online advertising campaign

READ THIS: "4 Things Most Leaders Don't Know About SEO"

Last Updated: June 11, 2015

By now, you’ve heard of the term “search engine optimization” (SEO for short), and at least recognize that there’s a lot of significance behind it. However, according to a recent article on Search Engine Land, there’s still a lot about SEO that business owners don’t know.

In his article, “4 Things Most Leaders Don’t Understand About SEO,” columnist Trond Lyngbø describes a major problem with business owners and SEO—mainly that they perceive SEO as a quick fix, an add-on, instead of the holistic approach to online marketing that it should be.
Here are the five most significant points from Lyngbø’s article:

SEO should be incorporated into every aspect of your marketing, including PPC.
Before you can begin creating optimized content, you must do your due-diligence and research your audience’s needs and interests. This way, you can attract your ideal prospects. Then, once they’ve visited your website, your content will demonstrate an understanding of why they need your product or service. This is what will grow your conversion rate.
In order to optimize your content and get the highest click-through rate, your company’s branding (i.e. messaging) must connect with what your prospects want to hear. In your advertising, you should be offering answers to their questions and solutions to their problems. Lyngbø writes, “Your story becomes more interesting when you talk about what they are already interested in.”
But SEO means more than just targeting the right keywords and content. It also means structuring your website so that the code is search engine friendly, pages load efficiently, navigation is easy, and internal links are sound.
However, SEO is not a cure-all. You must have a good product at the center of your marketing. That’s not only because you want your customers to spread the good word, but also because customer reviews will soon become a crucial ranking factor: “[Google] wants its users to keep coming back, so it will ultimately strive to suggest only high quality products and services which their users will love.”

Read the full article for further details, and feel free to check out additional columns by Trond Lyngbø on Search Engine Land.

Have You Outgrown Your Current Advertising Package?

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

There’s a common misconception floating around that the only way to change the direction of your advertising is to change advertisers.
Many clients don’t realize that it’s simple and easy to transition to a different advertising package within the Prospect Genius program. Instead, they uproot their entire campaign and start over from scratch, costing themselves a lot of time, money, and aggravation in the process. Completely changing providers when you want to move your advertising in a new direction is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Why abandon your investment and start over the hard way when it’s much easier, faster, and more economical to use the services that are already available to you?
A lot of hardship can be avoided if you just talk to us about your new direction. Our experts can craft a whole new solution for you by adding or subtracting elements of your current program, thus helping you leverage the investment you’ve already made. Even if it turns out that you do have to take your business to a new provider, we can at least help make your transition smoother and less damaging. But either way, if you don’t let us guide you, you risk doing irreparable damage to your web presence and campaign.

Reasons for Switching Packages

There are countless reasons for wanting to make a change to your advertising package. Hopefully, your reasons have to do with the growth of your company and the new direction in which you’re headed.
For example, let’s say you first signed up with us in 2011. Back then, all we offered was SEO-based lead generation, which we now call our Core program. After four years of seeing steady SEO results, you now feel like your advertising has become static. You want to give your campaign a little shot in the arm by promoting seasonal specials. Why not add on our PPC package for a couple of months? Our content specialists could handle your paid advertising for a short time while maintaining your SEO, and then we could help you decide whether you should stick with it or change to something else.
Or, instead, let’s say you had your own website when you first enrolled in our PPC program and have enjoyed a significant amount of growth since then. Now you want to focus on growing your brand. In this case, adding our Remarketing service would be a great solution because it would enable us to use your existing PPC campaign to create broader brand awareness for your company.
Or maybe you were a fledgling business owner without the slightest hint of a web presence when you first signed up for our Core program. Now, you want to move past the modest LeadTrax™ site we built you and hire an expensive, professional designer to create a flashy site that reflects how far you’ve come. You could absolutely do that without having to sever ties with us. When you switch to our B.Y.O.S. (Bring Your Own Site) package, we would simply start performing SEO for your new-and-improved site, instead.
There are dozens more examples, but you get the idea: Switching programs is great for virtually any client, as long as it’s in the interest of growing or expanding your campaign.

How to Switch Packages

It may not seem like it, but this is the easy part. As we mentioned above, all you have to do is talk to us. If you’re feeling like your campaign is in need of a shakeup, let us know. At the end of the day, we want you to have the campaign that satisfies you the most. When you talk to us about your vision for your advertising’s future, we’ll apply our expertise and come up with a solution that will make your vision a reality.
If you want to stick with a holistic marketing package, you can choose between Starter, Core, and Premium. Moving from one to another is easy. Otherwise, if you just want to build on your existing advertising package, these are your add-on options:
Mountaineering Route. Goal Achievement Concept. Vector

Social Media Services
Local Search Services
Paid Search Services
- Pay Per Click (PPC)
- Remarketing

Alternative Options

What happens if you speak with us about your goals and we both realize that our partnership is no longer a good fit? Well, by letting us in on the discussion, you’ve at least made it possible for us to advise you and make sure you move in the right direction. We can make your transition to a new company as painless as possible, using products like CleanSlate to minimize the damage to your SEO.
Transitioning will be much smoother when you keep us in the loop. It’s in our best interest, as well as yours, to make sure everyone leaves the partnership on a pleasant note.

Conclusion: Keep an Ongoing Discussion

Communicating with us about your changing needs is vital to your marketing success. Whether you end up staying with us or moving on, it’s essential that you keep us informed and allow us to guide you in the right direction. Don’t make the mistake of making a hasty decision without an expert opinion. The future of your business is too valuable.

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.

How to Find the Online Advertising Program That's Best for Your Business

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

You’re a savvy business owner, and you know that becoming more visible on the Internet is vital to your company’s success. But the number of online advertising buzzwords is completely overwhelming. You’re supremely skilled in your own trade, but how are you supposed to figure out the best strategy for online advertising when your Internet skills don’t extend much past e-mail, Google, and Facebook?
We hear you. The world of online advertising is vast and confusing. That’s why we’ve put together a buying guide to help you choose the best online advertising program for your small business. We broke it down by the most common marketing concerns.

First, the Options

Before you can choose a strategy, you need to know what your options are. These are the most popular online advertising categories. Keep in mind that the most effective advertising campaigns will combine two or more of these:

SEO: Search engine optimization means designing a website that is deemed valuable and relevant by search engines, and then getting other websites to link to it. Optimized websites are more likely to rank higher in search engine results, and a higher ranking typically means you reach more potential customers. Prospect Genius’s Core program is centered on SEO.
PPC (pay-per-click): This is a paid advertising strategy wherein business owners pay search engines to promote their ads, which link to their website.
Local directory listings: Local directories are the Internet version of the yellow pages. Most will allow you to add your business information to their directory for free. As a result, one marketing strategy is to leverage all the possible local directories to drive traffic to your own website. Prospective customers visit these directories when searching for specific types of businesses, and hopefully they find and contact you.
Pay-per-lead: Pay-per-lead is a type of paid advertising provided by many directory listing sites. Most commonly, the directory sites make money by charging you for better positioning on the page, inclusion of bolded text, highlighted information, more screen real estate, etc. If a prospective customer contacts you, you are then charged for that call or e-mail.

Need for Speed

If you need to promote services quickly—whether it’s because you need an immediate boost in sales or you have a seasonal offering that’s only available for a short time—here are your best options:

Pay-per-lead: Business owners can turn a pay-per-lead campaign on and off instantly, so it’s well suited for smaller time frames. Plus, this is the best solution for getting a large volume of leads in a short amount of time because the structure requires prospective customers to have higher purchasing intent, since they are actively making phone calls or sending e-mails. With a higher purchasing intent comes a higher conversion rate.
PPC: Similar to pay-per-lead, PPC (pay-per-click) is an advertising campaign that can be turned on and off in an instant. Each visitor comes at a much higher price than SEO, but the ability to start and stop can be highly valuable in certain circumstances.

Limited Advertising Budget

In 2014, every business owner should be carving out room in their budget for an online advertising program. But the reality is that small businesses tend to have a little less wiggle room. So if you’re trying to keep your belt tight, here are some of the more budget-friendly options that will still get you results:

SEO: Because SEO is an organic, systematic approach to online advertising, the overhead costs are fairly low. The majority of the costs are associated with the labor involved in building the website and promoting it on countless platforms across the Internet. Although SEO does require some patience to gain traction and momentum, the number of leads that comes in after a few months makes it all worth it.
Directory listings: While directories are mostly free to use, your visibility is limited to just the directories on which you’ve listed your business. It’s a very low-cost advertising strategy, but it hinges on prospective customers coming to your directory of choice. However, if you do enough of them, the number of links directed at your website will increase and help your site rank better in the search engines.

Craving More Ownership

Do you feel like you’ve been burned by online advertisers before? There are a lot of disingenuous advertising companies out there, unfortunately, and they give the rest of us a bad rap. But we very much understand the desire to have ownership over your online advertising program as a result of a poor experience, so here are some options for you:

SEO: Not every detail of SEO has to be dictated by the advertiser. If you want to hold on to your business’s existing website but still want the benefits of a professional SEO campaign, ask your advertiser about programs that keep your existing website in the middle of the campaign. As an example, Prospect Genius offers a Bring Your Own Site (B.Y.O.S.) option for its Core program. This allows you to invest in your current site while our content specialists promote it as if it were one of our own design.
PPC: While you can’t control the cost per click or the parameters set by the search engines, you can control your spending limit and the length of your campaign. If you do this independently, you can control which keywords are used. Even if you outsource this job to an advertiser, you have very little residual risk of long-term damage if they turn out to be dishonest. This makes switching from one advertiser to the next relatively easy and painless.
Directory listings: The categories on local directories are typically preset and you’re only given a certain amount of space for your information, but you can create your own listings without necessarily even needing a website or advertiser. Be careful, though: Some directories are labeled “bad neighborhoods,” and they can actually hurt your rankings. Beyond the manpower required to type in all of your information hundreds of times, knowing which directories are helpful, which are hurtful, and which just don’t matter is where companies like Prospect Genius can really be worth the investment.

Proportionate Cost per Lead

If you feel like some forms of online advertising are costing too much per lead, then it’s time to do some math.
On the surface, PPC and pay-per-lead seem like smart investments because you’re only paying for the leads that you actually get. But how much do those leads really cost?
Let’s say you spend $50 per lead on a directory site. If you get 9 calls per month, that’s $450 you’re paying out of pocket. If you only book jobs from 33% of those leads, it actually costs you $150 per job booked. And if you’re only booking jobs that net you $100 profit, you are actually upside down by $50 per job!
The same goes for PPC, but you’ll get an even lower ROI because the conversion rate for clicks is significantly lower than the conversion rate for calls/e-mails. For PPC, getting 1 call from every 20 clicks is a very good ratio; then when you consider that something like only 33% of those calls result in jobs booked, you could be looking at a real cost of $300 per job (when you’re paying a seemingly low $5-per-click rate). When you pay for each lead, you will only ever make a fixed margin on each. There’s no opportunity for you to drive your per-lead cost down and your margins up.
On the other hand, if you pay a monthly fee of $300 for SEO (like our Core program) and wait patiently for a few months, you could wind up getting 20+ calls per month and saving lots of money. It’s just like buying a house versus renting one: It stinks to have to pay $40,000 up front on that down payment, but then you have the ability to earn a profit on that investment over time. If you rent, avoid the initial pain of the down payment, but you’ll pay more over time.

Getting Decent Results, but Want More?

Many business owners encounter a plateau in their online advertising. They’re getting a solid volume of leads per month, but they want more. This often has no reflection on the quality of services that their online advertising company is providing; rather, it just means that the particular service they’re using has been maxed out.
If this is something you’re dealing with, do some investigating. Find out if your advertiser offers other services that may complement the one you’re currently using. For instance, if you’re currently using SEO and finding that your volume of monthly leads has stagnated, then you might be interested in trying out a short PPC campaign to give your sales a boost.
Conversely, if you’ve been relying on paid advertising to bring links to your website or calls to your metered phone, you can try adding directory listings to the mix or even optimizing your site for search engines. Covering all of your bases and adding algorithmic value wherever you can is never a bad idea.

Effective, Fast, Cheap: Pick Two

Unfortunately, when choosing an online advertising program, you can’t have it all. If you want something that’s fast and effective, it won’t be cheap. If you want something cheap and fast, it won’t be very effective in the long run. That’s why you have to think long and hard about your company’s marketing goals before diving headfirst into a campaign. Do your research, and know that the specialists at Prospect Genius can guide you through the decision-making process should you need any help.

Addressing a Few Common Campaign Concerns

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

No matter how many success stories we create, virtually no campaign ever runs as smoothly as we’d like. That’s just the nature of online advertising. Working in conjunction with independent entities like search engines, phone companies, and business directories means there’s a lot that’s out of our control. All anyone can do is keep an eye out for sudden changes and adapt accordingly.
In this newsletter, we’ll address a few of the pain-points and campaign concerns that Prospect Genius clients have encountered lately and explain what we’re doing to mitigate them.

Faulty Yahoo! PINs

Many clients have had trouble recently with their Yahoo! PINs. When your PIN gets sent to you, you turn it in to us, but when we try to input it on Yahoo! it just doesn’t work. While we’re not sure of what’s causing this problem, we are aware that it exists and we have been staying on top of it. We’ve spoken to Yahoo! but we haven’t had any luck resolving the problem.
While this may sound like a huge setback, it’s actually not. Frankly, Yahoo! is not a major search engine; very few Internet users actually rely on it as their search engine of choice. In fact, according to comScore, Yahoo’s market share has dropped to just 10.1%, a record low, as of March 2014.
Moreover, we do hundreds of other off-page tasks to support all of our search engine work. With everything else that we do for your campaign, a missing Yahoo! PIN is not the end of the world.
As always, we’re staying on top of this issue and will update you as additional information becomes available.

Call-Time Upgrades

Contrary to popular belief, phone minutes are not free. Even Verizon and AT&T have to pay line charges for minutes used on the networks that blanket the country. So when clients voice concern over having their call-time packages upgraded, it’s because they don’t understand the reason behind it.
Many clients complain about having their call-time packages upgraded, but they don’t understand what it actually is.
Prospect Genius institutes a call-time upgrade when clients get so many calls that they exceed the allotted number of minutes in their original phone packages. We often refer to it as a “homerun tax” because it’s caused by the fact that their campaigns are generating such a massive volume of leads.
We begin every one of our campaigns with the smallest phone package because it doesn’t make sense to charge our clients for a larger package if they aren’t going to use all of those minutes. Upgrading your phone package is necessary because you’re spending more time on the phone with customers than the original package allows.
The upgrade is a pass-through cost; it’s not designed to profit Prospect Genius in any way. We pass this minimal cost ($9/month) on to you because, if we didn’t, we would not have any incentive to make your campaign successful. Think about it: If we had to pay out of pocket for extra phone minutes that resulted from too many leads, then why would we want to keep sending you more leads? By passing the cost on to you, we are protecting both of our best interests.

Yelp Reviews Not Sticking

We also hear concerns from clients about their Yelp reviews. With Yelp’s strict filters, which are powered by confounding algorithms, many businesses are realizing that random customer reviews aren’t appearing on their pages. It’s a very valid concern, given how many businesses use Yelp as part of their overall online advertising campaign.
From what we’ve learned of Yelp’s review filtering policies, we can tell you that it primarily filters out reviews posted by brand-new accounts. In other words, if a user created a brand-new account to leave you a review or just didn’t leave many other reviews before leaving one on your page, Yelp will likely filter it out of your list of reviews. The filter system is intended to prevent potential spamming, but the result is that it also affects new, honest users.
While Prospect Genius doesn’t have the power to change Yelp’s policies, we do have recommendations for getting around them. For starters, only ask customers to leave you a review on Yelp if they have a well established account. Additionally, we’re fortunate to have several other prominent online platforms that also show ratings and reviews. Facebook and Google+ pages are both great alternatives to Yelp, so take advantage of them.
As always, if you have any campaign concerns that you’d like to address, call your campaign coordinator or account manager. We’ll listen carefully and accommodate whatever needs you have.

Prospect Genius

READ THIS: "4 Things Most Leaders Don't Know About SEO"

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