Online Marketing and SEO is Important

Your website design should reflect your brand and get people familiar with it; brand familiarity is essential for every local business. Visual elements are important, too. Potential customers don’t want to see large blocks of text—not only is it unattractive, but most people won’t take the time to look through it. The more appealing your website is, the more time your customers will spend on it, increasing the chances of them making a purchase.

Google is now using “user friendliness” as a major rankings factor.  In addition, the time of length spent on a site is also important as it shows user interest and value to the visitor.  By investing in website design, you can improve your local online marketing to reach valuable customers interested in your business.

See how we can help you build an SEO-friendly website!

2. Optimize for Local Search

Implementing local search engine optimization (SEO) strategies is an excellent way for small businesses to reach more customers. Optimizing your website for local search helps connect to your small business with people looking for the products or services you provide.

Most people find local businesses through Google. They’ll search for what they’re looking for and use phrases like “near me” and “city” to help find a local place that has what they need. With over 45% of searches happening through local listings, local SEO is more important than ever.

If you want to reach customers with any of your local online marketing strategies, optimizing for local search is a must. But how do you optimize your website to appear in local searches?

A common way is to integrate proper site map and footer setup as a foundation.  NAP information (Name, Address, Phone) has to be accurate on offsite business listings so that Google knows you are a reliable source to appear in the local results. However, conducting keyword research and implementing the right keywords in the right way takes time & patience.

You can also help optimize your site for local searches by cleaning up the code, increasing the total amount of directories and listings your business appears on.  This is called citation building. Optimizing your website for local SEO is a challenging and ongoing strategy, but it will help your small business reach a wider audience.

Related: Internet Marketing Strategy & SEO See how we can help with local SEO!

3. Manage Customer Reviews

Customer reviews are crucial for any business—especially for small and local businesses. Your potential customers rely on other people’s reviews to help them decide if they should choose your company.

When a potential customer researches a business, they look at its reviews to determine whether or not it’s a good option for them. When they see lots of positive reviews, they’re more likely to do business with you instead of someone else. Similarly, local businesses with handfuls of negative reviews can drive people away before they ever interact with the company.

If you want your customer reviews to work for you instead of against you, online reputation and review management needs to be part of your local online marketing strategy. Investing in a local online marketing service to help manage your reviews is one of the best things you can do for your small business.

Monitoring and managing your reviews mean more than thanking customers for their positive feedback. While it is crucial to make them feel valued, and welcoming their positive reviews strengthens your business relationship with them, many local businesses focus too much on the positive and ignore the negative.

You need to address the issues in negative reviews, too. It’s important to reach out to customers who have a poor experience, acknowledge the problems they faced, and try to resolve them. Your potential customers will expect to see a few negative reviews—what really matters to them is what you do with that feedback.  And always, reply professionally to reviews, good or bad!

See how we can help with review and reputation management!

4. Create Localized Content

Sharing Your Posts on Social Media

One thing many small businesses ignore at the beginning of their local online marketing strategy is creating content—typically because they don’t have the time to work on it. However, content creation is crucial, especially for local businesses. For a successful local online marketing plan, you need to include content creation and inbound marketing.

Related: Content Marketing: Smart Strategies for Small Businesses

Localized content comes in many forms, like blogs, webinars, podcasts, videos, etc. Your content should provide potential customers with information valuable to them. It can help you get more traffic to your website if you focus on the topics that matter most to your customers and provide them with relevant, valuable information.

However, like optimizing your website for local search, keywords also come into play here. That’s another challenge of creating localized content—even if you create the best content that you know your audience will love, you need to get it in front of them.

See how we can help you create the best content!

Let Us Help Launch Your Business’s Local Online Marketing Plan

A local online marketing plan brings so much value to small businesses, helping them reach more customers that are interested in their products and services.

At GMS, we have years of experience helping local small business owners like you create and launch effective local online marketing plans that incorporate web design, local SEO, review and reputation management, content creation, and more.

Let us help grow your small business with a local online marketing plan tailored to your unique brand and customers. Schedule your free consultation today.

Let Our Internet Marketing Team Help You

The post Local Online Marketing Tips You Need to Implement Today appeared first on .

Internet Marketing Strategies for Growth!

• Your Customers & Market Dynamics

Every small business owner should strive to understand their target customers. For example, what motivates them to do business with you? What do they need that you can provide? Answering these questions will help you choose the best ways to reach the right people with your marketing strategies.

Other than your customers, you need to understand your competitors, too. For example, who are they, and what marketing tactics do they use? What trends in your industry can change how customers interact with your business? You can survey your customers, directly call your competitors, and perform research online to gain insights into the market dynamics.

• Your Marketing Goals

What are the goals for your small business marketing strategies? Do you want to acquire new customers, improve customer retention, increase the average purchase per customer, or something else?

Setting clear goals helps you design a marketing plan that aligns your small business’s limited resources, time, and budget with the local marketing strategies that will help achieve your marketing and operational objectives.

• Marketing ROI

We work with small businesses, so we know that limited resources and budgets are commonplace. Successful small business marketing means focusing your efforts on the tactics that generate the highest return on investment (ROI) for your money.

Identifying this isn’t always easy, though. To determine which marketing strategies will deliver the best ROI, you have to test different tactics, collect results, and evaluate which ones perform the best for your business.

3 Ways for Small Businesses to Market Their Products & Services

There are many cost-effective marketing channels that small businesses can use—let’s look at three strategies that every small business should use to increase their marketing efforts and accelerate its growth:

1. Create a Website for Your Business

Having a Website done Right is the Key!

Setting up a website is one of the first things you should do as a small business owner; a business website will provide the foundation for many of your other marketing strategies.

It serves many purposes, from educating your potential customers to bringing in leads from inbound marketing and serving as the destination where your customers will arrive from Google searches, content marketing, etc.

If done correctly, it offers a great 1st impression!

Related: Web Design Focused on Conversions & Targeted Traffic And don’t forget to:

• Incorporate SEO — Most customers rely heavily on Google to discover small businesses like yours. So, your website needs to be designed with search engines in mind, mainly Google! Search engine optimization (SEO) is what helps your business’s website rank higher on search engine results pages (SERP) and involves both the technical aspects of how your website is built, layout, and the content you include on it.
• Support mobile devices — Everyone has a smartphone, and everyone uses them constantly, including to research businesses and shop. Over 50% of your customers will find your website from a mobile device, and if it’s not optimized for smaller screens, it can turn potential customers away quickly.

Is it time to create your small business’s website? We can help design, host, and handle the SEO for your site—Book your free consultation.

2. Email Marketing

Small businesses often use direct marketing strategies, which involve reaching out directly to specific groups. For example, direct marketing includes handing out flyers to local residents.

Email marketing is a direct response marketing technique that small businesses can use to their advantage. It’s a strategy that allows small businesses to customize their messaging to different groups of customers. You can send welcome emails to strengthen relationships with new customers and thank you emails for returning customers. You can also send promotional content, coupons, discounts, etc. to incentivize purchases.

This personalized messaging is great for capturing the attention of busy customers and is much more effective than one-size-fits-all emails. The result is better customer engagement, higher open rates, and, ultimately, more sales.

3. Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing helps strengthen your small business’s relationship with its customers by building trust and offering value over time through various tactics. Inbound and content marketing focuses on attracting customers to your business instead of pushing outbound messages (like ads) to them.

The key?  Add value!  For example, you can post articles on your website that talk about topics related to your business. Many searches online are questions, not key words!  Customers looking for information have an incentive to visit your website for answers. When they arrive of their own volition, they’re more likely to think favorably of your small business and stick around to learn more.

Inbound and content marketing also helps strengthen your small business website’s SEO. In addition, posting insightful content helps position you as an industry expert. And when you provide value to people before they become customers, inbound marketing also helps improve your business reputation.

Related: Content Marketing: Smart Strategies for Small Businesses

When using inbound marketing, providing quality content is crucial. This marketing strategy doesn’t work unless your content provides genuine value to the people reading it. And don’t forget that content marketing is about more than blog posts; webinars, podcasts, and videos are all great content that small businesses can use to bring in more customers.

Did you know that we do content marketing, too? Learn about our inbound content marketing services for local and small businesses and schedule your free consultation.

We Help Small Businesses Grow

Small business marketing is about more than creating an SEO-friendly website, sending out emails, and publishing content. It’s about finding the right combination of strategies that allow your business to best reach its ideal customers.

We know that behind every small business, there are hard-working business owners like you. And creating an effective small business marketing strategy takes time, resources, and expertise that you might not have available. That’s what we’re here for—you and your business.

Don’t hesitate to reach out.

We work on your website’s SEO all the time!

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Everyone these days is extremely busy. Both vendors and customers are rarely on the same schedule and with the majority of sales happening online, rarely are both available at the exact same time.  Many times, the buyer is shopping online after hours or even in different time zones.  These feedback forms can come in all hours of the day and by the time the vendor or business owner is available, the potential client has moved on with his or her busy routine and thus begins the phone tag or email tag back and forth.

Business owners often think they will simply email the client and when they get a chance, they will simply reply back with the same enthusiasm they had when they generated the inquiry. However, this is simply not the case, again for a variety of reasons.  Here is why:

The psychology of the buyer:

Buyers are impulsive and often “in the moment” when about to purchase or looking to purchase.  A person submitting a form at 2PM has completely forgotten about the form they submitted by 6PM that same day.  Reply to that same person at 9PM at night, they won’t be looking at your email until noon the next day and they have already had 5-10 other more important things in their lives since that 2PM form submission the day before.  How receptive will this person be to opening up your email from the day before when their kids are late for school, work is pressing them for deadlines, or they are trying to get a heating repairman to fix their boiler?  Your email has gone from priority 1 or 2 when they were in the moment to priority 14 or 15 and will be parked.  This is assuming you are lucky enough for the buyer to even open and read your email.  Worse, if they were in the moment at 2PM, they may have submitted 2-3 other inquiries to competitors that were quicker to the draw than you were.

The reason why returning phone calls is often ineffective is the same reasons as above, but even with an added irritant.  Most people are not going to recognize your phone when calling, even with a caller ID.  Remember, they are out of the moment and may not even remember the business they reached out to.  Many business owners call from personal cell phone numbers without caller ID and how many of us answer phone calls from unknown numbers?  Not many.  I know my phone is full of so much spam and random salespeople, that I simply hit the “decline” button with Clint Eastwood precision.  Lastly, even if the client does answer, they are usually busy and not ready to discuss.  Again, the phone tag games back and forth commence.

Slow Vendor response times:

Business owners are swamped with a ton of tasks and many small business owners do not have a sales staff or manager sitting by their emails.  They get to them when they have time.  Well, this is the kryptonite to lead gen.  New Leads not responded to within 5 minutes or less go ice cold like the dark side of the moon.  A lead just 60 minutes old has 20 times less likely chance of engagement than a lead responded to within 5 minutes.  If the service is food-related, emergency-related, or anything that is the same day, like a cleaning service or auto repair, the odds get even worse.  Respond 24 hours later and you are almost wasting your time.  Conclusion:  Respond FAST or you are throwing your marketing dollars out the window.

How common is this?  EXTREMELY common.  In fact, the open rate for emails is often less than 25%.  After the 3rd or 4th time reaching out, the business owner simply stops trying to reach out, and thus, the once warm lead goes ice-cold as does the sales opportunity.

THE SOLUTION?

Texting!

This is one technique that will triple your engagement with clients if not more.  Often we see a 5-10 fold increase with engagement, especially if automated.  Here is why:

Over 90% of texts are received and READ

My inbox is jammed packed with unread emails.  Many I simply delete just by reading the subject.  However, how many of your texts go unread?  Not many.  Everyone has their phone in their hand and that number by your unread text messages rarely gets very high.  Why?  Convenience and nonthreatening. 

Convenience

Before you beat yourself up and think that this is all your fault and you are disorganized out of control business owner, think again.  You are not!  You are busy and usually busy taking care of existing clients which of course should be your main priority!  The key is to come up with tools, techniques, and solutions that make life easier.  Business owners first and foremost should be problem solvers.  By making it easy to respond to clients reaching out to you in a timely manner and at the same time solving their problems, we are killing two birds with one stone while not losing sight of existing issues at hand.

I don’t know any business owner carrying a laptop under their arm while installing drywall or out to lunch with a client.  However, ALL business owners have their phones with them.  Here is the strategy:

1. Make sure your business email can be received on your phone.  This is critical.
2. Check your phone often for new inquiries.  If you can, have your new client inquiries go to an email dedicated to new clients.  Something like sales@mybusinessrocks.com or whatever.  If you can, make it have a unique sound or vibration for sales inquiries so you don’t have to stare at your phone every 5 minutes.
3. If you have a sales manager, make sure they are performing #2 for you
4. Have a prewritten text message ready to copy and paste to ALL new inquiries.
5. Make the text PERSONAL:  Something like the following:    Dear Brian, I just received your text message.  Thank you for the opportunity to serve you.  Can you please respond to this text and let me know when is the best time to reach out to you, or if now is a great time to talk, simply respond now and I will call you back within 3-5 minutes.

Note: Now this message can be changed up and customized to your needs, but this will START the engagement process and you will also be able to see if the potential client actually read your text.

Lastly, this is not to say… “Don’t Email”, but rather, when you receive the form…  this is the order to engage.

Responding to an inquiry within the first 15 minutes?

1. Respond via phone if they called, if they answer and talk to you, you are good to go.
2. Respond via email if they emailed and mention you texted as well.

Responding to inquiry After 15 minutes?

1. Respond via text
2. Respond via email
3. Send a 2nd follow-up text 24 hours later if no answer is received.
4. Send a 3rd follow-up text 72 hours later and 1 more voice message if no answer is received.
5. After 72 hours and 3rd follow-up, the lead has probably gone ice cold and a 4th follow-up is optional a week later and put on a mailing list.

For an advanced strategy that is even more efficient or any business owner with 50+ leads per month, you will need to make this process automated so that text messages with your customized message go out within 2-3 minutes of every inquiry.  We can help!  At givemeservice.com, we have many affordable tools, like automatic texting to make your life easier so you can focus on putting out fires less and your business more!   Anything we can do to help your business grow, we are here for you.

If you felt this article was helpful, please share the love!  Questions, Contact Us anytime!

The post Stop Playing Phone Tag with New Inquiries! Simple Solution! appeared first on .

Project: RangeCraft Inc. | https://rangecraft.com

Biz Description:

RangeCraft Inc. is a national manufacturing company of kitchen range hoods located in northern New Jersey.

Owners, Ramona Panus and son David Podwyszynski

Site Launch Date: June, 2019 – Present

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During the sales process, it’s common for customers to have questions about the type of product or service that you are offering. As a result, most people will try to get in contact and seek clarification. Your response time is the amount of time it takes for a member of your team to answer their question. Let’s take a closer look at how this could impact on your sales.

Why Does Response Time Matter?

There are many reasons why response time is so important. One of the biggest is that it impacts on how the customer feels about using your organization. The longer it takes for them to get an answer to their question, the more frustrated they will become. In most cases, a customer expects you to get back to them within five minutes. Clients responded to with a live person or within 5 minutes have a 10x’s more likely chance of landing the sale than those same clients contacted just 20 minutes later. In short, Response time matters!

Increasingly, there is a lot of competition to be found online. Customers aren’t going to wait for you. In most cases, they’ll simply turn to one of your competitors, costing you the sale. It might also make that customer less likely to use your services in the future. If you’re spent a lot of advertising to attract them, this can be a big financial loss. This can be compounded if they decide to tell their friends about their interaction, potentially damaging your reputation.

In a more competitive landscape, you need to make sure that you’re the first one to make an impression on the customer. When they first hear about a product feature, it tends to have the
biggest emotional impact. For this reason, you want to make sure that they hear about any benefits from your company. Because of this, it’s been shown that those who respond to a new lead within one minute can get a whopping 391% higher conversion rate.

Despite the importance of having a quick response time, many companies are failing to do this. It’s estimated that 55% of companies only respond to potential customers after five or more days have passed. In today’s environment, when your competitors are just a click away, this is too slow. However, it does show that, simply by improving your response time, you’ll be able to have a huge competitive advantage.

How to Decrease Response Time

As you can see, responding to customers within a few minutes is key to improving your conversions and improving your sales. There are several ways that you will be able to do this. First, you should make sure that your staff is in constant contact with your social media, email, and phone systems. This is quickly becoming one of the most popular ways for people to get in touch with your company. Setting up an automated alert to let you know when someone sends you a message often won’t cost you anything. You might also want to set up a chatbot system, to give answers to some of your most common questions.

You might also want to consider working with a virtual receptionist if you are simply not able to answer your phone in a timely manner. Simply calling customers back at the end of the day is not good enough. Get a real live person to answer your phones if at all possible. Live chat is another option. This will enable you to talk to customers while they are still on your website! Pretty cool. This is often one of the best times to communicate with a potential client, as they’re actively thinking about making the purchase.

You should also make sure to get up with an automated text response system. This will let you program the system to send a text and actually ask the client not only when they can talk but how they would like to do it. Phone, text, email or even video conference! This will show the customer respect by appreciating their time and comfortability zone.

Finally, you want to make sure that each prospect is qualified before giving their information to the sales team. When you’re placing a phone call, you want to make sure that the person at the other end of the line is interested in what you’re selling. Too many dead-end calls will simply slow down the team and make you slower to respond to genuine customers.

One of the most effective ways for you to improve your sales is by decreasing your response time. In most cases, the first person to talk to a client will win their business. There are plenty of tools that you can use to optimize your approach. So, try some of these tactics today, and land more conversions. All of these and more we offer here at givemeservice.com. Contact Us today to help you with any of these.

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This video is for our clients! We are very proud of all of you! None of you call with any despair, nothing that wasn’t positive. Everybody is feeling the pain, everyone understands what we are going through, but I tell you it’s just an honor to work with a small business owners. Small Business owners are resilient and creative, a lot of them are coming up with unique ways to stay afloat and to increase their business, they are just adjusting the business model a little bit. A buddy of mine who owns a couple of gyms in Seattle is like okay we’re going to go virtual and he’s already got content and coming up with different ways to make that happen and switch over existing clients to the virtual side. We have been working the same hours, my girls are at home I came in today cuz I got a little stir crazy but anything that we can do just send it to us and we will get it up. I want to send a special shout-out to Dr. Richard Mojares he’s doing God’s work and all of his staff, they now offer full testing for the coronavirus at both of their locations, Toms River and Oakhurst, big solute to you and and it’s mad respect for you and your personnel and everything that you guys are doing. Everything is really positive.

Also, all small business owners, not just us, this is the time to take a look at your marketing, evaluation what you are doing what is working, what isn’t. Take a look at your site, at your pages, does your site have any pages that are thin like less than 750, lets write some content, if the page has like 250 words or less, send us new copy or add to what is already there, thats always good for rankings. Take a look at your reviews off site, go to Google and see what reviews you have on there. Right now Google is actually having a hard time, they have limited resources because they had to cut their staff, so if you send someone to leave a review for you, it might not go through, don’t get discouraged, its only temporary. If that happens, this is also a perfect time to take a look at your on site testimonials, take a look and send us some more of new testimonials, so we can make your testimonials page more robust. New photos, your biography on your about us page.If you want to see an example, take a look at Nicholas Pools in Toms River, they have a great about us page, they have pictures of their entire staff and history of the company. So all of this is something that should be looked at, since we have some down time. Most importantly, we are here for you,  if you want us to take a look at anything, or work on something, send it over, we are here and we are working. Thank you for your resilience and encouragement, we are going to get through this, anything we can do to help when this ends, thats what we are going to do.

Have a great rest of the week, be safe.    I pray for anybody’s family members who might have fallen sick. hopefully you recover and lets watch out for elderly and vulnerable, and the rest of us, lets just keep working. We are the last outpost of freedom there is, so getting a job or going out and doing something different probably isn’t an option, it isn’t an option for me. We do what we love, and thats what makes life so awesome, we hit the ground every day we wake up, we hit the ground with both feet to go do what we love to do! I am so proud of all of our clients, and anything we can do to make that dream a reality stay a reality we are going to do. Hopefully this all will be over before too long. God Bless!

Anyone have any questions, email me at marvin@givemeservice.com If you aren’t a client of ours, just go to our site, givemeservice.com to find out all about us, all we do is care about small business owners grow, getting great services to you at reasonable rates that we can all afford , so we can help each other create a win win situation thats it! Thats what its all about! Thanks alot, have a great day!

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A website is the nucleus of your Internet Marketing Strategy but it just the beginning. Targeted traffic (visitors) and Conversions (lead generation) are critical if your site is going to help you grow your business. There are many techniques and strategies to make this happen. We want your site to be effective, not just “look good”.

Website Design Projects Built for LEAD GENERATION!

We will make sure every visitor can find what they are looking for and easily contact you. Your site should make a great first impression as well as have a lasting impact so that visitors return again and again.

Whether starting from scratch on a new site or improving your existing site, GMS will provide the solutions that will help your business grow.

Improving your business image on the web and simplifying the ease of which customers locate who you are and what you do is key to an Internet presence that works. Your website is one of the best investments you can make in your business. Period!

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RANKINGS MATTER!

There are many aspects of a successful Internet Marketing Strategy and Search Engine Optimization is most definitely a key ingredient to that strategy if success is your objective. The every changing landscape of rankings on the web make it difficult to constantly rank high and anyone who guarantees rankings is simply not being honest.

ORGANIC LISTINGS vs. PAY PER CLICK (PPC)

Many clients Pay Per Click and although this can be worth it depending on the conversion rates of your website, for most this is a very expensive way to go. Most people also don’t realize that visitors that click on an ad don’t convert nearly as good as those who click on an organic listing. All of this is explained during your initial consultation and we have saved some of our clients thousands of dollars per year avoiding the use of PPC. We have many clients who rank on the first page of google under multiple terms and phrases and never use PPC to achieve their results.

TARGETS TARGETS TARGETS

Being found online is one thing. Being found by those you WANT to find you is another. We call it “target shooting” and basically it is a strategy whereby your visitors are those you want visiting your website. The better the match a visitor is to your target, the more likely that visitor is to convert into a client. For instance, if you are a car wash facility it is better to have 100 visitors seeking auto detailing & cleaning than 1000 visitors seeking auto restoration.

GMS works along side our clients and learn about their business FROM THEM as nobody should know your business better than you. We then apply that insight with highly sought after key words that match your service or product. This gives a much higher probability that your traffic will convert into an actual lead.

LETS GET STARTED!

Arrange for a consultation for a real-time demonstration of how this process works and countless examples of this working. We look forward to meeting you!

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Content marketing is nothing new, it is fairly commonplace. People talk about how “content is king” and how blogging is important. So everyone is aware that it is important, but WHY is it important and how to best apply it as part of your SEO marketing strategies on your site is not well known.

Google has been emphasizing the addition of valuable original content that has some real weight to it for quite some time. Not just a couple hundred words on a page, but rather substantial weight (1000-1500 words) of valuable and interesting content is decent goal. Google has ways of analyzing content and their priority list as far as sites rank is emphasizing VALUE. How are you going to separate yourself from other competitors that might be wanting to rank for those same keywords and terms?

CONTENT NEEDS TO HAVE THE FOLLOWING ATTRIBUTES TO BE CONSIDERED EXCELLENT:

1. Original
2. Unique / Rare
3. Substantial
4. Valuable / Relevant
5. Enjoyable to read (NO KEYWORD STUFFING)

Create a resource center about your business, services, and industry. Become an authority that visitors return to for valuable information and you will be rewarded by Google for it.

Here’s how…

Blog! Have a learning center on your website and share the love! Almost all of our clients do. This means write consistently interesting blogs and articles and refer your blog posts back to your original service pages and visa-versa. Don’t go crazy with the links and don’f force it. But by linking to and from, you spread your domains “authority juice” around.

If you are writing articles or if you’re sub pages off original pages that break down the information and then you build a whole new page off of that about 1500 words off of that for a subcategory, it can really start to add up as far as traffic coming to your site. The more traffic you get to your site the more leads you’re going to get, the more leads the more sales. Title tag your pages the best you can. Just be natural in the way you name and categorize your work. Again, dont try and game the system.

For instance if you have an article on carpet cleaning, do not name the articles URL,: /carpet-cleaning-rug-cleaning-clean-your-carpet This will end up NOT WORKING WELL. Simply name it: URL: /carpet-cleaning-tips

Clients and customers want to do business with people that they know and trust. Providing valuable, insightful information builds up that trust. Take pride in your articles and show respect to your readers. As they read your work, they will get to know you and as you continue building up trust you become an authority online. So they did the search, they found what they were looking for and they see that there’s a person that provides these solutions right in their geographical area. They’re probably going to give you a call or they’re much higher more likely to give you a call.

Others who don’t call, may share your article on their social media platforms.  (This is also great for SEO)

You look back six months, a year, or longer and if you’ve been doing these posts and blots at a rate of one article per week or a new page every other week you look back over time and a year goes by and boom you’ve got another 50-100 pages on your site. Now you’ve really separated yourself from other business owners who have neglected their site over that same period of time.  Trust me, the vast majority of business owners neglect their sites big time.  For local business owners, out performing your competition is usually not that hard.

So the benefits of content marketing are huge.  Here they are:

1. It’s going to help with rankings and traffic
2. It’s going to help with conversions (turning visitors into leads)
3. It’s going to help with building up an authority for yourself (Leadership)
4. Its going to help increase the authority of the domain name
5. It’s FREE!

Thats right… It doesn’t cost any money to put content on your site if you do it yourself. Even if you have to pay for have someone do it for you and you have to approve it and put it on your site, if its original valuable content, it’s worth doing.

These are things that you need to look at and look into but if you haven’t touched your site in the last three weeks, three months, some people, the last three years, you need to start looking at this or else your rankings will start to slide if they haven’t already.

The other thing about having a lot of content on your site if it’s updated on a regular basis is it anchors down rankings that you’ve earned. Your competitors are not going to sit by and do nothing forever. Some businesses already are feeling the pressure and know they have to get into the Internet game, so get ahead of them. If you are already ranking high, that is great news but it isn’t a reason to neglect content marketing for your business. Content will help you nail you down. So think about your strategy, think about the services that you offer, think about niche areas within your services for subcategories and start building pages off of those.

I always ask my clients you know, what are the FAQ’s that you get? What are the most frequently asked questions and then we can start even using some of those questions as a topic for our Learning Center. All these things start to come into play with content marketing and content management. answer these common questions on your site.

VIDEO & More

Content does not just mean words. Video is a great way to add content to your site. Google purchased YouTube years ago and the authority given to a properly optimized YouTube channel is not something to overlook. The words spoken in a video are also cataloged and used in search results. There are many types of content beyond page copy. Info-graphics, webinars, interviews, White papers, podcasts, and more. The options and ideas for content marketing are literally endless.

COMMIT TIME TO MARKETING YOUR BUSINESS

A successful business owner doesn’t watch the clock or work 40 hours per week. A successful owner does whatever it takes to succeed. Period. It takes a large commitment of time to focus on growing and managing the business. Make appointments with yourself to manage your business or work on your business every week. Even if it is 10-15 minutes. Every Saturday morning at 10am with a cup of coffee or whatever works for you. Set an alarm. Commit and succeed!

Commit from the beginning to having an open mind and welcoming new ideas, new technology, and new strategies. Times are changing. Technology does not stand still. Rigid thinking leads to a stagnant business and reduced sales. If you want your business to succeed, you must embrace new ways of thinking, even if it means doing things that take you out of your comfort zone.. The attitude that good ideas don’t come from the outside can drive a stake into the heart of a business.

Hope you found this information useful. Contact GMS Today if you have any questions you need answered. We love business owners and we want you to succeed.

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Coming up high for certain keywords about your industry is obviously an important thing but coming up high for keywords that are actually being sought after that are relevant to your exact business and the specific services they deliver is much more important. Identifying these specifics before embarking on the SEO effort is just as important as the SEO effort itself. In other words, you want to rank high for things that people are actually looking for, that way, your site doesnt just gain rankings, it gains traffic from truly potential buyers of what it is you are selling or providing

Coming up high for just random keywords that might have to do with your business but aren’t actually being sought after isn’t going to provide traffic, therefore, it’s not going to provide customers. No customers = no revenue.

INDENTIFY TARGETS

Targeted keywords are those that are very closely related to exactly what you do. If you are a transmission repair shop, coming up high for “Auto Repair” is ok, but ranking high for “transmission replacement” is much more relevant or “Targeted” to your business. Assuming your website is built properly, the higher the targeted the visitors on your site, the easier they will convert. “Auto Repair” includes everything from brakes to bumper replacement.

If your delivering a service nationwide such as a disaster recovery business, then attaching local or statewide tags to your keywords will not be important. But for the transmission repair shop mentioned before, the city, county, and state targets are very important to hit. When folks are searching online for a local small business, it is very common to put in the location along with the search. This is when Local SEO comes into play.

What does your business specialize in? What key words or phrases that have value target those services best? Does your site make it obvious to google with content, updates, key words, optimized video, and information that your business is a great result for those targets? Do you have back links from businesses that are complimentary or relevant to those targets? If you answered no, you have work to do. A page with a bullet point * Transmission Repair does not constitute valuable content by the way!

Search terms, targets, and key word research analysis must be done. Volumes must be researched. Content must be evaluated. At “Givemeservice” we do this analysis way ahead of time so that we don’t waste our time optimizing you or your business for words that you’re not going to come up that are not being sought after.

SUPPORT TARGETS WITH ROBUST ORIGINAL CONTENT

What you have to do is actually create content around that so content more than just link building that’s important but beyond that everybody knows about the link building and a lot of search engine optimization companies emphasize this. They are doing link building and relevant follow backlinks whether it is white hat or black hat techniques. Look beyond this. Shortcuts will usually get you in trouble eventually.

What you want to do is create a resource center for your business so that Google loves what it is that you do and Google loves your site and wants to rank it high because you are providing a value to visitors. They don’t care about your business versus someone else’s business they care about the visitors’ experience. Their algorithms are always being updated to make it hard to “game the system”… So dont!

At “Givemeservice.com” we follow Google protocols because the better the visitors experience the more likely they are to become a client. A ton of back links to a site with very little content is a huge red flag. Anchoring your site with excellent information is the best SEO there is. Whenever we put together a website or anything to do with search engine optimization we want to make all those pieces fit together and that creates a better user experience and that creates more customers for you.

UPDATE OFTEN

Content that has been sitting on your site for years, untouched, may not be ranking as well as it did when you first posted it. Keep an eye on your page ranks. Times change, information changes as the calendar moves on. The article you wrote on the Iphone 5 is not in demand anymore. The Iphone X is out. Update the post or delete it and redirect it to more updated information. We call this pruning the content marketing tree. Google not only will notice when you add new pages, it will notice when you make frequent updates. Why? They want their customers (those using their search engine) to have the best experience possible. Its just a fact that if a site is being updated often, it is more likely to have updated (newer) information.

BE ORIGINAL

When adding content on your site, do your best to provide some “inside baseball”. Be unique, intriguing, and be original. As a business owner, you should know more about your business and industry than most. What are some of the special unique things you bring to the table that others don’t. Deliver some of those insights in a fun way or from an angle others haven’t thought of themselves. Helping others save time and money helps create loyalty.

Here is an example…

Most people HATE writing blogs or simply cant find the time. Right? OK.. Yes.. I am right. What if I told you its easy as speaking into a microphone? That’s right! Google has a transcription service right online! Guess what? It is FREE up to 60 minutes per month. Simply plug a microphone into your pc and hit start! When finished, copy and paste the text into your word doc. 60 minutes of talking is equal to about 20-30 pages of content! This is a great way to easily add a lot of content to your site for free quickly and easily.

So, talking for 5 minutes should give you about 2 pages of content. Writing 2 pages of solid content will take most people 30 minutes. I have now given you a tip to reduce that by 80%. If you spend 5-10 minutes per week on this, you will add 50-75 pages of new content on your site per year and spend less than 30 minutes per month doing it! Isn’t your business worth investing 30 minutes per month? Please tell me you just answered “YES”!

Lastly, even if you have to get your employees or outsource your content marketing efforts, as long as it is valuable, relevant and original, it is worth doing!

GMS is always here to help if you have any questions regarding SEO or any other Internet Marketing services. Regardless of whether you are a client or not, we are here to help. Contact Us today!

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