Search engine optimization best practices and SEO strategy. Grassroots SEO from the ground up, including local SEO and mobile SEO. #SEO

Quick Lead Response Times Win Business

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Your business will thrive with fast lead response times

It really does not matter where you get leads for your business, it’s what you do with those leads that truly counts. The speed of response to inbound leads influences the outcome of your lead conversion metrics. The vast majority of people search for goods and services online and this movement to digital media drives many potential customers and clients to websites.  Businesses that thrive from online leads understand that effective prospect management is the key to success. It all starts with fast responses to your inbound leads.

Want to fail in a big way? Respond slowly!

lead conversionWe’ve all had a negative experience when we reached out to engage with a business by showing our interest and submitting an online form and then wait for it … nothing. Nada, no response other than the impersonal auto-responder email or generic “thank-you” page. Been there too? Feel that pain? It soured your impression of the brand, right? Some studies suggest that up to 65% of all companies will admit that they do not have a solid process in place to handle and nurture those leads. Those that do prevail and thrive.

Lead response times very greatly business to business and by industry verticals. Companies that are largely dependent on leads for the majority of their revenue tend to be more aware of the need to respond to leads quickly. It is not uncommon for most leads to never receive a response or if they do get one, it may come days later after the initial submission. This is not a customer-centric focus that favors your brand.

Lead response times and lead nurturing is a massive problem. Studies indicate that companies that respond to and nurture leads have 47 percent higher profit margins than companies that do not. Prospects place value on quick thorough responses, it’s not always about who has the lowest price for the product or service.

Small businesses, solo owners, and professional service firms often struggle with limited support structure to appropriately handle lead intake and follow-up, but this is where you need to focus your investment. If your marketing efforts successfully drive traffic to you, don’t waste the opportunity to turn prospects into  buyers or clients. Do not miss these opportunities!

Why such a high fail rate?

Excuses are plentiful, too many leads, leads quality is poor, too many other job responsibilities, no good way or process to follow up the leads.  Often it is a lack of knowledge or tools that impact lead follow up. Lacking the proper tools or skills, it becomes difficult to understand how to follow up, what to say, what’s the best communication method (phone, email, text) to employ, or simply what is the next step to take in the process to convert the prospect into a customer or client. Strong measurement in critical areas can immediately help identify areas of opportunity for improvement. What gets measured, gets improved!

Setting the stage to WIN the lead conversion game

Here are few simple steps to follow to prepare your organization to handle leads like a “Boss”:

Start with the data and share some lead response facts:

  • 65 percent of all companies don’t nurture the lead.
  • Average response time for an Internet lead is 44 hours.
  • Only 25 percent of all salespeople make two contact attempts.
  • 80 percent of all lead transactions require five to 12 follow-ups.
  • If you include texting in your response, you increase your conversion rate by 40 percent.

Develop a lead conversion process with specific actions for follow up.

  • Brand your automated response. Make it more than a simple “Thank you” page and email.
  • Send a text with more information than requested.
  • Include a value driven call to immediate action.
  • Don’t give up on the lead, move into drip marketing follow up.

Plan and move forward. It’s easy to maker you brand stand out when so many businesses overlook lead conversation as a way to increase revenue. Develop your follow-up system and make it part of your business process. Nurture your leads and success will follow.

Local Citations Improve Search Results

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How Citations Influence Search Results

When it comes to ranking your business website, it is important to be mentioned on other authority sites. Most business owners spend a huge chunk of their time looking for hyperlinks from other websites. What they don’t realize is that they can get benefits from simply being mentioned on authority sites; this is true even if the site doesn’t use a hyperlink to directly link back to their website.

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Local SEO

It is important to get local citations for your business. Sites like the Yellowpages can help boost your search engine rankings; they do this without ever linking back to your site. Local business associations and your local Chamber of Commerce websites are also places where you can get a local citation.

When the search engines notice your business name mentioned on an authority site, they know that you aren’t some fly by night company. The search engines take this information and use it to give your business more authority; this authority means better search engine rankings.

Local citations are used by major search engines as an additional ranking factor; if your website has many citations, then it is likely to rank higher than a website without them. Businesses often spend thousands of dollars on SEO only to be outranked by sites that have very few backlinks. They don’t realize that their competition is ranking because of citations on authority sites.

Why Local Citations Are Important

Citations help the search engines verify your business address and contact information; when the search engines are sure that your information is current and correct, they are likely to display your website over others. Citations help search engines categorize your business; search engines work hard to give people information that is relative to their search queries. If the search engines can’t decipher what type of business you run, then they aren’t very likely to show your business in their local search results.

Using local citations is very important in less-competitive niches; they help to give you an advantage over your competition. Local sites tend to be put together sloppily; they often don’t use strategies that larger companies use. Without much information about these sites, the search engines use whatever they can find to help their algorithm rank sites correctly.

A local citation allows search engines to validate your business; your business is more likely to show up in local search results when the search engines know you are part of the community. It is hard for businesses to fake being listed in the Yellowpages or in their Chamber of Commerce. Search engines know this; they use this to give your business a boost in the rankings.[/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]

Social Media For Professional Services

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Social Media for Professional Service Businesses

Small businesses can benefit from a variety of marketing techniques in today’s ever changing world. Many utilize social media in their marketing efforts. Social media can not only allow a small business to bring more attention to their brand, but it can help them attract more customers and sales over time. Take a look at the following information to learn more about this powerful and popular tool.

Being a professional service business owner can have its challenges. If you’re a newly established small business, many people may not know about your services and products or your brand. It’s important to get the word out about your business and the unique value that it brings to your local community. With the use of social media, you’re able to better educate the public about your company so that they have the right information and more people begin to know about your brand. With so many people using computers, the internet, and social media on a daily basis, it’s no wonder why so many small business owners choose to utilize social media as a way to market.

Popular Social Media Platforms

Most social media platforms are free or have a free version. Some of the top social media platforms today are:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Google+
  • Pinterest
  • You Tube
  • SoundCloud
  • Plaxo
  • LinkedIn
  • Flickr
  • Vimeo
  • Instagram
  • Yelp

Social media for professional service business works in many ways. Small business owners can utilize their business page to post important information such as their business name, address, and hours as well as their philosophies and services. This is a great way to display information that customers may be curious about. Social media for small business also works in other ways. For example, a business can share pictures of new products or they can choose to announce a special. These are great ways to get people excited about your brand and its offerings with the use of social media. So many small businesses are looking for new and exciting ways to use social media to draw attention to their company.

At first, social media may seem confusing. The good news is it becomes easier to use the more time you spend exploring. As you begin to navigate various social media platforms, spend some time looking at how other small businesses use social media. This can help give you pointers so that you learn what works and what may need changed. One you bring social media into your everyday routine, you will want to try to post on a regular basis – such as two to three times per week. As a business owner, you should also respond to comments and feedback, even if the feedback is negative. This will show the public that you’re not afraid to make things right and answer questions. This also shows that you care about your customers, which is extremely important in today’s world.

Social media can be extremely beneficial to small businesses. This technological tool can allow a brand to build more exposure, bring in more clients and sales, and can allow a business owner to make sure that the right information is readily available about the company. Take advantage of this online marketing tool today to bring your professional service business to new levels. You will be amazed at all of the ways in which your brand can benefit. #professionalservice #socialmedia #brandbuilding

What is local SEO?

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Implementing SEO into your website is a great way to create traffic and increase your customer base. However, certain businesses may only want to target one specific location for their business. If the customer is looking for specific product or service in the area, you will want to be at the top of the list in the search engine results. Local SEO can help you achieve higher search results for searches focused on certain geographical locations.

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local seo

Local SEO

What Is Local SEO?

Traditional SEO is about creating website content that contains certain keywords and key phrases that are frequently used when searching for the business’s product or service. When a person types those keywords and phrases into a search engine such as Google or Yahoo, the SEO content on your website will bump your website to a higher position on the list of results. Local SEO is about doing that exact same thing. The difference is that local SEO will implement keywords and phrases that are frequently used to find products or services in a specific area instead of nationwide or worldwide.

How Does Local SEO Work?

Implementing local SEO is more than just inserting the name of the town or city that your business is stationed in on a few of your web pages. You will need to know exactly what types of keywords and phrases are being used most frequently to find businesses in your area.

If you’ve implemented traditional SEO before, you most likely know of certain keywords and phrases that are centered around your business. Combining these keywords and phrases with the town, city or state that you’re in will likely create local SEO content. There are also certain programs that allow you to see what keywords were used to find your website. This can allow you to figure out new keywords for your local SEO content. If you’ve never implemented SEO into your website before, there are many resources available to help you get started.

Why Is Local Search Important To Small Business Owners?

Putting time, effort and money into SEO that has nationwide or worldwide coverage can be a waste if your business is only in one area. For example, if your business was only stationed in a small town in Georgia, being at the top of a search list for someone in Alaska wouldn’t be very helpful. In addition, people specifically looking for businesses in your area might not see your search results as quickly because of their location specific keywords and phrases.

If you’re a small business with a local focus, local SEO can generate a lot of website traffic and draw in many customers. With some quick research and the creation of valuable local SEO oriented website content, you can reach the top of any related search result list.[/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]

Meta Data Optimization For Professional Services Websites

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Generally professional legal service websites are heavily Google centric and do not receive much organic search traffic from other search engines like BING or Yahoo. Another KPI, conversion rate of organic traffic, was also lower than expected. Reviewing the top performing attorney websites in several major metro markets in diverse practice areas, from many competitors websites like Justia, iLawyer marketing and SLS marketing, highlighting the use of unique meta data to maximize their organic audience and improve search engine indexation and page relevance to search user queries. The websites that showed up well in SERP’s page with greater visibility and frequency had a common characteristic of unique Meta keywords, unique Meta descriptions and unique title tags.

paid-search-marketingHow Search Engines Use Meta Data

While it is common marketing knowledge that Google does not read meta keywords for use in their algorithm as stated frequently by Matt Cutts from Google, there are 1,00’s of other search engines that do use this information to help establish page relevance and better indexation. Consider these two points about how search engines use Meta data.

  • While Google may not read Meta data, why do they stress it in their webmaster tool? In Google Webmaster tools under HTML improvements, WMT commonly lists and shows duplicative Meta data. Google actually recommends through their Webmaster tools to go “old school SEO” and improve your website by remove duplicative Meta data and provide unique titles, keywords, and descriptions for greater relevancy to user queries.
  • Recently Google has gone back to indexing news sites with Meta data.  Google recommends news sites and news articles identify story topics with by using unique Meta keywords to gain better relevancy and topic clarification.

Professional search engine marketers that used consistent quality guidelines to build websites, have continued to include unique Meta content in every site build. Many SEO’s focused on rank tend to ignore quality guidelines while reacting to the latest SEO trend. All the domains that ignore the practice of building page relevancy now have to play catch up, and here’s why.

Algorithm Changes In Google

In April 2012 Matt Cutts in one of his blog posts mentioned Google’s upcoming efforts to improve the site quality and user experience.  At that time, Google was looking to increase the quality of SERP’s by penalizing sites that were openly over-optimizing their domains with questionable SEO practices. This particular algorithm update was called Penguin. Penguin 1.1 was launched around April 24, 2012 and adjusted search results for a number of spam factors including non-diverse back link profiles, aggressive redundant anchor text, keyword stuffing and over-optimized title tags to name a few. This “over-optimization” of title tags includes titles that well exceed the standard character limitations. One common misdiagnosed SEO problem from Penguin is that it’s only link problem, when in fact it might be an poor optimization or over-optimization problem.

Most Meta data has a standard number of characters that will be displayed across the search engines. For example, title tags of 70 characters or less will show up in a Google search and 72 characters or less will show up in a BING or Yahoo search. When you research top performing sites you will see that many of these sites use no more than 70 characters to identify what each page is all about. Most websites that exceed 70 characters and use an abundance of keywords in the title tags tend to perform at a less than optimal level along with being poorly indexed.

SEO Industry Standards “Old School” Style

When it comes to keyword usage in the Meta keywords, the general rule of thumb is 3 to 5 unique keywords that support the relevancy of the page. A common SEO “black hat” tactic is to stuff a bunch of keywords in the string, repeat keywords in this string, or simply ignore the keywords because “Google doesn’t read it”. All of these are bad ideas. The Meta keywords help explains what the page is about, especially when the primary keyword of the page topic being the first phrase listed. The remaining keywords need to be relevant and non-duplicative to the primary keyword. Semantic indexing further reinforces the quality of the on page topic and improves the search engines understanding of what the page is truly all about. The outcome is that this page is easier to index because it is easier for search bots to understand. The byproduct of helping the search engines identify and understand the content on the page is with correct and consistent basic optimization is better placement in the results pages.

Social Media Networking For Online Marketing

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SOCIAL NETWORKING FOR INTERNET MARKETING

Social media networking sites (such as Twitter, FaceBook, and Google+) allow Internet users to form communities online quickly and easily, from groups of friends to business networking. These groups of networked individuals, often in similar demographic groups, have become a virtual gold mine for Internet marketers, who can place their message in front of members of their target market on social networking sites for little or no cost.

Social media networking sites have also become an easily abused Internet marketing tool, forcing social networking sites to crack down on new types of spam (such as message spam and bulletin spam on Myspace). This spam is a result of people artificially inflating “friend” counts (the number of other members in their social network) through mass-adding and bots.  The owners of these profiles will then sometimes market their own products, or charge others to have their URLs blasted to the bulletin board of thousands of other members.

Why Social Media Spam Doesn’t Work

Simply put, social networking spam doesn’t work. That’s not to say there won’t be any conversion for the marketing effort, but rather that it very rarely will offer a decent return on investment in comparison to other marketing tactics. Here’s why:

1. Huge social networking accounts rarely are filled with targeted members. Therefore, those seeing the message won’t likely be members of the target market (unless someone’s marketing something like a Facebook resource site, or a band marketing to legitimate fans, which are two exceptions to the rule)

2. Many of these paid posts (often in “bulletin” form) are only highly visible in limited quantities, based on post time, and only when a member is logged in. Therefore, most members blasted won’t ever even see the message.

3. Even if targeted members of a market do see the message, actually open the message, and actually read it, there’s still the traditionally very low response rate common in most direct marketing methods.

Ways to Use Social Media Networking Effectively for Internet Marketing

1. Build a highly targeted “friend” list, rather than using bots.

2. Personally welcome any new members of your network, or at least as many as possible.

3. Time bulletins and messages to when members of the target market will likely be online.

4. Offer something of value (like news or exclusive information) in the posts, rather than simply sending links.

5. Contact members regularly to keep the message in front of them, but don’t overdo it, to the point of looking like a spammer.

6. Join groups on social networking sites related to the niche, and promote in them where it doesn’t violate group rules.