best practices

Why You Need High-Quality Images on Social Media to Build Trust

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

It’s no secret you need photos and images to fill out your website. After all, who wants to look at a website that’s 100% text? This is one of the reasons we’re always asking our clients to send us pictures of their business. Whether they’re group shots of the whole staff, pictures of your storefront or office building, or photos of your company truck on various job sites, you need to populate your website with pictures so visitors are more likely to trust you.
However, pictures are equally important outside of your website. From Google Maps listings to Facebook pages, and all the business directories in-between, there are a whole host of places you need to display high-quality images of your business in order to attract customers.
You see, with the way local search operates these days, it’s not uncommon for people to find and call a local business without ever visiting their website. Often, they get all the information they need from Google, Facebook, or a directory like Yelp. Therefore, it’s critical to establish trust on all of these popular channels with an assortment of high-quality images.
So what kinds of images do you need on your directory listings and social media pages, and why? Keep reading to find out!

A Profile Picture Shows Customers You’re a Real Business

When someone does a local search and sees your company’s page or listing in the search results, one of the first things that jumps out is your profile picture. If you don’t have one, users are likely to look past your listing. Why? Because you won’t look as established or as credible as other businesses that have a professional-looking photo next to their names.
When people are searching the web for local businesses, they’re essentially searching for a company they feel they can trust. As we all know, the Internet has a scam or rip-off around every corner; people are rightfully wary. That’s why you need to prove your authenticity from the get-go with a recognizable profile picture (think: your logo, a company truck, a shot of your storefront, or a team picture). Right away, a profile picture helps you demonstrate that you are, in fact, a real business and not some fly-by-night operation.

A Logo Demonstrates Your Value and Professionalism

Ideally, you’ll have a logo to use as your profile picture. A logo acts as your company’s identity—a quick visual aid people will remember when they think about you. It also shows people you’re not some slapdash operation, but rather, a savvy business that took the time to think about its identity and presentation. As a result, customers will associate a higher value with your business.
So, if you have a logo for your business, use it for all of your profile pictures on listings and social media pages. Having it as your profile picture will demonstrate your value and authenticity right away. Plus, consistency across multiple channels will further establish your professionalism in customers’ minds.
If you don’t have a logo yet, have Prospect Genius’s talented graphic designer create one for you!

A Photo Gallery Makes You Stand Out From the Competition

Once users have actually clicked on your listing or social media page, they want to see what makes you uniquely qualified to meet their needs. This is where having an abundance of photos puts you above the competition. Show off previous jobs you’ve completed, share action shots of your team on the job, and “aww” us with adorable pets. In other words, highlight the unique personality of your company. Don’t be afraid to get a little personal.
As much as customers want to learn about your qualifications and service offerings, they also want to see the human side of your business. That’s what will distinguish you from other companies nearby that offer the same services.

A Cover Photo Acts as a Virtual Storefront

Lindsay Kolowich of Hubspot says, “Having a social media profile without a cover photo is like having a brick-and-mortar business without a store sign.”
The majority of social media pages and online directory listings now include cover photos. Cover photos take up a lot of space at the top of the page, so leaving this large section blank is not a good look. Instead, cover photos are a good opportunity to capture people’s attention and show off an important aspect of your business. Many times, a picture of your real-life storefront (if you have one) will work well here, because, again, it shows customers you’re a real place. However, you could also use this space to highlight your favorite service offering, a special discount, or a large group photo.
Bottom line: You need a high-quality image as your cover photo to captivate your audience and display more of your personality. Leaving it blank is not an option.

Photos Are All About Building Trust

Photos are especially crucial for local service providers like appliance repairmen, HVAC technicians, plumbers, and so on. In these types of trades, you travel to people’s homes and businesses to complete a job. This means people have to feel comfortable letting you into their building before they hire you. If your listing or social media page doesn’t prove to them you’re a real business, they’re not going to trust you. If they don’t trust you, they’re not going to call you for the job.
So, to recap, the ideal Google listing or Facebook page will have:

A professional logo as your profile picture
Quality photos of you and your team members on the job, as well as your completed work
A high-quality photo of your storefront
- Not a brick-and-mortar business? Use your company truck or van. It’s essentially your storefront on wheels.

Ready to submit more pictures for your website or off-page promotion? Need us to design a logo for you? Don’t hesitate to reach out! We want to set you up for the most success possible.

Three Tools to Vitalize Your Prospect Genius Campaign

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

Want more add-on options for your Prospect Genius campaign? Looking for ways to get more bang for your buck? Then, keep reading—because we have some great options for you.
As you know, we’re committed to growing with our clients. We aren’t interested in quick fixes. Instead, we want long-term visibility and lead generation for you. That’s why we’re always evaluating our service offerings and updating them to fit our clients’ evolving needs.
As such, we’re excited to discuss three tools that can give your campaign a boost and take your business to the next level. Not all of them are new to our catalog of services, but they’re all increasingly relevant to today’s online marketing demands.
Ready to discover the new directions your online marketing campaign can take you? Let’s jump in!

1. Get More Jobs by Answering More Calls

Already seeing some success with incoming leads? Capture more of what’s already coming to you by taking advantage of our partnership with Professional Answering Service, Inc. Working with this business answering service will help you turn more of those leads into paying customers because it will significantly decrease the number of calls you miss.
As noted by an article in Forbes, close to 80% of callers won’t leave a voice mail if their call is missed, which likely means they’re giving up on that particular business and moving on to a competitor. The key is not to let your incoming calls go to voice mail. Professional Answering Service, Inc. will help you do this.
Prospect Genius recently announced a new partnership with Professional Answering Service, Inc. to help our clients win more customers. When you’re out on a job or you’re away from your desk for the weekend, the staff at Professional Answering Service, Inc. will be able to:

Answer calls on your behalf
Represent your business professionally
Take messages
Schedule appointments
Answer basic customer questions
And more!

Best of all, our partnership provides an exclusive discount for Prospect Genius clients! Professional Answering Service, Inc. will be reaching out to all of our clients soon to see if you’re interested in their help, so keep an eye out. And if you have any questions about their services, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We’d love to make it easier for you to land more jobs!

2. Increase Your Visibility by Thinking Outside the Search Box

What if we told you a substantial number of local business searches never even make it to Google? It’s true. People are increasingly crowdsourcing on social media before they ever turn to search engines. They’re asking their network of friends, family, coworkers, and acquaintances for personal recommendations for everything from landscapers to hair salons to pediatricians. They’d rather choose a business based on a recommendation from someone they know than take a chance on a business they’ve never heard of.
This is where having an active social media presence is crucial for your business. If people are making recommendations for local businesses on Facebook, for example, they’ll want to tag you so their friend can see your page right away. It saves prospective customers a few extra steps in the search process and makes it easier for them to discover you. And anything that makes it easier for prospective customers to find you should always be at the top of your to-do list.
To help you with your social media outreach, Prospect Genius offers a few different options:

SocialStart—If you don’t have any social media pages at all, we’ll set them up for you and create attractive profiles that will impress prospective customers.
SocialStream—We create compelling and valuable blog content on your behalf and share it across your social media channels. As a result, prospective customers will see you’re engaged with your audience and knowledgeable about your industry.
SocialBuzz—We keep you active and engaged on social media by posting weekly updates on your behalf. These brief posts cover your hobbies, interests, local news, and other topics that highlight the personality behind your business.
Paid Facebook Ads—We’ll target your ads according to specific topics and interests. Then, Facebook will display your ads on the news feeds of matching users. In other words, your ads will be placed right in front of prospective customers!

Interested in expanding your visibility with the help of social media? Give us a call for more details.

3. Improve Your Reputation by Getting More Customer Reviews

As we mentioned above, people almost always look for recommendations from previous customers before they commit to a business. And if they can’t find personal recommendations from people they know in real life, they’ll turn to online reviews. A 2016 survey by BrightLocal supports this. According to its findings, 84% of consumers trust online reviews as much as recommendations from friends.
Needless to say, most people do their research before hiring a business. So if you don’t provide your prospective customers with adequate information about why they should hire you, you’ll miss out on lots of potential business.
That’s precisely why customer reviews are so crucial. On top of that, your local Google listing is directly affected by your customer reviews. How? Google now displays your business’s “average” star rating as soon as the first review is posted on your listing. You obviously don’t want your star rating determined by just one or two reviews, so it’s in your best interest to accumulate as many reviews as possible.
To achieve this, we recommend signing up with a company like Customer Lobby. Customer Lobby is a service that will contact past customers for reviews on your behalf, integrate those reviews with your website and social media, and even help you add them to your Google listing. We use Customer Lobby for our own marketing efforts, and we’ve had a great experience with the automated process. We barely have to lift a finger.

Get the Biggest Bang for Your Buck!

Now that you’ve already invested in an online marketing campaign from Prospect Genius, why not get the most out of it that you can? By adding any of the above tools to your campaign, your business will take off in new and exciting ways.
Reach out to us today to find out more!

Your Website's Ranking Is Not Important

Last Updated: April 28, 2017

We repeat: Your website’s ranking is not important.
That probably goes against everything you previously thought about SEO. However, as Ryan Shelley points out in a recent article on Search Engine Land, there are much more accurate measures of success:

The problem with putting too much emphasis on [ranking] is that the search results aren’t always consistent. Google’s results will vary based on a number of different criteria.

More specifically, ranking only tells you how your site performs when an exact keyword is typed into the search bar. Plus, only 2.8% of all search terms are one-word keywords. This means individual keyword rankings are hardly representative of what people are searching for at large. Additionally, personalized algorithms and geographic location greatly influence ranking, too. In other words, ranking is only relevant to a very narrow, specific set of conditions.
Meanwhile, Shelley says, there are much more pressing metrics you should consider—especially because these other metrics have a greater impact on your bottom line. After all, what’s your end goal? Is it simply to display at the top of the search results for a particular keyword, or is it to attract more customers and increase revenue? Usually, it’s the latter.
Therefore, according to Shelley, you should spend more time and energy focusing on your traffic trends and conversion funnels. This is the kind of data that actually affects your ROI. Ranking is more or less irrelevant.
For a more detailed explanation of this issue, please click over to Search Engine Land and read Shelley’s full article, “The Problem With Obsessive Rank Tracking.”

5 Quick and Easy Tips to Improve Your Site's Ranking

Last Updated: September 7, 2016

Your site’s ranking is important. That goes without saying. It’s not the be-all and end-all, but it’s definitely a top concern for businesses that want customers to find them.
So, let’s say you’ve already worked hard to fill your site with informative, relevant content and captivating images. It’s frustrating to discover that this isn’t quite enough to get your site ranking. Are there any other simple tweaks or adjustments you can make to improve your site’s ranking?
Absolutely!
In this post, we’ll take a look at five quick and easy ways you can improve your site’s ranking today.

1. Make sure your site loads quickly.

It might surprise you to learn that load speed has a significant influence on ranking.
Indeed: Google and other search engines actually factor your webpage’s load speed into your overall ranking.
Why? Because when a page loads quickly, the user experience is more pleasant. Therefore, the user is more likely to stay on your page, which increases dwell time and potentially the number of pages they visit on your site. This signals to Google that your site is worthwhile.
On the other hand, if your page is loading too slowly, the user is far more likely to get frustrated and move on to another site. This increases bounce rate, decreases dwell time, and stops the user from browsing other pages on your site. All of these are bad news for your ranking.

Easy fix:

Use Google’s own PageSpeed Insights to see how efficiently your webpage loads. If your pages aren’t loading quickly enough, reduce the size of your images. This makes a huge difference. The best part? It’s super simple to do.

2. Don’t overwhelm users with big chunks of text.

If you have a lot of written content on your page, break it up into smaller paragraphs with subheadings.
When users see a giant wall of text, they get overwhelmed. In turn, they often scan the page quickly before they move on to another page or a different site altogether.

But with catchy subheadings that break up your text, you can draw the user in and capture their attention more immediately. At the very least, the user will read over your subheadings and skim the content under each one. Even if they don’t read your content word for word (and very few will), they’ll at least stay on your page for substantially more time. And, as we explained above, a higher dwell time will improve your site’s ranking.

Easy fix:

Create appropriate subheadings by using Heading 1 (H1) and Heading 2 (H2) tags. This helps your page appeal to search engines, as well. For SEO best practice, add at least one target keyword to each subheading.

3. Feel free to link to other pages on your site.

Do you have multiple pages of useful content on your site? Use them to your advantage! Internal links are a great way to boost your SEO value and improve your site’s ranking.
If there’s a logical way to link one page to another—i.e., the content is related with similar keywords or they offer supplemental information—then you should absolutely do so. Not only does this provide information to the user and keep them on your site, but it signals to search engines that your site contains valuable content. That’s a surefire way to ramp up your ranking!

Easy fix:

Give your site content a quick read and determine if you can make any connections between pages. Once you’ve decided which pages to link to each other, the rest of the work is a breeze.

4. Keep your outbound links in good shape.

When you want to improve your site’s ranking, outbound links are just as valuable as internal ones. But you need to make sure you’re following best practices if you want them to give you that extra SEO oomph.
One common mistake is leaving broken or dead links up on your site. Most websites are constantly updating, so it’s not unusual for a specific webpage to be taken down or for its URL to change entirely. However, it’s your job to make sure your site doesn’t link to nonexistent pages. Otherwise, users will get frustrated when they’re led to 404 pages, while search engines won’t trust you as a reliable site.

Easy fix:

If your site doesn’t contain all that many links, you can check them manually by sitting down and clicking on each individual one. However, if your site has lots of outbound links, it’s much more efficient to use one of the countless, free link-checker tools online.

5. Add a “Contact Us” page.

You already know search engines want to see that your site is trustworthy. That’s why you went through all the trouble of writing informative, relevant content in the first place. But did you know there’s a super-quick way to add legitimacy and trustworthiness to your site?
With a “Contact Us” page or something similar (like an “About Us” page), you’ll prove your authenticity by including verifiable NAP (name/address/phone number) information. NAP data is specifically for the search engines. But this page will also make users feel more comfortable with you, knowing you exist in the real world.
Bonus points if you add a contact form so users can e-mail you directly!

Let users e-mail you directly. Everyone's doing it.

Easy fix:

Hopefully, you already know your own contact information. That should make this a very quick project.

Consider user experience along with search engine preferences.

You might have noticed that all of our tips to improve your site’s ranking combine two things: users and search engines. Your ranking depends heavily on appealing to both.
This is because Google and other search engines are generally aiming to make user experience a ranking factor. That’s why Google favors mobile-friendly sites and will soon start docking sites that have pop-ups, for example. Simply put, Google’s long-term mission is to improve user experience, so they penalize sites that don’t cater to it.
So if you want to improve your site’s ranking, you must start by improving your site’s user experience.
Good luck!
Note: This is not a comprehensive guide to SEO or site rankings. These are just a few easy and quick things you can do to improve your site’s ranking.

Weighing the Pros and Cons of SEO and PPC

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

In the years we’ve spent blogging about the virtues of search engine optimization (SEO) and online advertising in general, we haven’t focused much on the benefits of pay-per-click (PPC) marketing. Since PPC is a valuable and increasingly popular marketing technique, let’s rectify that right now.
But first…

Which Is Better: SEO or PPC?

Many online advertisers offer both SEO and PPC services as a way of accommodating the various needs of their clients. Some clients might seek a gradual, sustainable, and affordable marketing plan, and thus opt for SEO; others might need immediate results and have extra room in their budget to pay for speed, and thus opt for PPC. Both options are ideal for different advertising goals, which is why it’s important to work with a knowledgeable, honest specialist who can determine which marketing tactic is best for your business.
Each method has its pros and cons, so let’s dive in without any further ado.

SEO Is Better for Beginners

Any online advertising professional worth their salt will tell you that SEO is the best place to start when embarking on a web marketing campaign for your company. It’s important to begin your campaign with content that’s optimized for keyword relevance so you can demonstrate clear value to the search engines. Plus, since SEO is a gradual, ongoing process that requires a few weeks or months of patience before steady results kick in, costs are usually pretty affordable.
Pros:

Budget-friendly prices
Good for long-term marketing
Exposure on platforms other than search engines
Can stand alone as a marketing strategy

Cons:

Immediate results not available
Cannot be freely turned on and off

SEO takes a long time, so what makes it worth the wait? Read our previous blog post, “SEO Is Crucial. Make Sure You Can Afford It.”

PPC Is Better for Fast Promotion

As we’ve grown as a company, we’ve embraced the unique value that PPC provides. It’s extremely fast and keyword-targeted, which makes it an ideal strategy for promoting specific services on an immediate timeline. Moreover, since PPC operates like an auction and requires regular bidding for certain keywords, you have full control over how much you wind up spending. Bids on popular keywords become expensive rather quickly, but the immediate results usually pay off for clients who are willing to spend lots of money up front, and respectable results can often be secured with less popular, more affordable keywords.
Pros:

Immediate results
Best for temporary and seasonal promotions
Offers more control overall
Can be started and stopped at any time

Cons:

PPC keyword bids may become very expensive
Exposure limited to search results pages

For Best Results, Use Both!

If you want to see fast results but don’t want to spend exorbitant sums on PPC keyword bids, your best bet is to combine SEO and PPC. By starting with SEO, you’ll have a keyword-relevant website that can be found in top search results, Google+ Local, and popular business directories. Then, once your web presence is established and your relevance proven, you can bid on PPC keywords at a lower cost, thanks to your site’s high-quality content. (Learn more about how SEO makes PPC more effective by reading our previous blog post, “Optimize Your Site Before You Bid on AdWords.“)
Fortunately, Prospect Genius offers a variety of SEO and PPC services.

If ROI is your primary advertising concern, our Core package offers the biggest bang for your buck through broad SEO strategies.
If you only want to promote a seasonal service, our Boost package can leverage targeted PPC for a three-month period.
If you don’t want to wait for results, our PPC package will promote your business’s top services right away.
If you want to maximize lead generation, our Premium package combines the best of SEO and PPC to achieve immediate results while establishing a long-lasting web presence, ultimately leading you to pay less for PPC keywords as your campaign continues.

With customizable SEO and PPC, as well as a cross-section of other online marketing strategies, Prospect Genius has the tools you need for success. To speak with a specialist who can advise you on which option is best for your business, don’t hesitate to call or e-mail us now!

Prospect Genius

Your Website's Ranking Is Not Important

5 Quick and Easy Tips to Improve Your Site's Ranking

1. Make sure your site loads quickly.

Easy fix:

2. Don’t overwhelm users with big chunks of text.

Easy fix:

3. Feel free to link to other pages on your site.

Easy fix:

4. Keep your outbound links in good shape.

Easy fix:

5. Add a “Contact Us” page.

Easy fix:

Consider user experience along with search engine preferences.

Contact Us

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