Luckily, the latest GPS tracking software includes some interesting tools that can actually end up saving your business a considerable amount of money. Even though the virtual world is shrinking, the physical world is not- and deliveries need to be made in order to keep your business growing.

Related: Get the best quotes on GPS fleet tracking software

Route Guidance

One of the most effective ways that GPS tracking systems can end up saving you money is using their efficient routing guides. GPS tracking can update traffic conditions in real time and can help your drivers avoid heavy-traffic areas that will waste precious gas.

• Route tracking will also help you to determine which routes are more gas-efficient, or which have fewer traffic lights.
• Having your drivers take the quickest routes will likely increase delivery time and therefore customer satisfaction- which will likely lead to more business.

Idling Reporting

Though your drivers spend a lot of time driving, they also naturally spend a lot of time idling. The EPA configured that idling (running the engine without moving) can waste anywhere form a quarter to a half a gallon of gas per hour. Your drivers could be idling in traffic, at stop lights, while taking breaks, on detours, and much more. The latest GPS systems can measure you overall idle time as well as your most recent gas mileage.

Related: Improve Productivity with GPS Fleet Tracking

Driver Supervision

The overall quality of your drivers could be costing you money you aren’t even aware of. Even if you hire drivers with spotless records and professional demeanor, you never know how they will perform on the job once they are sent away in your vehicle.

• GPS tracking allows you to monitor your driver’s position, to see if they are purposely taking longer routes or spending excessive amount of time on break. If you see that a few of your drivers are falling behind in their delivery time or driving practices, they might be costing your business money.

Speeding Alerts

GPS tracking can help you to avoid costly speeding tickets or help prevent accidents by altering you when your drivers are speeding over a let limit. Some GPSs allow you to set automatic alerts that will notify you when they are 5 or 10mph over the limit. Though speeding may help you make deliveries quicker, it also puts your driver and cargo at risk and you could end up facing a damaging lawsuit or expensive ticket.

Related: Is Your Business On Track to Know Where Employees Are?

Accident and Theft Reporting

The final way that GPS systems can end up saving your business money is that they can be used to report accidents or thefts instantly. In the event of an accident, your GPS can be used to calculate important information that could be vital in proving a drivers’ innocence for an insurance claim. If your vehicle or cargo is stolen while on the road, your GPS will allow you to pinpoint your vehicle’s location and perhaps even bring the culprit to justice.

Having GPS tracking for your vehicle fleet can also save you up to 35% on your insurance premiums. The cost of installation and equipment is usually recovered after the first year of use, and the money-saving benefits extend far beyond that.

Here are some tips for improving your employee interview process.

Related: Find the best applicants with help from our recruiting software providers

Point out Your “A-Players”

Often times there are a few individuals who stand out in the workplace and are the most efficient at completing their tasks. It is important that you acknowledge these individuals, as they may provide the key to hiring most effective workers.

• What makes them so effective? Make a list of the specific attributes each of your star employees has. Do they manage time wisely? Do they go above and beyond their assignments? Are they effective communicators? Determining desired qualities will help you to hire others who share them.
• What drew them to the company? Why were your best employees drawn to the position they applied for? Why have they stayed with your company? Understand what working benefits your company includes, and be sure to mention them when posting to job listings.

Related: A Bad Hire Costs $25k-$50k: Avoid the Risks of a Bad Hire with 4 Simple Steps

Set Up Peer Interviews

Setting up “peer” employee interviews is a great way to get input from your current employees about potential new hires. Your best employees can provide helpful information that you might not have noticed before.

• Create an interview guide. Make sure that, when your employees are conducting the interviews, they have some sort of structure to their discussion. You do not want them wandering off topic or making biased decisions based on personal preferences. Have them include behavior-based questions, or “what if” strategies so that they can better judge the prospects’ potential to work effectively.
• Trust their Judgment. If you are implementing peer interviews, be sure you can trust the judgment of your key employees. They can provide insights to certain characters that may be hidden if they were interviewing with a higher-level employer.

Related: 5 Tips for Hiring the Right Employees

Employ Quality Managers

The general manager to in your workforce stands as the main method of communication between you and your employees. In order to hire quality workers, it is important to have solid relationships with your general managers.

• Good communication. Good communication between both you and your managers and your managers and the employees is essential for making the workplace flow efficiently. Make sure employees feel comfortable with their managers and that you can accurately obtain information for your managers about their staff.
• Provide Opportunities for Advancement. Making sure employees are able to advance within your business is key to helping your company grow. Before looking to outside sources for employment, make sure you first look to existing employees who might be able to handle new responsibilities in the new position. Be sure to provide thorough training programs for all employees. Providing opportunities for advancement will also draw possible employees to lower positions with room for promotion.

These are all effective ways to optimize the hiring process to prevent a high turnover rate, which is a common aspect of many hotel businesses.  Hiring more new employees every year will cost you valuable time and money that could be put toward other prospects. By including your best employees in your hiring process and giving them opportunities to advance, you can gain valuable information that will help you to hire more efficient workers.

Related: Save your startup time with recruiting software.

Find a Confident Co-Founder

The right founders of a startup can make or break the business. In an interview with ReadWrite, Martina Welke of Zealyst explained that the co-founder of a startup is someone who you will spend a great deal of time with and that this person is someone you’ll have to see things through with, no matter what obstacles arise. Choosing the right co-founder is crucial to your startup’s success as any consequences and challenges your business faces will have to be faced together. Ensure you and your co-founder complement each other, enjoy working together and have a mutual commitment to the company you’re growing.

Leave Emotion Out of It

Hiring friends and family may seem like a good idea, but you need to take a more objective approach before making a hiring decision. Because of an experience you have with someone, or an emotional connection, they may seem to be a fit for your business, but that isn’t always the case. Business missteps and mistakes could lead to a failed business and permanent damage to your personal relationship. Take the time to evaluate whether you’re friend or old classmate is really the best fit, or if someone else out there is a better hire.

Related: 10 Recruiting Stats to Keep Your Hiring Strategy Current and Effective

Hire Smart: Hire Someone Smarter

Don’t let ego get in the way when it comes to finding new employees; smart people will take your business to new heights. Unless it’s you, the person filling the role of chief technologist should be smarter than you are. Someone whose intelligence exceeds your own will help drive a product or idea from strategy and concept through execution so that the entire business is successful. While you may be the founder, you can’t wear every hat. Hire experts in areas where your experience lacks.

Pick a Perfectionist

Every team needs a perfectionist, someone who is focused on the minute details that could go overlooked. While you may have the vision about the product and business and a tech team that can build it, every startup needs someone who can refine the product to ensure it stands out from others, has a place in the market you plan to enter, and will generate excitement from the target audience. This may be your CMO, CFO or CTO. Whoever it may be, make sure they complement your nature and talents so your startup has checks and balances.

Related: Why Do Startups Fail? Debunking the Myths

Think Realistically

Startups are often on tight budgets and straddle the line between success and failure. Think realistically about where your business is headed and only hire what you need and can afford. While filling certain positions is a must as your business grows, start with only what you need in the beginning and be realistic about the compensation you can produce. Just as you would with business development efforts, make sure you have the budget and resources available before taking on massive recruiting and hiring. Paying close attention to the business bottom line is a must and even though you may want to scale the business, you need to pay careful attention to your finances before you scale hiring.

Running a startup and finding top talent isn’t easy. Before your business really gets going, look to involve the right people who will help your business boom. A complementary and confident co-founder is just the start. Startups hiring need people with expertise other than their own, a perfectionist, and just the right amount of employees to scale without bottoming out.

Your call center is the main point of interaction between your company and its customers, so it is important that your call center and its agents be as effective as possible at increasing sales and providing quality customer service.

These five tips will help your business to either build an effective call center, or help you to improve your existing one that might not be as effective as it could be.

Related: Search our vendors for call center software

Make it Personal

You would think that this would be the most obvious tip for a call center, but it is an important one that businesses commonly overlook. Hiring call center agents who are comfortable on the phone and can speak easily and informatively without a script is tougher than you might think, but it will definitely pay off in the long run.

• Lose the script and allow your call agents a certain amount of freedom in their conversations, and the customer will naturally feel more at ease and will be much more likely to listen.
• Get your reps to smile when they talk, which will create a friendly tone in their voice, and be sure that they warmly greet and send off your customers.

Related: Is Your Call Center Keeping Up with New Trends?

Use Social Media

Using the internet as a means of communication between your business and their customers is a great way to get more questions answered in less amount of time. Using social media is great tool for providing instant customer support.

• Live chat allows you to extend your support center past regular business hours with relatively little effort. This is good for customers who may be in different time zones, or prefer internet communication in general.
• Providing a customer service email allows your company to answer questions that might not be as time-sensitive as ones over the phone. Be sure that customer emails are not overlooked, however, and make sure you respond in a timely manner.

Multi-Task

Use your call center agents to their full potential. Many are trained in a variety of skills including scheduling, lead generation and website support. Train your call center representative to generate leads as they’re taking calls throughout the day to increase you sales. Allowing your agents to take a certain amount of risks could pay off greatly in the long run- just be sure that they maintain the quality of your services while doing so.

Related: Your Call Center: Which Real-Time Metrics Matter Most?

Get To Know Your Team

Call center are all about open communication- so be sure that as a business owner you are also open and available to your team. Spending time interacting and communicating with them will promote a relaxed atmosphere that will reflect in the quality of their calls.

• Be sure to visit the office and spend time observing and interacting with them. Make sure you maintain a friendly demeanor to prevent them from feeling uncomfortable.
• Ask their input. If they feel like certain pitches are not working with their customers, listen to what your agents have to say about the overall quality of their conversations or trends they might be noticing.

Monitor Effectiveness

It’s important to evaluate you call center regularly for possible areas for improvement. An unattended call center usually becomes stagnant and prevents growth. Monitor your best calling methods and seek to improve your call center at every opportunity. Using metrics to keep track of your call centers effectiveness is also a good way of spotting trends.  Seek to generate more leads at a time and at the same time maintain positive relationships with your loyal customers.

Make sure that your call center is being as effective as possible in increasing your company’s sales and revenue. Maintaining a personal relationship with your customers can benefit your company’s reputation and help you to stand out against your competitors. Having an effective call center can make all the difference when it comes to making sales and providing your customer with quality support.

Because customers are receiving so much spam in their inboxes these days, it’s important that your company keep its email marketing content fresh so you don’t get moved to the trash folder.

To make your email marketing more effective, you’ll need to convince or motivate your customers to click through to your site and make a purchase. This, of course, is easier said than done. Here are some ways to make your email marketing efforts more effective.

Related: Find email marketing companies who can help make your campaigns shine

Increase Your Click-Through Rates

The ultimate goal of email marketing is to have customer immediately follow through to your site and convert them to purchase. A study by Silverpop found that email open rates have declined 2.1% from 2009, whereas click-through rates have increased slight by .7%. Chances are, if they don’t click through at the time they first read your email, they won’t make a note and come back and do it later on.

• Use words that create a sense of urgency, and make the customers think that their business cannot wait. If they think that their time for special offers is running up, they are more likely to click-through immediately to go to your site.
• Place links to your site in multiple places in the email, including at the top of the page. Make it easy for them to find your company information in the email.

Related: 5 Email Marketing Best Practices You Aren’t Using Yet

Make a Strong First Impression

As soon as the customer opens your marketing email, they should recognize your company’s brand. Make an effective first impression by placing the company logo at the top of the email, or at least above the fold. Then, even if they do not end up reading the entire message, you have still made an impression on them. Also, make sure you email is clean and aesthetically pleasing. Basic black and white text is boring. Be sure to put your best foot forward in all of your marketing efforts.

Communicate With Your Customers

Another good way to update your email marketing strategy is by communicating with your customers by email more frequently.

• If they bought a product from you once, then never heard from you again, chances are if they randomly receive an email offer from you they won’t go for it. Be sure to maintain consistent communication with your customers over email to remind them of your brand every now and then.
•  Adding personalized information to emails can also help you connect with them connect with your company on a more personal level, and will make them more inclined to use your service again.

Related: Using Your POS Data to Improve Email Marketing

Go Mobile

Creating a mobile version of your site or incorporating responsive web design into your existing site will help make your company accessible to a wider customer pool. Many people check their email on their phones, so if the site they click through too isn’t mobile-friendly, they could close the window immediately. Include the link to your mobile site in the signature of your email.

Monitor Your Effectiveness

Like with all of your marketing campaigns, you should keep track of your numbers to monitor its overall effectiveness. If you are simply sending out messages and not keeping track of them, it can be considered spam.

• Make sure your messages are being delivered to customer’s inboxes and are not being bounced back by email servers.
• You can view your open-rate to see how effective your subject lines are
• Click-through rates will let you know how effective your email body is. A high open rate with a low click through rate will show that you need to update your email content.

Keeping your email marketing content fresh can be what sets you apart from the wave of spam messages that are sent every day.

Operating a business means you can help play a part in saving our planet.  Why not make some small changes to make your business greener and reap the benefits and cost savings of operating a more sustainable company?

We can help you determine which eco-friendly changes are best for your business.

Related: Find sustainable sources for office drinking water

Here are some suggestions of eco-friendly changes that may work well for your business:

It’s Obvious: Use Less and Track Your Savings

Use less of things like water, electricity, paper and printer ink to save money. Think about recycling and reusing office supplies.  A survey by American Recycler indicated that 90 percent of American businesses practice some form of recycling, while 10 percent do not which means we have some room for improvement countrywide.

• Ponder the idea of shutting off lights when rooms are not in use, or turning off the computer at the end of each workday.  Think about the benefits related to allowing employees to telecommute and decide if this option is one that would work for your company and its team.
• Don’t be afraid to explore some areas where you can save money and be greener.  Implement some changes for a month and compare your expenses to those of months past.  If you see a clear savings, then bring your entire company into the changes and start saving money and helping the environment.

Related: Can Startups Save Both their Money and the Environment?

Invest Now, Save In the Long Run

If you rent or lease office space, it may not be in your best interest to drop cash to make your building’s infrastructure greener, other than simple fixes like implementing energy efficient light bulbs.  If you anticipate you’ll be in the facility for a few years or more, then it’s worth pulling out the calculator to crunch some numbers and see if it’s in your best interest to make investments like upgrading your air conditioning systems or another avenue that may afford a more significant savings.

Find Sustainability Organizations

Becoming an eco-friendly business isn’t something you have to go at alone.  Many organizations are available to help you determine which measure will give you the best return on investment.  Call your utility produce and discuss your efforts; they can help you determine what changes to implement.  Energy.gov can take you to links to tax credits, rebates and other state-based savings available for installing energy efficient windows, lights and appliances.

Related: 3 Easy Steps How Your Small Business Can Go Green

Green measures are about more than just dollars saved.  The investment associated with running a business that’s environmentally conscious has benefits that are both short- and long-term.  As a business owner, place a high value on green practices and the feeling of empowerment this gives you and your team can set your business apart from others in your community.

What investments have you made in order to run a greener business?

Bio: Megan Totka is the Chief Editor for ChamberofCommerce.com. She specializes on the topic of small business tips and resources. ChamberofCommerce.com helps small businesses grow their business on the web and facilitates connectivity between local businesses and more than 7,000 Chambers of Commerce worldwide.

As your business progresses, it may be harder and harder to untangle profits and expenses and control your credit score.

If your business fails, you also want to be sure that your personal finances are protected so that you don’t get caught up in bankruptcy.

Related: Find a merchant cash advance to help grow your business

Open a New Business Account

Opening a completely separate account will help you start your business out on the right foot. You can choose to open your account with the same bank you use personally, but be sure it is specifically labeled as a business checking account.

• A business checking account will help you to establish a banking history for your company. It will help you maintain a professional demeanor when interacting with customers, vendors or investors.
• Sorting through statements at the end of the month will be much easier if your personal account is kept separate. It will also help you avoid error in payments and fees.

Get To Know Your Banker

As a new business owner- a good relationship with your banker could be one of the most valuable tools to carry with you throughout your career. If you keep lines of communication open with your banker, they can give you important advice or help get you out of a sticky financial situation you may find yourself in. Your banker can answer any questions you might have about business finances or applying for loans or lines of credit.

Related: Should You Use Personal Savings to Fund Your Business?

Use a Business Credit Card

Though it is not wise to fund your business solely on credit, applying for a business credit card is a good idea when setting up your business banking. When paired with a business checking account, your business credit card can help to keep your company on track at all times.

• Taking out a business line of credit can help you build your business’s credit history and score, which can be useful it’s in good standing when applying for more financing or making business partnerships.
• Most business credit cards come with discounts or rewards programs that can provide you with bonuses like insurance coverage, discounts, or travel coverage.
• Like personal credit cards, business cards shouldn’t be used for huge purchases, and should be paid off regularly and on time in order to preserve your credit score.

Know Your DUNS Number

Your Data Universal Numbering System number provided by Dun & Bradstreet is a unique nine-digit identification number for each physical location of your business.

• Your DUNS number is not connected to your personal credit history, and helps to protect your business if your personal finances take a hit.
• A DUNS number will allow you to apply for government funding and bid on government proposals, and are free of charge.

Related: Bad Debt: How to Spot the Early Warning Signs

Monitor Your Accounts

Keeping track of both your personal and business bank accounts will help you make wise business decisions and keep you updated on necessary action.

• Go Mobile: mobile banking for both your personal and business accounts can give you access you your funds no matter where you are. Most bankers offer mobile logins for their accounts.
• Set notifications to keep you on track with payments.

Mixing your personal life with business can hurt you in quite a few ways- one of them being your finances. Keeping your credit and banking information completely separate is a way to keep them both safe, and could end up saving your business in times of financial crisis.

However, you don’t need enterprise-level IT departments and software in order to benefit from the many advantages of Big Data.

Tools for the integration, computing, management, and visualization of Big Data are becoming increasingly accessible to startups and small businesses – and the use of those tools is paying off.

Related: Take control of your business data with document management software

The Benefits of Big Data

According to The Aberdeen Group, “Big Data refers to the problems of capturing, storing, managing, and analyzing massive amounts of various types of data. Most commonly this refers to terabytes or petabytes of data, stored in multiple formats, from different internal and external sources, with strict demands for speed and complexity of analysis.”

The study from Aberdeen found the data collected by businesses is growing at a rate of 40% year-over-year. IT departments are strained by the length of time it takes to get information, inaccessible data formats, siloed data, and data volume growing too rapidly to handle. Despite these strains, 51% of small businesses find that the expense of software and IT services prevents them from investing in Big Data technologies.

However, effectively managing Big Data effectively caused organizations to report a 12% year-over-year increase in their operating profit and a 14% increase in their total customer base.  A 2012 survey by the SAS Institute about the use of big data in more than 2,500 organizations came to similar conclusions. 67% of respondents gained “a competitive edge” through their use of big data analytics. The surveyed organizations placed analytics first in:

• Streamlining operations (46% of respondents),
• Identifying target customers (36%),
• Developing or refining products or services (31%),
• Evaluating employees (29%).

Related: Big Data: Recruiters Need to Start Talking in Numbers

Utilizing Big Data in Your Small Business

Just as the volume of data collected by a business is scaled to the size of the organization itself, so too is the technology used for managing big data scalable. New technologies are emerging to help small businesses and startups manage their data. The technological areas that businesses need to master in order to attain control over their data include:

• Data integration.  Aberdeen reported that companies collect data from an average of 20 unique internal sources, 12 sources from partners, suppliers, distributors, etc, and 9 from external sources like social media, web traffic, economic information, and more.
• In-memory computing. The fastest way to process data is in-memory computing, in which the target data is loaded directly onto the RAM of a server or desktop, thereby preventing data bottlenecks in your network. The amount of RAM you need to purchase is directly proportional to the amount of data you have. The decreasing costs of RAM have made this function financially accessible to small businesses for the first time.
• Unstructured data management. Your business needs to collect, manage, and analyze data from relational databases as well as unstructured data from documents, emails, social media, images, video, and rich media. NoSQL databases like Hadoop gives you more flexibility in how you store, manage, and assess your data repository.
• Data visualization. This functionality can range from simple reports, dashboards, or charts, to dynamically updated visualization elements that enable you to drill down into your data to find underlying patterns or relationships.

Related: Using Big Data to Optimize Your Predictive Marketing

If your small business has previously considered, but rejected Big Data management tools due to their cost, complexity, or effort involved, take the time to revisit the idea. You may find that emerging software tools geared towards small businesses and small budgets can have an overwhelmingly positive ROI for your business.

Using customer support software that operates in the cloud, or on a hosted online server, can help you improve your connection with your customers and be more readily available to answer all of their questions and concerns.

Here are three sure-fire ways that using the cloud will improve the overall quality of your customer support.

Related: Improve customer experience with the right inbound call center

Promote Innovative Ideas

Hosting your customer information in the cloud as opposed to in an in-house database will allow your customer service agents to come up with fresh, innovative ideas. If your company embraces an innovative approach to customer care, it will likely result in better and more effective communication.

• Customer feedback can provide your company with a huge amount of productive feedback, and often it is difficult to keep track of so many ideas. Cloud software is easy to use and can give your customer support team tools that will help promote innovative ideas for customer engagement.
• Developing and testing new methods of customer support will help keep your company on the cutting edge of product development and help you go beyond simple customer satisfaction.
• Using cloud-based software will help free up you time usually dedicated to software management. Because the cloud is hosted by a third-party, your employees don’t have to spend time organizing and performing maintenance, and can focus more on providing quality assistance.

Related: Social Customer Service on the Rise: Are You Taking Advantage?

Get Personal

Using cloud computing can help your company move forward in one of the most popular trends these days: personalization. Increased personalization means a stronger connection with each and every one of your loyal customers.

• Social media is one of the newest platforms for customer support. E-Service (including web, social, and chat) support channels made up 13% of incoming support requests in 2012, but are projected to grow by 53% in the next year (DailyInfographic). Having your CRM in the cloud will allow your team to reach out to customers on social media sites easily and let them to provide instant support.
• Monitoring customer trends using social media will also let you to adjust your service to each customer you assist, letting you answer their questions quickly while projecting an approachable and friendly image of your company.
• The cloud allows you almost instant access to your customer base, allowing you to tailor future campaigns or create forums specifically for your target audience.

Related: 15 Things Your Customers Are Dying to Hear

Access Information Easily

One of the most important ways that the cloud can improve your customer support is in its mobility. By storing customer information online, your team members can get the information they need even if they are away from the office.

• If employees are outside the office, or even working from home, they can still provide assistance to your customers by easily pulling up information about their accounts including purchase history. Depending on your employee’s scheduling, this will make your customer support team accessible outside of business hours or even over holidays, because some of the time your customers might operate outside of normal business hours.

A study by Bluewolf in 2012 showed that 85% of your business could be lost due to poor customer service. One of the most effective ways to keep your customer support team up-to-date with customer information is by using cloud-based applications to keep them mobile and to promote innovative thinking.

The keywords you target (or don’t target) on your site determine what searches Google and Bing will pull your website for and what kind of traffic will find its way to your website.

Here are four keyword research tips to help you stay on track:

Related: Get help with your keywords from one of our online marketing vendors

Look at what keywords are already driving traffic to your site

Before you dive headfirst into your keyword research process, open up your Google Analytics account and take a look at the last year (or as far back as you can go). What are the top keywords from the past year that drove organic search traffic to your site?

For instance, a CPA might see keywords like “business accounting,” “small business CPA,” or “tax CPA.” If certain keywords are already driving traffic to your site without any SEO help chances are when you put your SEO program behind them you’ll do even better organically.

• Take a look at the top keywords for each page, not just your site overall, as you have to do keyword research for and optimize each page of your site individually. You might find some great long-tail keywords that don’t crack the top keywords overall but still have a lot of value and potential.

Remember who your influencers AND purchasers are

Depending on your niche, it’s entirely possible that the people doing the research do not have the buying power to actually make the final decision. For instance, an IT manager might want to get the company on a private cloud computing environment, but the CIO is actually the one that makes the call (provided they get the CFO to approve the budget).

Related: Think Like Your Target Audience When Choosing Keywords

The keywords you select need to take into account who your influencers AND purchasers are and what kind of search queries they might be using. The IT manager might be more interested in “moving to a private cloud” while the CIO cares about “cloud computing security” and the CFO wants to know about the “cost saving benefits of cloud computing.”

• All three keywords (and their many variations) are potential keywords that the site could target depending on who they are trying to connect with using a specific piece of content.

Get specific with your keywords

There is a big difference between “insurance” and “small business health insurance in Massachusetts” when it comes to search volume, competition levels, and SEO value. “Insurance” is incredibly broad and could mean anything depending on the person doing the searching. Do they want car, home, auto, life or flood insurance? If you sell small business health insurance getting a visitor to you site looking for pet life insurance isn’t going to do you much good.

• That’s why it pays to get specific with your keywords and incorporate the long tail. Those keywords might get less search volume but they send a much more targeted visitor to your site.

Don’t be blinded by search volume

Piggy-backing off of tip #3, don’t let the search volume dictate which keywords you choose! Yes, “mortgage” might get 25 millions searches a month but is that the best keyword for your website? You want to target keywords that are highly relevant to your website’s content and accurately reflect what you have to offer potential customers.

• Keywords with high search volume also tend to be much more competitive, meaning it’s a lot harder to rank well for them. If you only gauge the value of a keyword by its search volume you could be missing out on a lot of valuable opportunities.

Related: One Always Lies, and One Always Tells the Truth: Where Do Your SEO Ranking Reports Stand?

Keep in mind that your keyword research is not set in stone. User behavior changes, your industry evolves and your business grows—and you want your SEO program to accurately reflect those changes in the keywords you target. Don’t be afraid to look for new opportunities.

Bio: Nick Stamoulis is the President of Boston search marketing company Brick Marketing. With over 13 years in the industry, Nick Stamoulis shares his SEO knowledge by writing in the Brick Marketing Blog and publishing the Brick Marketing SEO Newsletter. Contact Nick Stamoulis at 781-999-1222 or nick@brickmarketing.com