise and short text, compressed images and content delivery that mirrors user behaviors.

Mobile Search Results Differ

KEY POINT: because mobile user search behavior is different, mobile search results are different too. In a recent independent analysis by SEO Clarity, 67% of mobile search results were different from desktop search results. Post Google “Mobilegeddon” algorithm changes on April 21, those search results changed even more. Now some mobile search results are up to 73% different that their desktop counterpart search following this recent mobile update. Mobile continues to deviate from traditional desktop search results when it comes to rankings. Make sure that you take this into account when building your mobile seo strategy.

Beyond the Second Screen
The mobile world continues to blur the lines and behaviors people use to connect to the internet. Seamless integration with all internet devices creates a user experience the moves easily between interest and actions, research and purchase, engagement and sharing. So what are people doing on mobile?
10 Facts About Mobile User Behavior:

  1. 86% of mobile internet users use devices while watching TV
  2. 63% access the Internet
  3. 62% check their email
  4. 61% play games
  5. 55% check the weather
  6. 50% use maps for directions
  7. 49% use social media and 70% access social networks with an app
  8. 42% listen to music
  9. 36% get their News
  10. 21% watch streaming video — 200+ million YouTube views on mobile per day

Know Your Mobile Site Behavior

With a better understanding of the goals of a mobile user and their current behaviors on a mobile device, you can now begin to develop a mobile focused strategy that aligns your business goals with mobile user actions. Start by verifying and measuring the organic mobile traffic and the top mobile queries and mobile pages of your website. Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics provides more than enough data to get most businesses started down the mobile SEO path. Continue to optimize your mobile site and focus on these 3 things;

  1. Design – is it crayon clear what actions you want people to take when they are on your website? Can these actions be completed easily?
  2. Relevant Mobile Content — is your mobile content short and concise? Does it contain mobile friendly keywords?
  3. Define Location — use schema.org markup to specify your location, business type, reviews, and special events. Make it easy for mobile search bots to present your website.

Embrace A Mobile Mindset

Mobile search will continue to grow in the near future, so keep that at the top of mind in your SEO and marketing strategies. Remember the mobile user profile outlined above and try the make their experience incredible and rewarding. Don’t let your mobile website be the target of the frustration because it performs poorly, slowly or has too many steps involved to complete their tasks. Don’t be the “idiot who built this damn website”; be the business that built “a great mobile website” that gets shared with many others because it is so mobile friendly.

Resources:
IDC Forecast January 2014,
KPCB Mobile Search Actions 2013
Google: Our Mobile Planet: United States of America – Understanding the Mobile Consumer, May 2013
Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2013–2018, February 2014
IDC Forecast: Tablet Shipments Forecast to Top Total PC Shipments in the Fourth Quarter of 2013 and Annually by 2015, September 11, 2014
KPCB Internet Trends 2014

seo for mobile

Know Mobile SEO

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When Is The Best Time To Start Mobile SEO?

It’s a little too late already to just begin mobile SEO, Google’s recent mobile algorithm update has already changed the landscape for many businesses, so no more delays, let’s get started with your mobile optimization today. If you have not started monitoring your mobile channel, then you are missing the chance to future proof your business. Start providing your mobile visitors a superior mobile experience and your business will benefit. Even if you are late to the mobile game, don’t let that stop you from taking action right now to rectify the situation. Step number 1, jump into analysis of user behavior before taking any other action like mobile optimization improvements or task oriented responsive design.

A Little Mobile Analysis Anyone?

When you want to make the best business decision regarding mobile, let your reporting platform provide you with the insights surrounding the characteristics of mobile activities on your domain. Use the data as a catalyst for change starting with:

  • The volume of mobile traffic, is it increasing?
  • What are the top 3-4 mobile devices that engage with your site?
  • What are the top 2-3 mobile OS that visitors use?
  • What is the most popular screen size for your mobile users?
  • What are the top 5 pages that attract organic mobile traffic?
  • What is the most common action that the mobile user takes next?

Is your website mobile friendly?

mobile seoWhile it’s critical that you understand how your audience interacts with your mobile website, and that all starts with how your site is rendered on mobile devices. Is your design a mobile template or is it a responsive design? To see what the site looks like I recommended that you find out how your site appears in Google’s mobile search results (Google Mobile Friendly Tool), and also look at how it actually appears on mobile devices. There are great mobile emulator resources here too, a favorite is Mobile Test Me . This tool allows you to check mobile rendering across multiple different platforms. Other popular mobile emulators include Opera Mobile Emulator or Screenfly, use these mobile tools to check how your pages are displayed in Google’s mobile search results.

Mobile friendly is the easy thing to check, and while there are many tools online to review your mobile site, start with Google’s own Mobile Friendly Test found here [https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/]. If you pass with the lovely green message, then you have more time to enhance your mobile presence, if you fail, well then there’s more work to do.

While you are using the Mobile Friendly Test tool, pay attention to the number of blocked URLS from robots.txt. If the number is too high, or you need additional insights into what are the actual blocked URLS, look for the details in Webmaster tools under robots.txt. There’s even a handy robots.txt tester to validate any changes you may make to the robots.txt file.

Understand Your Mobile Visitors Now

After you have checked how your organic mobile audience views your mobile website, it’s time to get a better understanding of how they engage with it. This is where your analytics package becomes the tool to provide data on mobile performance. The metrics that follow can all be found on Google Analytics. Google analytics provides an excellent platform for mobile performance data. For those people that use Google Analytics to do this analysis here are a few quick tips to get you started building an advanced segment to quickly identify your mobile visitors:

A few of the key metrics to review include:

  1. Total Mobile Traffic. Take a look at the difference between the Mobile Organic Traffic, All Organic Traffic and All Visits volume and include time on site, page views and goals. This strongly emphasizes the behavioral differences for each of these sources.
  2. Keywords driving mobile. Go to Traffic Sources \> Sources \> Search \> Organic with the Mobile Organic segment selected. This helps you to see keywords that your mobile visitors used to get to your site from a mobile device.
  3. Most Popular Mobile Device. This information is vital for you to make mobile enhancements that best represent your audience. Start by identifying the most popular devices used by your organic mobile audience. Discover these important dimensions such as operating system and screen resolution by going to Audience \> Mobile \> Devices.
  4. Mobile Engagement. For more advanced data analysis, look at User Flow for mobile organic traffic. This creates a visual representation of the pathways used by mobile visitors. Do these pathways mirror your mobile design. Better still, do these pathways align with your business goals? When the design supports your business objectives and visitors intent, your mobile site adds the greatest value to you and your audience.

Mobile SEO: Tactical Basics 
As the mobile search environment evolves and grows, your brand needs to understand how to use your value proposition to grab attention and engage mobile users. Remember that for most major search engines, their objective is to deliver your mobile website in the best version possible and most importantly, as quickly as possible. Speed wins on mobile.

Sourcing SERP results from their mobile web indexed pages, here are a few mobile SEO tips that will help deliver a superior mobile experience for your audience:

  1. Simple URL Structure. A single URL strategy is the best approach, whenever possible use short concise URLs.
  2. Don’t Block The Bots. Allow the same access for all crawlers to both desktop and mobile websites, make it easy to understand navigational structure. Uniform crawler access improves search signal consolidation.
  3. Remove Crawlability Obstacles. Clean code keeps the website free from challenging crawl obstacles such as Flash, excessive tracking code and disproportionate JavaScript.
  4. Page Load Speed> Quick page load speeds drive performance since page load speed dramatically improves the mobile user experience. If you what to learn more, check out Google PageSpeed Insights tool [https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/]
  5. Remarkable User Experience. Make it super easy for your visitors to find the information they are looking for and interact with one finger touches. Don’t forget the all important “Click-to-Call” action.

Mobile SEO Benefits

To truly maximize your mobile SEO benefits, you must clearly start with understanding exactly how your mobile website appears to your mobile website visitors. Beginning with a consistent design that represents your brand in both your mobile and desktop interface, make it easy for your visitors to browse your site on any platform they choose. After you review how your organic mobile audience is already visiting your site, from their preferred mobile devices and platforms, you can continue to refine your mobile SEO strategy and online business requirements.

lead nurture

Critical Success Factors For Online Lead Intake

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The individuals that interact with online clients via lead intake at professional service companies need to understand how these online opportunities might differ from traditional walk-ins or phone calls.  Before the advancement of the Internet as a common consumer tool for research and communication, there were only two principle ways in which a prospective client would make contact with your business:  walk-in traffic  (face to face) or incoming telephone calls (phone to phone).  Now business professionals must also be proficient in digital communications including email (keyboard to keyboard) and social (keyboard to community).

Today’s Internet represents a powerful unique way for clients to both investigate options and perform research before making a critical final engagement decision.  The marketing strategy, the communication platforms, and the vital skills and abilities required to satisfy and inform these clients are uniquely different from the traditional traffic channels.

What Are The Critical Success Factors For Internet Lead Intake?

The responsibilities and skill set required for successfully processing, intaking and closing an online engagement opportunity requires specialized training, abilities and mindset because and online lead generation IS a different process. Let’s look at some of the differences from traditional traffic compared to modern traffic channels.

The following chart compares the differences in focus in building customer value between the traditional intake and online intake:

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[fusion_content_box title=”Old School” backgroundcolor=”” icon=”fa-minus-circle” icon_circle_size=”” icon_align=”left” iconcolor=”#359B24″ circlecolor=”#F1F1F1″ circlebordercolor=”#359B24″ iconflip=”” iconrotate=”” iconspin=”no” image=”” image_width=”35″ image_height=”35″ link=”” linktarget=”_self” linktext=”” animation_type=”0″ animation_direction=”down” animation_speed=”0.1″]

  • Focus is on identifying client needs, selecting the right service or product, making a value / benefit presentation, gaining a closing commitment, negotiation and closing on the product or service
  • Face to face
  • You control the flow of information
  • You control the pace of the process – who does what when
  • Buying commitment required in exchange for pricing disclosure
  • Emphasis on building value in service or product
  • The opportunity is NOW: Go for close
  • One and done, get ready for the next opportunity

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  • Focus is on confirming the client needs, engaging the client / customer in an exchange of information, validating the value / benefit that your service or product offers, and closing on an in person appointment
  • Keyboard to Keyboard
  • Customer controls the flow of information
  • Customer controls the pace of the process – who does what when
  • Up-front pricing disclosed to build customer trust
  • Emphasis on building value in the business relationship
  • The opportunity is indefinite: Go for an appointment
  • Success requires tracking and follow-up

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What Does A Successful Lead Intake Process Look Like?

The most effective managers of Internet leads will need to have core competencies in three important areas:
1. Technology:

  • Must be comfortable with information technology, it changes rapidly.
  • Embrace multiple communication platforms. Be fluent with how your leads want to communicate with your business.
  • Capable of learning and utilizing lead management applications.

2. Online Lead Process Management:

  • Can organize multiple engagement activities at once to accomplish business objectives.
  • Understands how to arrange information and files in a useful manner utilizing technology.
  • Knows what steps in the process to measure and how to measure it.
  • Good at figuring out priorities in getting things done.
  • Does not get overwhelmed by multiple engagement and administrative tasks.
  • Breaks down engagement activities into the process steps.
  • Focuses on outcomes that drive success.

3. Online Engagement Skills:

  • Assumes client / customer has previously completed some research online.
  • Has excellent communication skills that engages the client / customer, validates customer research, builds trust and secures in person appointments.
  • Is able to write a digital communication that is clear, concise and gets a message across that provides value to the client / customer.  Understands basic digital protocol for email, social media, and other digital platforms as it pertains to your business.
  • Patient working within each client’s / customer’s information agenda while maintaining a focused results oriented engagement plan.
  • Understands the business’ services or products and can easily answer basic related questions in a way that projects professionalism and increases client trust and confidence levels.
  • Drives engagement forward to the desired business objectives: set an appointment.

The digital environment is extremely dynamic and the business engagement process does vary from traditional brick and mortar client acquisition methods. Success is measured differently, because the business objectives align closely to the client objectives with a focus on outcomes; in most cases setting an appointment becomes the priority rather than closing a client.

[/fusion_builder_column][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”][fusion_tagline_box backgroundcolor=”#f7f7f7″ shadow=”no” shadowopacity=”0.1″ border=”1px” bordercolor=”” highlightposition=”top” content_alignment=”left” link=”” linktarget=”_self” modal=”” button_size=”” button_shape=”” button_type=”” buttoncolor=”” button=”” title=”LEAD INTAKE SUMMARY” description=”” animation_type=”0″ animation_direction=”down” animation_speed=”0.1″ class=”” id=””]
To recap a successful lead generation intake process, it is critically important to review and know these key concepts:

  • The engagement strategy, the communication tools, and the skill and ability required to successfully handle inbound leads are uniquely different from the traditional role for walk-in traffic.
  • The most prosperous people in these lead intake positions understand the responsibilities and skill sets required for successfully processing and engaging the online opportunity and recognize that it requires specialized training to maintain a competitive edge.
  • Everyone interacting with an online lead makes a unique contribution to the clients’ experience and perception of the brand value.
  • The online lead intake process has a distinctly different focus than a traditional engagement process in building customer value and provides validation to the customers’ decision.
  • The lead intake team that handles online queries will need to have competencies in three important areas; technology, online lead process management, and online engagement skills.

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