MARKETING MANAGEMENT FUNCTIONS Are your marketing programs swimming or sinking? To survive in such a densely competitive market environment it is necessary for business owners to know customer needs and align business activities to those needs. Getting started with (or overhauling) your marketing programs is just as important as maintaining & measuring AND managing them […]
CONTENT MARKETING PLANS & STRATEGY A business that creates valuable, relevant, and informative content that is catered to its audiences becomes the authority of a market or industry. A business that promotes valuable content in effective ways can take the majority share of new business. This goes for big brands as much as it […]
Developing a Marketing Strategy & Plan Perhaps the most vital aspect of any business is the marketing function. A marketing strategy provides a roadmap for running and coordinating marketing programs (aka campaigns) that help define the tactics, branding, people, entities, and assets involved in commercializing your products and services. A written marketing plan is the […]
Big companies like Google are putting large amounts of R&D and funds into their local programs, and with the recent changes we need to stay up to date with local platforms we use to promote our businesses.
We own a few niche directory websites ourselves, we provide value and have fun with them but we certainly are no Google or Yelp. We see the value in providing a specialized business directory to bring consumers and companies together on a mutually beneficial platform.
Since we know how important GMBs are to local businesses we created this comprehensive guide to your Google My Business success through optimization of the factors and sections that matter. This will be updated when new GMB updates are confirmed.
A famous quote goes something like …
"The average goldfish has an attention span of 9 seconds, and the average 20th century human consumer has an attention span of 8 seconds."
On Google, there’s only 3 free local spots to take on the first page, and it takes more than 8 seconds to determine which one of those 3 to go with – your consumer is already getting mentally worn out.
People do not usually click past the initial 3 pack of local map results unless there is no obvious choice of the 3 or the thing they are looking for costs a good bit of money. These decisions are made very quickly for most local services or products (like the low to mid range price tags).
When consumers go online to find something locally, the actions they take can appear quite noisy.
When you get a new Android phone, it basically runs on Google. Yelp is an app that you have to think to go find, download and login – do you get what we are saying?
Some are saying that Google might be getting to big ...
Google ramming our eyes with ads
Big G is not shy to show you ads, and we have never seen so many of them. If you are on mobile, it’s the entire first section of the page full of ads – and about 2/3 that much on desktop.
Google used to be tactful about showing ads, now they’re just smack in your face – like every other website it seems these days.
This means the small amount of free organic results are being squeezed into an even smaller space – making it more of a pay-to-play platform.
So if Google is making it so alluring to sign up for their services, and we know they have plans to flip a switch to monetize those services once business owners rely on them – should we still be using Google My Business?
Google My Business is an online local advertising tool we need to use, and it is still relevant if not more popular with consumers than ever before – here are some statistics that prove it.
Google My Business Statistics as of 2019
Who are your REAL competitors? – Google fights local spam
Local affiliate marketing, do you know what that is?
It is a form of sales commission for companies like HomeAdvisor, they pay affiliate marketers who create competing business listings to get leads, sell them to HomeAdvisor who then sells those online local leads to you. A marketing scheme that completely bypasses you – the actual real business!
Google expanding it’s Guaranteed Program for Home Services
We have seen the Google Guaranteed services carousel (above the maps section) get more exposure in more business categories. We see how this is will become more popular and Google will market it more aggressively in the near future.
Tightening the radius on proximity sensory
A few years back Google updated their local rank algo called “Pigeon” it was meant to filter out business listings that were too similar and too close to each other, giving the searcher more variety.
All of the sections within the Google My Business dashboard are what make up your business listing profile. How well you setup your business profile will determine how well you perform in search.
Starting with getting your hands on your back-end GMB data, we will take you through each one of those sections.
This section tells you whether customers are searching for your brand, or for something you offer using keywords.
Google tracks what people are typing when they make searches and at least nice enough to let you know.
PRO TIP: In this section keep an eye on what terms are showing up, if they are not related to what your business does then you may need to re-write some of your copy to replace / include the correct terms so that your business is found by the right people.
Simply, the Google services that customers use to find your business.
The most common actions that customers take on your Google business listing.
When and how many times customers call your business.
The number of times your business photos have been viewed
The number of photos that appear on your business, compared to photos from other businesses
Before we get started into the weeds of Google My Business settings there is one core concept that you must understand when it comes to your business and online data.
That concept is called NAPW – Name, Address, Phone, Website
Since the data online can be so noisy, it is imperative that the exact same NAPW appears wherever your business is mentioned online.
If your business name, phone numbers or address changes and the data is inconsistent data aggregates, like Google, will find it hard to trust your business.
Name of business
Ideally, this should be the official legal business name as registered in the same county as the GMB listing.
PRO TIP: If you try to force keywords into the name field then back it up with a DBA of that same name so that when you get suspended for listing spam you can get un-suspended.
Business categories
Do not dilute with too many, find the top 3 that are the BEST FIT
Service areas nearby
In either case, you can set service areas that are nearby.
PRO TIP: Add additional service areas by the zip code, and do not expect the listing to show up beyond 10 miles from the address that was used for verification – but it doesn’t hurt to add them, especially if you run local ads.
Opening hours
Follow the same rule as NAPW for the business hours, they should be the same everywhere they appear, which makes sense.
Special hours
Make sure to apply hours to holidays, and any other special hours your company might have.
Phone numbers
Clearly a very important part of any business is the sales phone number, make sure it is correct.
If the phone number has changed, put the NEW phone number as the “primary” and KEEP the OLD phone number and list that as a “secondary” phone number. (That’s a trick so you do not have to go back to all your other business profiles just to update a phone number)
PRO TIP: Google does not always do a great job at tracking the phone calls, we usually see more actual calls than what Google has in their reports. For that reason we recommend using a call tracking service with a tracking phone number for that specific location as the primary phone number. There are loads of benefits in doing that.
Profile short name
Something similar to a Twitter or Facebook @URL, this is Google trying to make your business profile more shareable because their native URL strings are extremely ugly. Not sure what future plans they have for this but we will make an update when we are.
PRO TIP: At the moment, we are using brand nick names or keywords in this field.
Website link
One of 2 places you can place a link to your website from your Google Business listing profile.
Contact link
This is the second place to insert a link for people to contact you, useful for going straight to a contact form.
PRO TIP: In some cases it makes sense to use a link that provides tracking metrics. For example, If you are running a special promotion for first time customers coming from your GMB to a special offer landing page.
Highlights (attributes)
These are additional business amenities that you get to list if they apply to your business. Things like “veteran owned” or “woman lead” and “wheelchair accessible” or with “Free WIFI” and things like that.
The attributes are especially helpful for any business that is a brick & mortar that serves customers at it’s location.
Founded
Allows people to know how long you have been in business. We recommend that you do not exaggerate the truth.
A business with several bad reviews, but a decent average review score will get more calls and new customers than a business that has 0 reviews. Second to asking friends or family for references, people tend to trust online reviews as the next best thing.
Reviews are the strongest signal telling Google about the sentiment customers have for your business. Along with the other insights, listed above, Google uses reviews to as one of the stronger factors as to how high a business will appear.
PRO TIP: When possible, have your customers use keywords in their review, and while they are there have them thumbs up on reviews from other people.
Google’s attempt to get businesses more engaged with their audience, but on their platform. A cool feature, but not anything worth it’s own weight in gold. Anything you publish anywhere outside of your own website is not owned by you, and only serves to improve the platform you published on – so make that YOUR OWN.
Publish to your own website, and share it to your GMB as a preview and still get the benefits of Google My Business Posts.
Not only does it show activity on your profile, but the words in each post can add value to your Google Business listing overall. We have targeted keywords in GMB posts that have caused the listing to appear more frequently for those terms.
PRO TIP: Create an image just for the GMB post. Lightly sprinkle with keywords, and maybe garnish with a link inside the text body to a previous GMB post. Google says they expire after 7 days, but that just means it is not displayed prominant – but remains on the business profile in archives.
Use model #s or SKUs and the name of the product but also make it descriptive with a single keyword per product listing. Make sure you put the link of that actual product to your website.
Google will try to guess what services you offer.
If you can not find suitable service categories you have the option to create a custom one.
We never suggest stuffing any part of your profile with keywords, so write your service descriptions with good sales copy and only a couple of keywords that pertain to each service respectively.
Google wants to make it easy for a brand new business to start getting it’s name out there, even if that means giving them a free one-page website to go with their business listing. It’s like getting the toy in a happy meal.
Since Google is also a domain registrar, it is one of their attempts to get you signed up with them for your new website before anyone else does.
Although it is nothing fancy at all, it can help the SEO of your Google my Business profile. We like to use these as “pumpers” to help push up our GMBs.
This can be a click to call, or a link to the website.
This will be the same as the appointment link you created on the main business info section.
We suggest using a keyword phrase + local modifier here.
We suggest you reinforce the headline here or use the company slogan.
This is the section you can optimize that little one-page website to do something good for your listing. Write for your customers, but make sure to take advantage of the text editing features included. Bolds, lists, links, etc.
As with all of your company online assets, you should be linking them together to help with the semantic relationship to your business. Including links with descriptive anchors back to your website is a great start.
We suggest making sure to have a dedicated mobile phone and a person to respond to the messages before you enable this feature.
The messaging feature is for sending texts to the business, and it requires the Google My Business app for it to work. Google wants to make sure that smartphones are being used for this feature.
A sneaky little google my business feature many business owners do not realize. Anyone with a Google account can ask a question on your business profile.
What’s more, is that anyone can come along and respond whatever they want to answer that question.
Scary? – Maybe, just make sure you keep an eye on that. If someone uses the Q&A feature you will be notified.
Aside from the tips we dropped along the way, here are a few additional things to consider when trying to improve the ranks of your Google My Business listing.
Embed your GMB map on your website, for single locations you can place into the footer, for multiple locations you should only embed onto the location page
Having your business listed in other places with the same information will help Google to trust that your business is who you say it is and your GMB rankings will reflect that.
Once you have successfully completed the sale, you should immediately follow up with your customers to get positive feedback while they are still left with a good impression of your business.
Google crawls info from everywhere online. Part of Google’s job is to consider a company’s reputation elsewhere online and plug that into it’s ranking factors. So make sure you are controlling your brand rep everywhere it appears.
Hard to believe that there are, for some niches, other apps and directory services that work better than Google My Business – it’s true.
GOOGLE MY BUSINESS SECRETS WE CAN SHARE IN PRIVATE ONLY
GMB Ranking secrets – contact us to learn more
VIEW OUR GMB CREDENTIALS
Yes, but once you have a certain amount of directory listings they become diminishing gains, so just focus on the most well known.
It certainly can, when you connect your website with Google My Business in the correct way there can be a strong correlation to the ranking of a GMB and the corresponding website.
No, actually, you might be able to use what is provided within GMB alone and get decent results, in small unpopulated and low competition areas.
The total number of reviews is a factor, but not by itself. You will need to have mostly positive reviews, and the more engagement with the reviews the better. So make sure customers are liking other reviews, and that you are responding to them.
You can see more Google My Business FAQ here: https://www.google.com/intl/en_us/business/faq/
At least once per year we should be looking at our website to make sure it pleases both the Google robots AND our people. Whether you are planning to launch your new website soon, or have been in business with a website up for a while – this guide will help.
This has been a great year, and a lot has added up to make websites much more relevant in 2020 and beyond, here are some statistics from around the internet.
Stats as of Q4 2019
Having an under-performing website makes you one of the many business owners with low traffic volume and low conversions. This guide is meant to get you back in or ahead of the game in 2020 and beyond.
If you are thinking about self-examining your website this year, here are the top key factors to focus on. We recommend performing a self-audit or hiring a professional to review your website and it’s performance to help you formulate the best path for moving forward this year based on data collected from last year.
Google has released public documentation so that we know how they look at & rank websites.
Review the Google quality rating guidelines
What new goals do you have this year, and how do those relate to your website?
This checklist primarily focuses on WordPress websites, but for the most part concepts & factors mentioned can apply to all website platforms.
That being said, this guide is basic with some good advanced & technical tips included and works for both new website launches and existing websites.
Have any legal terms or policy changes happened within your company that need to be reflected on the website?
Do you have exclusive, even private sections of your website that are being accessed from another place allowing people to back-door your offers?
Is your website on a platform that you understand and can manage yourself?
Do you have guidelines and a strategy for your website?
Make sure all of your tracking integrations are up and running while you are visualizing data collected from last year. This includes traffic data, user metrics, conversions and more so that you can correlate with your sales to know where you are having the most impact.
Check your incoming links, make sure they are mostly relevant to your business
Compare the incoming links presented in Google Search Console vs a link checking tool like ahrefs to compare to make sure you have insight to all links to your website (Google does not always show every single link)
Check both Google + Bing for any technical site errors such as:
Tools you need for this:
Sometimes something in our website can be broken without us noticing. At least once per year get into your website and test the functions & other integrations to make sure everything still runs the way you set it up.
Plugin makers, online software vendors, and etc can change their pricing models or terms of service at any time, so if you are not logging into your website often you may know even know something is not functioning.
You could have a lead capture, opt-in, or simple contact form that is not working, and although people may contact you in a different way, what if there is not any notification of the error – business lost.
What if your email integration has stopped working or has been tagging your leads with the wrong segmentation? – that could turn away future business!
You may have WordPress core updates waiting to be applied, or there could be a problem with your hosting cron scheduler and auto updates are not being applied. Updates to websites and plugins are usually for security patches, so they are very important.
If you have had a plugin that provided a specific feature to your website and forgot to pay the subscription, depending on what it was, can interrupt your entire website lead capture system, or worse.
Part of a good marketing strategy that includes your website has to do with re-targeting the people who came to visit you but didn’t buy anything the first time. If you are running ads, in 2020 and beyond you will need to take advantage of lead capturing tactics and ad retargeting to catch the attention span of a goldfish.
Follow your potential customers where they spend the most time and attach the Facebook tracking pixel to your website so that you can show up in the Facebook feeds of people who visited your website.
You can target the people who visited your website around the internet as they use Google and Google Partners in the display network. If they have clicked your Google ad, you can retarget them with other campaigns.
Usually a once-&-done but sometimes sitemap plugins can have problems. Review your website sitemap to find any pages included unintentionally, and make sure the most important pages are discoverable. (You can check for sitemap errors in both Google & Bing)
Do the supporting pages of your top level topics or categories fit in a logical hierarchy?
Do the competitors look better than you? Does your website look outdated? This might be the year to redesign the website!
Are all of the most commonly used pages at the top of your menu, easy to click on for both returning and new website visitors? (High bounce rates can indicate people are not finding what they are looking for, or that the website turned them off in some way.)
Each page on your website has the potential to rank for many keywords & phrases. How well you are doing in the following areas of website on-page determines how effective that page will be out in the wild.
Using the data collected from years prior while drilling down into keywords related to the moment of transaction.
Still one of the top ranking factors so that bots know what the overall topic of your web page is about. You still need to include KWs in the page titles.
Part of structuring a well written document includes organizing your talking points into the H1, H2, H3, etc tags.
Do not allow 2 or more pages to compete for the same keywords
Links carry the most weight inside of the body of content on a page. Make sure your links to other important pages use exact match keywords or phrases linking from within the text of the body of content.
About, contact, service, product and certain other pages all have schema markup terms specific to them, find what these are and make sure they output in JSON-LD format in the page header tag.
URL deepest level should be no more than 3 and should be as short + descriptive as possible using regular words without numbers. (example, never use a date in a URL string)
Site-wide tag that tells other websites that the content on your page is the source of the original content and the content, thereby any credit thereof goes to that page. Make sure this is self-pointed to each page in your SEO settings site-wide.
Minify your CSS/JS/HTML
Have clean HTML & CSS files
Google no longer supports the nofollow/noindex & disallow directives in the robots-txt file. Other web crawlers and bots do, which means that any post types, pages, posts, templates should be set to no-index, when appropriate, on the page level meta-robots tags and / or removed from the xml sitemap.
Every main-menu and sub-menu should take advantage of the “Title Attribute” to make them more descriptive to include meta information for bots to consume and can provide more information to the user as to what the menu link is about.
Make your website faster & stronger for better marketing and user experience.
Beautiful website pages help people trust your business. When they feel comfortable engaging with your website because the layout is organized and calm they will spend more time on it and appreciate you more because of it.
Is your text formatted into blocks that are short paragraphs and easy to read without having to traverse the entire width of the screen?
Elements, buttons and other things should have at least a bit of padding between them, so if your content is looking crammed go in and put some white space between the items.
Does your sidebar have logical & relevant info, or does it have the junk you couldn’t find a better place to stick? If the content in your sidebar is junk, get rid of it.
The main bar that is usually the website main menu and can also contain “breadcrumbs”
The new trend these days either a half page or full-screen image with some catchy phrase written over top of it. Although they look cool, hero sections can be a stereotypical element that is no longer appreciated by most people – just get them to the content or CTA- FAST.
You may have a computer, tablet and a phone, but there are also different internet browsers out there. An iphone may render your website differently than an Android phone.
Website are more than just digital brochures, these things can be your marketing workhorse if you have the right strategy in place and maintain it.
Used to support your other main pages. These should provide value and information that links to your most important sales or capture pages.
Explains a service that you do or a product you offer, and the benefits therein. You need a single page for each of the single services or products you offer.
Also called lead pages, the beginning of your website sales / conversion funnel. These are pages that help support or drive traffic from marketing campaign around the internet for a special offer.
A point of conversion where you can capture lead info in exchange for something of value to them. These are pages that give your leads the information they wanted after submitting thier info to you.
A good website will load fast while being responsive to any device. To make sure all that works requires a little technical optimization.
Serving static pages to website visitors makes your website load very fast. If your website displays mostly pages with information that does not change often, then caching is a must.
Images should always be formatted for web, or compressed in “jpg” or “png” file format before uploading to your website. However, if you have a website that’s been around a while, there are plugins and services that can compress the images you already have.
Security
While managed or shared hosting is beneficial in terms of cost, you get what you pay for. Website speed has a lot to do with who is hosting it, and how that server is configured. (We suggest cpanel hosting for WordPress)
GZIP Compression
Server side file compression, also called “GZIP” helps to smush your website files into smaller byte packets to be loaded faster.
PHP & MYSQL versions
As of PHP-7.0 websites can run faster and process more complicated functions, on each subsequent release of PHP make sure you are up to date.
Server security
Review security settings that your hosting panel has to offer and check for any updates.
Emailing account(s)
Has anyone recently left your company, or do you have old emails that need to be cleaned up?
SSL covering top level & sub-domains
Sometimes your SSL may not cover your mailing subdomains which can result in email delivery problems.
WordPress is running upwards of 90 million websites on the internet today. From part time enthusiasts to big brands WordPress is the website building platform of choice.
We see many WordPress installations overlooking some crucial settings, from design to speed, and from SEO performance to making the conversion there are certain ways you need to setup your WordPress website for it to be user friendly and have maximum effect.
WordPress is a great website building solution, but out of the box – some assembly & tools required.
Organic search (below the maps) is becoming harder with the increase of ads on the first page of big G. That is intentional. In 2020 and beyond it will be more of a mixture of a good website and paid ads.
Online shopping is now subject to even more laws & regulations in 2020 and beyond from GDPR affecting overseas, to new rulings in California regarding consumer privacy.
Google is looking for bloggers and influencers to be more transparent and credible and will begin checking the backgrounds and general sentiment around people & brands that will affect how they show up online.
"If you are seeing a page with high impressions but low clicks it could mean a few things, but usually this means that either you are being shown low in the results, or that these are impressions from image searches with no clicks. This could also mean that you have a rich snippet showing in Google that is answering the query having no need to click to your page."
"If you notice a page with high impressions and clicks, but a very high bounce rate it could mean that the page is ranking for keyword terms that are unintentional or accidental."
"Google is using website visitor engagement & actions to help determine what is a good website. If your visitors are engaging highly with your website it will be seen more relevant than others with less action, and it will move up. (by website, we mean web-page)"
Start with a memorable domain name, then solid hosting plan, and a great content management system like WordPress.
You have to build SEO into your website.
Common sense, experience and using your brain are a good set of tools for auditing a website.
Beyond common sense we recommend using Ahrefs, Google Search Console and Screaming Frog web crawler with your own spreadsheet to visualize the data.
A comprehensive website checklist like the one on this page.
A good website checklist will cover the main categories and the most important factors within them and should include technical factors and details that pertain to your business niche.
A good website will have all the information that a customer is looking for designed in an organized layout.
Aside from the fundamentals, a good website will have ways of engaging visitors, and potentially capturing leads for your business.
All websites need the following basics:
Beyond that, reference the checklist above for more details.
The design and structure of your website has a lot to do with how your customers will interact & react to your business, building SEO into your website design will play the largest part of getting new people to your website.
When your website and other marketing channels are properly optimized there should be a constant flow of new and repeat activity. A good online content marketing strategy backed by proper SEO helps put your business in front of people who are searching for your services.
There are multiple ways you can successfully market your business online from paid ongoing services like ads to organic top rankings achieved for little to no cost.
Anyone can pay for ads, the highest bidder usually wins.
When it comes to “organic” or SEO it becomes a new game, a game where you have to know certain things to play your best – but it’s the people that decide who wins.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process of making technical implementations within a website for a Search Engine Results Page (SERP) to display the website near or at the top of the list.
SEO is an organic website component that helps customers find your business first online when searching for your services. We base our marketing campaigns on the core goals your business needs to meet and implement proven methods of repeatable/scaling results.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) refers to the practice of designing creative or text based ads to display on targeted networks of websites, digital display advertising.
SEM requires you to place bids against other advertisers on the same or similar keywords. A “pay to play” means of advertising on a search engine like Google or Bing. If you have a big budget, this can be pretty easy.
You need to find the balance between setting up your site for search indexation ( like Google) while being enjoyable for people using it.
We consider two concepts of structuring a website:
Just a few things that effect how well your website appears in search results.
WordPress is a great platform to build large or small websites with flexibility for a lot of functionality, but some assembly is required out of the box to get a WordPress website to the top of Google.
All it takes is a bit of time and applied marketing strategy to get lasting results. With a well designed website combined with a planned online marketing campaign your company can take more share of any market.
Functionality includes the technology and implementation needed (the tools and programs) to complete the sales process and for such things as automate follow up for future sales, and performance tracking.
Website integrations such as:
Technical, Links, and Content (TLC) and design your company brand image and story, website, and online marketing strategy around the TLC principals. The overarching frame work for our marketing process involves many more minute details but these are the core factors. The TLC method is the foundation of the overall online marketing strategy.
Need Help optimizing your website?
SEO is still one of the most attractive sources of attracting new business, it’s affordable and delivers long term results. One time optimizations to websites can yield years of new business.
Popularity is gained through naturally sharing your website content around the internet in relevant places such as other websites that might compliment your business services / products. The one thing that you need above anything else is website traffic.
Traffic to your website should come from sources in relevant places that drive the right people to make a purchase from your business. While traffic may help the overall popularity of a website it may not mean it is valuable. Value from website traffic comes in the form of transactions, so the sources of traffic should be from strategically placed sources.
Link acquisition is the process that can bring you the most online authority in your business category helping to dominate in a product or service / local or national areas.
We help you understand how linking in and out of your website is important. It is important that if your business is a local service provider that you have complete and optimized local citation listings in the most important directory websites.
The words and images on each of your web pages should be well written for the reader, your potential new customers! There is no longer a need to over-stuff keywords that you think will get you ranked to the top of Google. You must think of every page on your website as important as the rest. Good well written sales copy with a few keywords that is directed towards solving your readers problems and offering your solutions.
Usability includes the rate and likelihood of new conversions. Website design has everything to do with converting new qualified traffic (potential buyers) into actual paying customers. If a website is well planned and designed it will be easy to convert new sales.
Make your website faster & stronger for better marketing and user experience.
Website Management
The main pages on your website are for conversion, taking action, or providing a function. Sometimes, though, these main pages need some help.
In terms of a ‘good converting landing page‘ it should be concise, easy to understand, and not overwhelming – it should focus on the main point – to generate an action.
A blog is used for expanding on topics using posts (articles) related to your main / core offers or other main sales & information pages on the rest of your website.
MUCH OF OUR LEADS COME FROM BLOG POSTS THAT WE WROTE YEARS AGO.
The main pages of your website are meant for converting sales, but blog posts are pieces of content used to “get people in the door“, increasing your chances of acquiring new customers.
The blog is where you keep all of your additional published content so that your main website pages are kept well organized. Blog posts can play a pivotal role in an inbound marketing strategy.
Not everyone has time to read every post you ever make, so you could use blog posts as content to nurture your leads.
Since you can hide certain blog posts, you could create the content of an automated email drip campaign in a sequence of posts that are only accessible through the emails.
As you create content in the blog section of your site, the overall indexation of related keywords & terms will grow and your website will appear in search results for more people. Optimized to be found in Google searches.
Your website has the ability to sell for your company 24/7 – whenever anyone searches for what you do, that could be at 2AM. If you think about what you could offer within a blog post that would benefit the visitor in exchange for their email – you are creating lead capture pages with each additional post.
Potential customers and visitors can contribute to expanding your content by commenting on blog posts, which in and of itself is a means for generating leads – not to mention it will help your SEO.
EXAMPLE
To be honest, we are writing this blog post to help you understand why it’s important, and at the same time using it as a soft-sell to generate leads for our website content creation & design services.
There have been a lot of changes, court cases, and terms of service or privacy policy updates since 2018, no doubt you have received an email from one of these major social media platforms about that.
They have the ability to silence, shut down, censor, or terminate accounts. Many of these platforms are moving to strictly “pay to see” models, where your business will not reach anyone organically anymore, the ad-pocolypse may be upon us.
Having your own website ensures that you won’t be bothered by any of this. We may need to use these platforms to get traction but we do not need to live or die by them.
If you publish on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube – it’s not YOUR content anymore, they OWN it & your account can be terminated without notice.
Google maps has been known to do the same things. Why we suggest that if you do not own it, do not put majority stock into it, but still use it.
Think of your core offers, services, products and build those concepts into a hierarchy – this is what categories are for.
Write about topics closely related to the main categories of your website / business, write in a way that solves a problem related to the product or service – just do not try to create a blog post that is the same as the main sales page or there could be problems.
As mentioned above, you do not want blog post cannibalizing the same keywords as your main landing / sales pages. You want those posts & articles to support the main pages.
Since you could not fit every possible ‘thing’ about your offers (sales pages are meant to be simple and convert) you need blog posts to expand on those ‘things’ or ‘topics’ and point links from those posts to your main sales pages.
Most of these blog post articles are going to be informative. Things people might think & researching about before they are ready to buy. In that case, you should look at each blog post as an opportunity to captivate those people and get them further into your website / sales funnel.
A blog can have a section dedicated to the questions your customers are always asking, saving everyone time. You can use these types of Q&A posts for on-boarding sequences & information to help them be more prepared to do business with you – lots of ideas & selling points here.
If you have valuable information that you would like to share, why not capture some basic lead info in exchange for sharing it? You can make section of a blog private for member access, or enter email to access only – lots of benefits in that concept.
Here are some additional tips for local business blog post ideas
Best places to live
Community events
Local statistics
If your company is doing something new, write or make a video about it and post to your blog!
Write individual topics on your industry, news related and more and tie it into what you do.
Not for everyone, but if it makes sense consider creating content that shows a little behind the scene of what you do, it will make you stand out and customers will trust you more.
Becoming one of the main functions of a website is to answer common questions right off the bat. It saves everyone time, and helps to pre-qualify your leads, plus, it makes the sales process much easier.
If you frequently create new products or build projects it’s always good to share a completed job well done.
If possible, give insight into how you conduct business and what your potential customers can expect.
We hope this helps and gives you some ideas. If you have not started expanding your website content by using a blog, hopefully this has inspired you to take action.
A lead magnet (aka “opt-in”) is an incentive, freebie, or offer that you can use to “magnetize” potential buyers in exchange for their email address or other contact information. Lead magnets usually offer a piece of digital, download-able content, such as a free PDF checklist, report, eBook, white-paper, video, etc.
JUMP TO A SECTION:
We talk about digital lead magnets, like the ones on websites. Though we are not discrediting the effectiveness of printed lead magnets such as post cards, direct mail, magazine ads – all of which can work together in a cohesive marketing plan for both online & offline lead generation.
People do all kinds of crazy things when researching something new online, lot’s of skimming, scrolling and snap decisions. These people are at the top of the funnel, they are not ready to buy, yet.
"I HIRED THEM BECAUSE THE WEBSITE AND EMAILS THEY SENT ME WERE SO INFORMATIVE, AS IF THEY KNEW WHAT INFORMATION I NEEDED - IT MADE ME TRUST AND APPRECIATE THEIR EXPERTISE."
Before your buyer become a customer, they are first shopping around as leads. It is one of the most effective ways to give trust and value in a mutually beneficial exchange of information.
The bottom line is that if you are not creating ways to exchange value on the first impression your competitors probably are. You need ways to get these potential customers that you otherwise might never have known were considering your company for the sale but they other guys just did their marketing better. Ouch.
On the backside of collecting all the leads you have magnetized you can create automations & systems to reach and filter out unqualified leads.
First of all, no one is going to sign up for your “Newsletter” – it’s 2020, potential customers are looking for VALUE. A good, effective lead magnet should be quick to respond and easy to operate.
Here’s a few things that your lead magnet should do if you want it to be effective:
No one likes a popup that hits you in the face the second you arrive to view a website, even Google has spoken out about that problem. Since people expect a solid value-driven approach to website design, you should let them open it when they are ready, like a button.
If you decide to display a popup automatically, at least set it to display at the bottom of the page, or on “exit intent” – as that one last ditch effort to capture their interest. Just don’t be super hardcore sales about it, that pushes people away.
Why this matters
Why this matters
Why this matters
Now that you know what a lead magnet is, why you should have many of them, and why they are so important, let’s have a look at the ways swimming pool companies can use lead magnets effectively.
Pool service and repair customers can be quick to make a decision. A good way to capture them as a lead is to offer a quick pool service reference guide, or even better, a discount first time service if they act right away.
QUICK IDEAS
New pool buyers can take some time before making the decision on getting a pool, then deciding on a contractor. As potential buyers are searching for information about a new pool you need to have something to offer to get them into the top end of your sales funnel.
QUICK IDEAS
Swimming Pool Industry Edition
Some of the lead magnet ideas listed below are links to service-packages we offer for you pool people.
Any of the items you see on this page we should be able to help you add to your existing or new website.
You can see how these things will attract new leads like a magnet! Consider the graphic design & layout to be viewed & printed easily – and you will stay ahead of the competition and front-of-mind to your prospects.
Capturing the emails from potential leads is half the puzzle. On the back end of collecting all those emails or phone numbers is building a list, and then creating a strategy and put it to use. As important is the way you reach out to these people as it is to get their info.
Not all leads are the same, some may not even be qualified to do business with you.
Sometimes the sequence of “touch points” you create to nurture a lead helps to filter out the unqualified – less time on the phone chasing dead leads for you, and that’s more quality time for your life.
Customers now have higher expectations from even some of the most mundane home services.
We can’t count how many times our pool building partners say to us they were hired because customers told them they had a great website with all the right information on it.
Need Help creating lead magnets?
Lead capture pages help you sell more, bottom line. If you don’t have the time or experience to make these important pages on your website we can help you out with creating them for you for a quoted price.
Going beyond the standard pages like About, Contact, Gallery, and Services will help in so many ways. You still need the standard pages and elements on the website, but if you expect to stand out and take more share of the business there are some expectations you need to meet.
Just a few of the main factors your website should be accomplishing:
You get calls all the time for questions that you answer all the time, why not put all those Q & As into a formatted page so that you are not bothered so much (it also helps you rank in Google).
Why this matters
Examples:
A few simple website pages will do.
We still see a lot of pool builder websites out there not displaying their pricing based on their Minimum Viable Pool Package, which is exactly what pool buyers are looking for. Help them determine if they can even afford a pool before getting all worked up and wasting time.
Why this matters
Examples:
A few simple website pages will do.
You have a lot of visitors who are at the top end of the funnel, can they afford a pool, what are the best design trends, what is the best pool equipment and so on – small but informative things you can offer them in exchange for their email.
Why this matters
Examples:
A simple PDF will work just fine!
Give your customers access to documents they call you for all the time because they lost it, or never got it to begin with because it was destroyed during the build – we know how that goes. Now you can just say “Just go to our website and download a copy”
Why this matters
Examples:
Just a few pages can make all the difference.
Everyone says they are the best pool builder in town, but seriously, come on – what is something that no other pool contractor is saying / doing? People can buy a pool from anyone who sells them one, so what makes you different? Be different, and use those differences as selling points.
Why this matters
Examples:
Create one or two pages with this info on it.
Perfect for showing them what they are getting into while at the same time conveying your expertise while also leveling their expectations of having a new pool overnight and what it takes to get one installed and hopefully give them some appreciation for what you do.
Why this matters
Examples:
Create one or two pages with this info on it.
The terms of your service, and your construction agreements will be checked against your website. You should have terms and conditions that relate to limiting your liability. Particular to the pool industry, and the troubles contractors deal with, your website can be used for or against you in court.
Why this matters
Examples:
A couple of pages will do the trick!
Whether or not the potential customer has ever dealt with a pool builder in the past, they will talk to people they know who will tell them to “make sure they are BBB accredited, and … etc” The truth about these less than attractive badges on our websites is that customers are looking for them, and if the competitors have them and you do not you can miss out on more leads than you would ever know about.
Why this matters
Examples:
Memberships, accreditation, awards, etc.
… to be continued
We will update this list when we find new things to improve your website.
Whether you are a pool builder focused on high volume sales or a few luxury projects per year the website is no place to be skimping on the information. Not only can it help make the entire business better, it can help keep you out of hot water.
The customer demographics are changing and you are dealing with more millennial homeowners than anything – that means the people who are always on their phones and used to looking up information extensively before making a purchase.
Customers now have higher expectations from even some of the most mundane home services.
We can’t count how many times our pool building partners say to us they were hired because customers told them they had a great website with all the right information on it.
Need Help With Your Website?
Sales & Informational pages help you sell more, bottom line. If you don’t have the time or experience to make these important pages on your website we can help you out with creating them for you for a quoted price.
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