Blog – Page 52

Mobile-Friendliness Is Now One of Google's Ranking Factors

Last Updated: March 9, 2015

Does your website have a mobile version yet? If not, you only have one month before your rankings will begin to suffer. Starting April 21, your ranking on Google will be affected by whether or not your site is mobile friendly.
The new update, which was announced by Google on February 26 and takes effect on April 21, will impact all Google searches that take place on mobile devices. We’ve been expecting this move for some time now, as Google has been gradually making changes to increase the importance of having a mobile-friendly site. For instance, back in November 2014, Google rolled out a “mobile friendly” label to mark mobile search results that meet its criteria for mobile-friendliness. It even sent out notifications to website owners earlier this year, advising them to fix their sites’ mobile usability issues before their rankings were affected.
As Search Engine Watch’s Jay Taylor concludes, “This announcement eliminates any doubts regarding the beneficial treatment mobile-friendly websites will receive in the way of better rankings moving forward. If you don’t yet have a mobile-friendly website, it’s time to get to work.”
If you’re a Prospect Genius client and have a LeadTrax™ site from us, then you have nothing to worry about! All of our LeadTrax sites are automatically designed to be mobile friendly. But if you’re using your own site, the time to act is now. Conduct a mobile-friendliness test on Google’s webmasters page to see if your site meets Google’s criteria. If it doesn’t, then you better give us a call for help.

Facebook Is the New Google

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

Facebook isn’t just for stalking your old classmates anymore. In the past few years, Facebook has evolved into a hub for exchanging information—everything from political opinions to diet tips to breaking news—among friends, coworkers, and relatives. People even outsource their own questions, asking trusted friends who they recommend for local doctors, dentists, hair dressers, repairmen, contractors, and so on. That means local businesses and service providers have a unique opportunity on Facebook: They can take advantage of this crowdsourcing trend and promote themselves right on Facebook, where people are already looking for info about them.
In fact, Facebook is slowly replacing Google as the go-to resource for local search. People used to turn to Google to find local appliance repairmen, plumbers, landscapers, and the like, but there was no way to know whether these professionals were actually reliable or not. Hence the uptick in crowdsourcing on Facebook. Now, people realize it’s much more easy and effective to ask the people they know and trust for their personal recommendations—instead of taking a gamble on the business that happened to have the best ranking on Google.

Optimize Your Facebook

To take advantage of this new opportunity, you must make your Facebook presence as appealing as possible to prospective customers. Here’s what you need:

Page “Likes.” A Facebook Page without fans is like a restaurant without patrons. People passing by will not go in because the restaurant is empty, implying that it’s unpopular. In other words, more “Likes” on your Page will give your business more credibility.
Reviews. Customer reviews used to just be nice to have. Then, they became integral in attracting new customers. Now, they’re a vital part of your local search rankings on Google. You simply must get your customers to leave reviews on your company’s Facebook Page.
Page activity. Your Page is a showcase for your company’s personality and expertise. You should be posting status updates, uploading photos, and sharing helpful articles on a consistent basis (at least a few times a week), otherwise your audience will see no value in following your Page.
An attractive profile. Your company’s description should be well written and captivating. Your profile picture and header should be unique, high-quality images that are relevant to your business—not grainy snapshots of your own face. You want Page visitors to see how professional your team really is.
Regular engagement. To show your audience that you care, you should be interacting with them regularly. When they comment on one of your posts, respond. When they leave a review, good or bad, thank them for their feedback. This is your chance to hear what your customers and prospects are thinking and to let them know that you’re listening.

What You Can Do Yourself

There are many aspects of social media marketing that you can take care of yourself. Maintaining a presence on Facebook is something that’s entirely within your abilities if you have the time and energy. Here are some of the Facebook tasks that are pretty DIY friendly:

Sharing status updates. It only takes a minute to share what your company has been up to for the past few days.
Uploading photos and/or videos of your work. Smartphones make it super easy to take photos and videos, and the Facebook app makes it even easier to upload them straight to your timeline.
Sharing links to relevant articles and/or blog posts. If you come across an item online that you think your audience would appreciate, it takes almost no time at all to copy and paste the link on Facebook.
Interacting with your audience (e.g. posing questions, replying to comments, etc.). As soon as you get a notification that someone has commented on a post or left you a review, take a quick moment to read it and respond. It’s also easy to engage with your fans simply by asking them about their plans for the weekend or an upcoming holiday.

What You Should Leave to Us

Of course, having some extra time on your hands isn’t always enough to make an impressive Facebook presence. If you really want to promote your brand and put yourself in front of local prospects, then you’ll need to consider some more advanced strategies. However, advanced strategies call for advanced expertise. The below tasks require the kind of experience you can only find at Prospect Genius:

Promoting sponsored ads. We have years of experience working with paid ads. We use those countless data points to identify trends and help your ads get the most visibility and highest conversion rates possible. Plus, since Facebook uses a CPM model instead of CPC (in other words, you pay for ad impressions instead of clicks), you’ll need a team that knows how to set up your campaign so you aren’t hemorrhaging money.
Implementing a “Like” campaign. Again, since we’re able to draw on our wealth of experience with paid ads, we know how to test and rotate ads so they drive the most “Likes” to your page.
Continuously sharing content. Even if you have the time to post on Facebook, you may not know exactly what to say. That’s where our SocialStream package comes in handy. Our professional writers will add a certain number of blog posts each month to your LeadTrax™ site, and our production specialists will share them on all of your social media accounts. It’s the best way to share useful, high-quality content with your audience on a consistent basis.

Lather, Rinse, Repeat

Social media is a lifestyle. It’s not a one-and-done campaign. Maintaining a solid Facebook presence requires lots of repetition. You need to be continuously active on your account. Your activity can’t just last for one month and then taper off, or else you’ll miss out on countless potential fans. If you don’t think you’ll be able to maintain consistent activity on Facebook, then you should seriously consider calling for reinforcements. Our professionals will give you plenty of valuable content to share and can even promote your brand through sponsored ads. You can’t afford to ignore such a vital (and mostly free) advertising platform… Give us a call and start coordinating with our team today!

Online Advertising Guarantees Are Just Tricks

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

Let’s say you’re an appliance repairman. If you were to install a new part in a washing machine, you would most likely guarantee the quality of your handiwork, but you probably wouldn’t specifically guarantee how clean your customer’s clothes would come out of the wash. Why not? Because there would be too many variables out of your control, like whether the customer added enough detergent, whether they packed the machine too full, or how dirty the clothes were when they were put into the wash. While you can advise your customer on how to best use a washing machine and explain what normally happens when clothes are put into a washing machine, you can’t actually guarantee specific results. A lot of that is up to the customer and the washing machine itself.
Man lying with fingers crossed
This scenario translates to online advertising. Advertisers are the appliance repairman, Google is the washing machine, and quality lead generation is the clean clothing. While it may seem reasonable at first to ask for guaranteed results from your advertising provider, it’s just not something we can do because there are so many variables that are out of our control. We can give you a ballpark estimate of results based on the typical trajectory of a campaign, but we cannot guarantee you specific results. And you should question any provider who does.
In this post, we’ll take a look at some of the most common types of online advertising guarantees and explain why you should think twice before believing them.

Guaranteed Number of Calls

There are plenty of online advertising providers who guarantee you’ll get “X” number of calls through their campaign. But here are some questions you should ask:

What kind of calls count?
Are they counting unique calls or repeat calls?
Are they counting existing customers?
Are they counting misdials?
Are they counting solicitation calls?
Are they counting calls for services you don’t offer?
Are they counting calls from totally different geographic areas?
Are your calls being sent to multiple other businesses at the same time?
What kind of timeline are they using to count the calls? Is it per month? per year?

Providers may guarantee a certain number of calls, but when you start digging for answers, you’ll usually see that their guarantees mean nothing. Even if they do fulfill their guarantee of “X” number of calls, they could be sending you lots of calls unrelated to your services, calls from outside of your service area, or calls that have been shared with your direct competitors. And unless they say otherwise, it could take the entire span of your campaign to reach the promised number of calls. In short, a certain number of calls does not guarantee success for your business.

Guaranteed Number of Leads

Meanwhile, some providers guarantee that they’ll send you a certain number of leads. In this context, the difference between leads and calls is that leads are sent to you in the form of a prospect’s contact info, and they require you to track down that individual in order to obtain their business. If an advertising company guarantees you a certain number of leads, here’s what you should ask:

Are they sending live leads to you?
Are they also sharing those leads with your competitors?
- If so, how many?
Are they sending leads that aren’t actually relevant to your service offerings?
Are they sending leads from the wrong geographic areas?
Are they counting leads from existing customers?
Are they counting leads from repeat customers?
Are they counting spam e-mails?
What kind of timeline are they using to count the leads? Is it per month? per year?

Just like providers who guarantee a certain number of calls, providers who guarantee leads will always find loopholes to get around their own promises. To satisfy their guarantee and provide you with the highest number of leads possible, they might just send you leads for any old service, even if you don’t provide that service. They also might be sending you leads that are simultaneously going to other clients, who are most likely your direct competitors. By sending you poor-quality leads or leads that aren’t exclusive to you, they’re able to fulfill their promise without actually helping your business.

Guaranteed Search Engine Rankings

One of the most common guarantees floating around the online advertising industry is for “first-page” rankings on search engines. If they say that they’ll put you on page one, there are a lot of technical loopholes that they might be going through in order to make that happen. Here’s what you should be asking:

Are you ranking in organic search results, as a sponsored ad, or in the maps section?
Who is performing the search?
Which search terms are you ranking for?
Which search engine are you actually ranking on?
If they’re using Google, are they searching while signed in to their accounts?
Will they clear their own search and browsing history before performing the search?
Do they turn off their browser cookies?
Are they using a proxy server?
Are they always using the same IP address?
Which web browser are they using?
What location are they searching in?
Are they searching from a desktop computer or from a mobile device?
How long will the page-one ranking last?
Are they just going to take over your existing Google My Business listing?

As you can see, these guarantees can get extremely complicated because there are so many technical factors that play a role in rankings. It’s easy for a provider to work around their page-one guarantee by simply manipulating all the right variables. Normal searches aren’t going to produce the same results.
For instance, if it’s a PPC campaign, then it won’t take much–aside from a lot of money–to get your business on the first page of Google, as sponsored results automatically display at the top of the first page. The specific search terms that they’re using to determine your ranking also matter: Are you ranking for natural search terms like “appliance repair in Albany, NY,” or are you ranking for “Bob’s Appliance Repair, 123 Main St, Albany, NY 12203″? You’ll probably rank at the top when someone searches for your exact company name and location, but that’s not what makes an advertising campaign effective or successful.
The final bullet point is especially important. If you already have a Google My Business listing in good standing, there are many providers who will seek you out because all they have to do to satisfy the guarantee is take over your listing, even though most of the SEO work was done before they even got there. It’s a dishonest tactic, but many providers fulfill their guarantee this way.

Guarantees Are Traps

Providers offer guarantees because they know how to grab your attention. But the takeaway from this post should be that online advertising guarantees, when boiled down, mean nothing. Just like with every other form of advertising that has ever existed in the world, online advertisers can’t actually guarantee results that are ultimately out of their control. If a provider does guarantee you specific results, you should be very, very skeptical.

Prospect Genius Writer Publishes First Novel

Last Updated: February 13, 2015

The Distance Between Lost and Found
It’s a proud moment for the Prospect Genius team. Kathryn Holmes, one of our talented writers, is celebrating the publication of her debut novel, The Distance Between Lost and Found, with HarperCollins Publishers.
From the author:

The Distance Between Lost and Found (HarperCollins/HarperTeen) is a literary young adult novel about three teens who get lost in the Smoky Mountains. The narrator, Hallelujah “Hallie” Calhoun, is a social outcast following an incident with the preacher’s son six months ago, and getting lost may just be the only way she can find her sense of self and her voice again.

An East Tennessee native, Holmes says this book is her love letter to the Smoky Mountains: “I truly feel like the setting is a character in its own right. In writing this vivid, beautiful, wild, and yes, at times, scary mountain setting, as well as in depicting teens like those I grew up with, I felt like I was paying homage to my home.”
Holmes received her undergraduate degree from Goucher College in Baltimore, MD, and her MFA in Creative Writing from The New School in New York City. She currently lives in Brooklyn. You can find out more about Holmes and the book (including snippets from advance reviews) on her website, www.kathrynholmes.com. The book is available from HarperCollins in hardcover and e-book form.
The Distance Between Lost and Found hits shelves Tuesday, February 17, 2015. Look for it on Amazon, iTunes, Barnes & Noble, or your local independent book store!

The Do's and Don'ts of Expanding Your Campaign

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

Thinking about expanding your Prospect Genius campaign in 2015? It’s not uncommon for clients to want to take their campaigns to the next level after being with us for a certain amount of time and achieving a certain level of success. You want to see how far you can take your online advertising campaign, and we can’t blame you!
You should feel free to make upgrades and additions to your Prospect Genius campaign, but be careful: more does not always mean better. Here’s what to do and what not to do.

Goal: Expand Service Offerings

If your goal is to expand your service offerings…

DO NOT just add any old service to your site.

It may be tempting to stack up your services as a way of offering the widest selection possible, but that strategy could actually backfire. Google likes specificity. The more laser-targeted your offering is, the more credible you’ll be in Google’s eyes. Love it or hate it, it’s just the reality of dealing with Google and their expectations. Google likes to put things in tidy boxes, so even if you do offer an eclectic range of services, your Internet marketing strategy should focus only on advertising what’s relevant to your main category.

DO add specialized service pages to your LeadTrax™ site.

Instead of just tacking on extra services, a more effective way to generate leads from your service offerings is to offer specialty services. Think depth over breadth. By offering a specialized service like Samsung or LG appliance repair, you’ll be able to capture attention from prospects who have highly specific needs and corner that niche market. Google likes this approach, too, so the hyper-specific search terms targeted by these pages rank really well. We’ve had many clients see fantastic success by adding specific brand pages and specialty pages to their LeadTrax sites.

Goal: Expand Your Market

If your goal is to expand your market or service area…

DO NOT create a fake Google listing.

If you want to reach a different geographic area, do not under any circumstances create a new Google My Places listing with a fake address. It may seem like a shortcut to getting listed in a different area, but this trick would only work if you actually had another physical location at that address. Google uses Google Earth technology, their own cars, and even local volunteers to check out new listings and determine whether they’re valid. If you try to pull the wool over Google’s eyes, you’ll pay the price with a suspended or penalized listing (which can take up to 12 months to rectify). So while faking an address may give you a temporary improvement in rankings, it’s not worth the risk of what could be a year or more of penalties and other problems.

DO use a pay-per-click campaign.

This is the smarter alternative to creating a fake listing. Did you know that pay-per-click (PPC) isn’t as geographically limited as organic SEO is? That means adding our PPC package to the mix will help you to expand your geographic market, regardless of whether you’re already a Prospect Genius Core member or you’re using one of our à-la-carte services. While local search is dictated by the address on your Google listing, PPC is much more flexible. You get to decide on how broad or narrow your targeted geographic area is. For example, you could choose to target ads specifically at Schenectady, NY, or you could choose to widen your ads’ reach to all of Albany County. It’s totally up to you. In other words, PPC will allow you to reach a wider audience without hurting your organic local search rankings.

Goal: Maximize Results From Online Advertising

If your goal is to get even more out of your online advertising efforts…

DO NOT use two SEO companies.

You might think, “My campaign is doing well. I’ll add another one to get even better results!” That couldn’t be farther from the truth when it comes to SEO. While combining organic search optimization and paid search optimization typically generates great success, combining two organic search campaigns from two different providers will do the opposite. Working with two separate SEO companies at the same time will essentially sabotage both your campaigns. Read more about this in our blog post, “For SEO Companies, Two’s a Crowd.”
This principle applies to all forms of online advertising: You don’t want to hire two different companies that provide the exact same services. Whether it’s two SEO providers or two social media specialists, they’ll counteract each other’s work, get in each other’s way, and create a disaster for your web presence.

DO leverage social media.

If you want to get more out of your online advertising without sabotaging your own campaign or paying for PPC, then optimize your social media presence. By leveraging all the social media tools available to you for free, or even taking advantage of our specialists who can do the work for you, you’ll be able to reach customers in a whole new way. Not only will you be able to spread the word about your business more efficiently, but you’ll also create a terrific showcase for your business’s unique personality. When prospects get a glimpse of what your company is about and see that there are real people behind it, they’ll be much more likely to connect with you. Plus, the more “Likes” you have on Facebook and followers you have on Twitter, the more credible your business will seem to prospective customers.
To that end, consider taking advantage of Prospect Genius’s SocialStart or SocialStream packages. If you’re looking for an even greater push, we also perform Facebook ad campaigns that will boost your posts and get more “Likes” for your page.

Always Ask Questions

If you want to expand your campaign but you’re having trouble setting goals or deciding where to start, give us a call! We’re always happy to discuss your company’s needs and work on a solution that fits perfectly.

Prospect Genius

Mobile-Friendliness Is Now One of Google's Ranking Factors

Prospect Genius Writer Publishes First Novel

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