Blog – Page 53

Here's Why You Should Get a BBB Accreditation

Last Updated: January 30, 2015

In a recent blog post on LocalVisibilitySystem.com, Philip A. Rozek highlights several reasons why business owners should get accredited by the Better Business Bureau (BBB). Titled, “BBB Accreditation: Boring But Bumps Your Local SEO,” the post lists eight significant advantages that come with an accreditation from the Bureau.
Some of the advantages are more technical and have to do with the valuable, high-quality link that comes from your listing on the BBB website. Other advantages are easier for small business owners to wrap their heads around. For example, according to Rozek:

BBB accreditation adds credibility to your business (as many consumers put a lot of stock in the BBB as an objective resource).
Your BBB listing may serve as an extra platform for customer reviews.
The BBB website ranks very well for search terms containing business names.
The “BBB Accredited Business” seal is a symbol of quality that prospects will immediately recognize upon visiting your website.
The contact information on your listing serves as an accurate citation from a credible site (and good citations are key to local search rankings).

At Prospect Genius, we encourage all of our clients to get a BBB accreditation. We will happily add the accreditation seal to your LeadTrax™ site once it’s official. Our goal is to maximize your lead generation success, and getting this accreditation is just one small thing you can do to help us make that happen.

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.

Are You Spending Your Online Advertising Dollars Wisely?

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

Throwing Money Away

Are you getting your money’s worth from your online advertising expenses?
That’s the question many business owners should be asking themselves. You already know that having a web presence is crucial and that hiring an online advertising professional is worth the investment—but are you making the right investment for your company? Once you’ve decided to hire a provider, it’s a little more difficult to figure out if you’re actually getting the best return possible.

What Are the Options?

There are advertising options for every budget, and they can be categorized into a three-tier system of pricing.

Top-tier providers are suited for large, competitive markets and undefined geographic boundaries, and are therefore very expensive.
Mid-tier providers are perfectly serviceable for niche markets and narrow geographic boundaries, and are therefore more affordable than top-tier providers.
Bottom-tier providers are entry-level online advertisers who provide one-size-fits-all marketing, and are therefore considerably cheap.

To simplify matters, we’ll use general terms and average rates to discuss the advertising providers in each tier (as specific services and price points vary from provider to provider). Obviously, the tier that you’ll want to use will depend on your company’s marketing budget as well as its needs. At the end of the day, you want to get the best possible online advertising services that you can afford for your business.

Top-Tier Providers

In this tier, clients have a range of advertising options to choose from. However, the two most prominent options are premium outside marketers and in-house marketers.
OUTSIDE MARKETERS
Premium marketing services from outside providers generally cost around $10,000 per month or more. Not surprisingly, these services are typically reserved for large corporations that have broad national or international campaigns. Regional campaigns (in New England or on the West Coast, for example) with a more focused market will cost maybe half, but that’s still in the ballpark of $5,000. Regardless, let’s use $10,000 as the baseline price. That adds up to $120,000 spent on Internet marketing services in one year.
So, what are you getting for $120,000 per year? You’re paying for high-end, 100% customized services from a small firm that only takes on a handful of clients at a time. You’ll get personal attention at all hours of the day. Your hired specialists won’t have tons of data points to work from, given that they typically don’t focus on more than a few clients in a given year, but they’ll still be able to draw on experience from previous and other current clients in order to evolve their approach when necessary.
IN-HOUSE MARKETERS
The other top-tier option is to hire an in-house team that performs numerous online marketing activities for your company. This will involve hiring at least one promotions specialist on a yearly salary that falls between $50,000 and $55,000. (Keep in mind, costs for in-house employees go beyond salary; you must also account for health benefits, personal equipment, and other overhead costs.) However, if you want an efficient marketing team, then you’ll want to hire a couple of additional specialists, as well. If you hire just two promotions specialists, you’re already looking at a yearly cost of $100,000 to $110,000 in salary alone.
What are you getting from your in-house marketing team? You’re getting a team that, by definition, is under your employ and therefore at your beck and call. Attention to your campaign can’t get more personalized than that. However, this team is only working on one campaign, so it won’t have the benefit of A/B testing and multiple data points that come with an outside provider who has many different clients. This means they may not be able to spot trends in updated search algorithms or test new techniques with as much confidence.
THE WINNER
With the average costs of both options being relatively equal, we’d say that premium services from an outside provider will get you the biggest bang for your buck. However, they’re both viable and effective options.

Mid-Tier Providers

On the other end of the spectrum, mid-tier providers are for local businesses that are marketing to a niche audience in a restricted geographic area. These are plumbers, electricians, handymen, and similar businesses. Prospect Genius is a mid-tier provider.
This type of provider may cost between $300 and $500 per month. With these providers, a campaign is roughly 20% customized, with the remainder following a standardized procedure that’s used for all other clients. Although the vast majority of small businesses have similar advertising needs and face similar issues, mid-tier providers will work with clients to tailor campaigns as much as possible within the framework of their program. These kinds of campaigns are effective because small, localized markets aren’t very competitive and don’t require as much legwork to get off the ground.
What are you getting for $300 to $500 per month? You get all the online advertising essentials: a fully functional website with custom content, Google+ Local optimization, directory listings, social media exposure, and (usually) performance reports. Mid-tier providers typically work with hundreds and hundreds of clients who all have similar needs, so they’re exposed to a high number of data points that allows for accurate A/B testing. This means they will be able to detect patterns with different search engines and continually test new techniques to create the most effective strategy possible.
With mid-tier providers, there’s also plenty of room for clients to grow. Typical mid-tier providers will offer a wide selection of campaign upgrades and add-on features that clients may take advantage of at their own discretion. Popular expansion features include social media updates, blog posts, and pay-per-click (PPC) ads. Clients usually start out paying for the bread-and-butter package, but over time they might like their campaign’s results so much that they want to add to it to make it even stronger.

Bottom-Tier Providers

Otherwise known as “one-size-fits-all” marketers, these providers cater to small, local businesses who don’t wish to spend much money on advertising. You’ll find a lot of snake oil in this tier. These providers usually cost about $100 per month because their services and strategies apply to every one of their clients with little to no variation whatsoever. They sell the same exact product to every single client, which is how they keep their costs down. Some of the better known providers in this category are Yodle and 99 Calls.
Well, $100 a month sounds pretty cheap! But what are you getting out of it? You’re getting a one- or two-page website that’s identical to many of the provider’s other clients, as well as written content that’s been outsourced to a non-native English speaker. What’s more, most of that content is duplicated from one client to the next, with only minor details like company name and location changed. (As we all know, Google penalizes duplicate content.) But, in a way, their practices make sense: With $50 of your $100 going to overhead costs, and another $25 going to profit, these providers only have about $25 to actually spend on your campaign per month. They’re doing all they can afford to do.
Unlike mid-tier providers, who not only offer room for customization but also room for growth, most bottom-tier providers don’t offer any expansion features. What you see is what you get. The providers that do offer expansion features essentially just upgrade you to a campaign similar to a mid-tier one. In these cases, where they clearly have the resources to provide you with a better service, they should have just sold you the right solution from the start.

Go for the Best

When selecting an online advertiser, you should apply the same logic that you use when you’re selecting tools for your trade. When you go to the hardware store to purchase a new tool for your plumbing or remodeling business, do you buy the cheapest tools—or do you buy the best tools? You shouldn’t spend beyond your means, but you also shouldn’t skimp on quality, either.
Whether you’re currently in the market for a new online advertiser or you’ve been using the same one for years, keep this in mind: You get what you pay for.

"Local Search Puzzle" Pieced Together in One Simple Image

Last Updated: January 7, 2015

Having trouble understanding exactly what goes into your site’s local search rankings, no matter how many times your account manager attempts to demystify it? This should help.

Linda Buquet, a local search specialist and community leader of Local Search Forum, recently posted this illustration that simplifies the “puzzle” of local search. As the image shows, the four main components of local search are:

Google (reviews and Google+)
On-page SEO
Citations
Backlinks and social signals

Let’s break those down.

1. Google

This first component is fairly self-explanatory. The state of your business’s Google+ Local page, as well as your number of customer reviews, will contribute to your ranking. The more optimized your listing is, and the more (positive) customer reviews you have, the better your ranking will be.
Prospect Genius optimizes your listings for you, but only you have control over how many reviews you get.

2. On-Page SEO

Your website’s pages must all be optimized to appeal to Google’s search algorithms. The content must be deemed “valuable,” i.e. targeted at specific search terms, fully relevant to those search terms, and generally informative.
All of Prospect Genius’s LeadTrax™ sites are designed to fulfill this component.

3. Citations

“Citation” may not be a word you’re familiar with in the context of local SEO. It refers to all of the instances in which your business name appears alongside your contact information (e.g. address and phone number). Accuracy and consistency are crucial. Citations most often come from online directories and Internet yellow pages, but they may also occur in newspapers, magazines, local blogs, and social media posts.
Several of Prospect Genius’s packages, including Directory Dominator, Core, and Premium, will add your business info to numerous directories, thus ensuring accuracy across the board and driving up your citation score.

4. Backlinks and Social Signals

Backlinks are also commonly called “inbound links.” They refer to links that exist on one website and link to your own website. A high number of backlinks will drive up your local search ranking.
The same goes for social signals, which are data points that tell Google how appealing your website is on a human level. If lots of people are sharing links to your website on social media and your company’s social media account has lots of “Likes” or followers, then those valuable social signals will boost your local search ranking.
A handful of our packages, including Core, SocialStart, and SocialStream, will set you up with Facebook and Twitter accounts, thus setting you on the right course to gain more social signals.
Need further clarification? Don’t hesitate to give us a call or send us an e-mail!

Actionable Lessons From 2014 That You Need to Know

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

Did you feel overwhelmed this year by what seemed like a constant barrage of Google updates? You’re not the only one. A series of new guidelines, new dashboards, and new search algorithm updates made it a full-time job to stay on top of Google in 2014. As a business owner with your own hectic schedule, you probably weren’t able to keep up with those changes as much as you would have liked. That’s okay. Prospect Genius is here to highlight the most important points to take away from all of 2014’s changes.

Person jumping over 2015 What’s the underlying lesson? As Google continued to refine its search algorithms, and search engine optimization continued to adapt, we were reminded that it’s just as important for your campaign to have a solid foundation as it is for your campaign to evolve with Google’s changes.

Here, we give you some of the actionable insights we gleaned from 2014 so you can have an even stronger campaign through 2015.

Oldies but Goodies

The more things change, the more they stay the same. This year, we saw firsthand that some of the old, tried-and-true ways for business owners to lay the groundwork for a campaign still work. Here are a couple of classic ways you can take initiative and make sure you’re primed for a strong campaign, no matter what updates Google throws your way.
GET REVIEWS
We’ve said it over and over again on this blog, but we can’t say it enough: Customer reviews are a crucial aspect of your online presence. When prospective customers see a significant number of reviews and a positive consensus about your company’s services, they will be exponentially more likely to hire you for a job.
In 2014, we saw many clients experience great success with their SEO campaigns after fortifying them with strong customer reviews. Take a look at a few for yourself:

Conner & Sons Repair — This Michigan-based appliance repair company has a 4.9 rating (out of 5.0) from 34 reviews on its Google listing. Its first year with PG, this company got approximately 65 calls per month; the second year, it averaged over 100; the third year over 200. In August 2014, it received a whopping 551 calls! That number hasn’t dropped below 300 since.
Ace Appliance Repair, Inc. — Based in New Jersey, Ace Appliance Repair has a stellar 5.0 rating from 23 reviews! Not surprisingly, these appliance repair pros went from around 75 calls per month last year to 120-160 calls per month this year.
Jimmy Gusky Heating & Air LLC — This D.C.-metro outfit boasts a 4.6 rating from 14 reviews. That’s a slightly lower number than the two clients above, but this company is already pulling in around 75 calls per month!

While there’s no way to definitively prove that the high number of reviews in these cases caused the high number of leads, we certainly don’t think it’s a coincidence. The takeaway? You should always be asking customers to leave reviews on your Google listing. Your company’s success may depend on it.
SHARE YOUR LOCAL BUSINESS LISTINGS
This is another topic we’ve written about extensively, and it still holds true: Prospect Genius—or any online advertiser, for that matter—needs access to clients’ Google My Business accounts in order to properly optimize and manage them. We need to keep tabs on your local business listing’s performance and update it whenever necessary to remain in compliance with Google’s ever-changing guidelines.
We understand the hesitancy to share log-in information in this day and age, but that’s why Google instituted the Google My Business platform, which allows you to name a manager of your account without requiring that manager to have your password. But if you don’t name Prospect Genius as the manager of your listing, then we’ll have difficulty tracking your campaign performance and making sure all of your online information matches. This could result in conflicting information (something Google will penalize you for) and poor visibility.
As we said in our April 2014 blog post, “Hand Over Your Google+ Local Listing to a Pro“:

If you’re paying for professional online advertising services, it’s wiser to let your money work for you. You’ve made an investment in an online advertising company, so why not facilitate that company’s job to the best of your abilities? Rather than complicating matters by actively interfering with your own listings, you’re better off relinquishing a little control and letting your hired specialist do the work.

You’ve trusted Prospect Genius to perform your online advertising, so let us do the job right.

Today’s Top Hits

So, you’ve laid a strong foundation. Your content is valuable, your online reviews are glowing, and your advertiser has access to your listings. Now, it’s equally important that you make the necessary upgrades in order to adapt to Internet marketing’s ever-evolving landscape. It’s imperative to keep up with Google’s changes, or you’ll get left behind.
In 2014, we were able to examine the latest algorithm updates and determine some of the most significant actions our clients can take to boost their campaign performance going forward. Here are the highlights.
USE PAID ADVERTISING
Paid advertising became even more prevalent in 2014. Pay-per-click, or PPC, is widely recognized as a valuable investment, and it’s even more effective when combined with SEO. (Read more about that here: “Optimize Your Site Before You Bid on AdWords.”) PPC and SEO complement each other, as a site with optimized content will have a higher “Quality Score” and therefore see greater PPC success. Having an optimized site will also allow you to pay less for bids on AdWords. The best way to integrate PPC with your existing Prospect Genius campaign is to upgrade from Core to the Premium package.
In fact, PPC has grown so much in popularity that Pauline Jakober, a leading paid search strategist, recently published a whole article on Search Engine Land dedicated to extolling its benefits. Titled “5 Incredibly Practical Reasons to Do PPC in 2015,” Jakober’s article cites PPC’s consumer-targeting capability and lightning-fast results as top reasons to start using PPC this year.
Paid advertising can be leveraged outside of search engines, too. Many social media platforms, most notably Facebook, offer some form of paid advertising. In Facebook’s case, a business can create sponsored posts, which are posts you pay Facebook to target at a specified demographic. The sponsored post will then appear in the news feeds of individuals within that targeted group. Ultimately, as your posts reach more and more people, you’ll see an increase in your number of Page “Likes.”
PUBLISH MORE CONTENT
These days, Google’s algorithms favor websites that have a continuous flow of fresh content. The way Google sees it, the more up-to-date content is for its users, the better. This doesn’t mean you have to add a new page to your site every week; it just means you have to make updates every once in a while.
The best and easiest way to do that is to add a few short blog posts every month. (Every Prospect Genius LeadTrax™ site comes equipped with a fully functional blog you can update at will.) Posts don’t have to be lengthy or detailed—they just have to show prospective customers that you care about them and that you’re passionate about your work. You can recount a recent job so prospects can get a glimpse at what your process looks like, or you can give a few handy tips to homeowners. An updated blog will show off your knowledge about your trade, and it will boost your site’s SEO value to boot.
TARGET YOUR CONTENT
Specificity has become hugely important with the latest search algorithm updates. To use this to your advantage, try adding a couple of pages to your LeadTrax site that are specific to one brand or product. This way, you can capture targeted searches for things like Maytag appliance repair, Trane furnace repair, and so on.

Your Participation Is Key

Prioritizing user experience, Google constantly seeks to improve the quality of its search results. That means Prospect Genius has to make a continuous effort to elevate the perceived (and actual) value of our clients’ websites. But while we’re hard at work on your site, it’s just as important for you to do your part. Take initiative.

Make a concerted effort to get more reviews from your customers.
Give us access to your Google (and Facebook) listing.
Let us display your address on Google+ Local.
Write your own blog posts.
Add more specific pages to your LeadTrax site.

No matter how many updates Google makes to its guidelines and search algorithms, there’s one thing we’ve learned that will never change: When you take an active role in your campaign, the results will grow exponentially.
Here’s to a prosperous 2015!

Prospect Genius

Here's Why You Should Get a BBB Accreditation

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?

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