Reports are out that Google now controls over 90% of all searches on the internet (..compared to Yahoo at 3.9%, Bing at 3.7%).
Google now also controls 98% of all mobile searches (..on smart phones, Androids, Blackberry, etc).
Nielsen reported way back in 2008 that 82% of people needing local services went online to search. I can’t wait to see their 2009/2010 stats..
What’s this mean for you? You do the math.
As you’re all too aware, getting reviews into Google have been difficult (to say the least).
Going through Google’s site directly it’s practically impossible, and the alternatives like DemandForce often look more like a 3rd graders homework than a raving testimonial from a pleased patient.
We’re happy to announce we’ve “cracked the code” and will begin offering our clients review posting to their Places page.
We have built a network of sites around the country to syndicate reviews to your Places page through, so that your reviews won’t be flagged by Google as “not genuine.”
We can take your existing patient reviews, videos, notes, etc and load them into your Google Places page 100% in compliance with Google’s guidelines so that YOU are the expert in your area.
…Not to mention the added SEO value from getting LOTS of reviews on your Places page…
Anyways, if you have reviews you want to get loaded in there, give us a shout. Our awesome sales team will be glad to hear from you!
Take a moment and search for a local service in your local area. Chances are that a map will immediately pop-up showing nearby service providers, as well as links to reviews, driving directions and more information on each company.
Studies have shown that local searches are one of the fastest growing segments of queries (http://www.clickz.com/3626608) and that a majority of local business research is conducted online.
If you have trouble with the link above, you can also view the attached PDF.
For those reasons, it’s crucially important that you optimize your local business profile to generate high, relevant local rankings for your services.
Optimizing Your Business Profile
All of the major search engines (Google, Bing and Yahoo) feature their own unique local maps engines which provide information on local business offerings, reviews as well as media such as pictures and videos. By default, many of the listings pull data from around the web and may leave off crucial elements of your business. Claiming the profiles within each search engine gives you the ability to write a detailed description, add coupons for special offers and integrate video into your listings.
These additional elements are a core part of determining how highly your firm ranks when consumers search for your local service. Ensuring the accuracy of the information on the listing, such as updated addresses and phone numbers, can also ensure that you’re getting as many possible leads through local search. As the momentum from local search continues, you can stay ahead of the curve by integrating the latest features into your local listing, further helping you separate from the competition.
Just got an inquiry from the millionth small business who had wasted a nice chunk of their budget on an offshore SEO agency that did a grand total of nothing except worthless spammy link building.
I am not going to complain about snake-oil salesmen, ethics, how many good SEOs there are, etc. Instead I am going to ask every small biz out there who is reading this to sit up straight, stop mumbling, look me in the eye and pay attention. It’s time to wise up.
Now I know you are no search marketing expert. That’s why you’re looking for help with your SEO right? So I thought it might be useful to put together this list of questions for the next time you take a pitch from your friendly local SEO consultant:
Can you tell me exactly how you do what you do? Local SEO is not magic. There is a long list of techniques that are known to work. Some work better than others. While how a SEO campaign is executed can have some proprietary aspects to it, in general a good SEO consultant should have no problem telling you how that are going to go about improving your rankings. In particular you want to make sure they are not using any spammy techniques that could potentially harm your business. If they avoid the question or they don’t seem particularly transparent about their methodology, hang up the phone. It’s not particularly hard to switch out a toilet, but most people would prefer to hire an expert so it gets done right. Your plumber doesn’t have any secrets (at least I think he doesn’t) so why should your SEO consultant?
What are you going to need from me to be successful? While it typically takes some time to analyze the state of a business’ SEO, the consultant likely has a list of tactics they will deploy which they know from the start. Some of these will require input from the client. It’s important for you to understand up front how much of commitment will be required. Knowing how much time, money and human resources you will need to spend will help you determine how profitable this effort will be.
Do I control access to all accounts? Typically local SEO engagements require updating your business’ profiles on a number of sites: Google, Bing, Yahoo, yellow pages sites, etc. I hear from businesses all of the time who can no longer get into their Google Place Page account because their old SEO agency or a former employee created it for them. It is critical that you control admin access to the account for any profile or page created for you by a third party. This can save you a lot of headaches if you part company in the future.
How are the spammers doing it? Most SEOs I know typically work inside of the various search engines’ guidelines to achieve great rankings for their clients. It can be tedious, not-very-glamorous work, but in the long run it pays off. That said, there are a whole host of successful SEOs that use less-than-kosher techniques that can pay off fast and drive a ton of new customers to their clients. While these techniques can be risky, the short term ROI on them can be stellar. I would never recommend that a client go this route, but as I watch the same spammy fake address listing rank #1 for a valuable local query for the third month in a row, I would be hard-pressed to tell a client that it is not worth doing. If you are going to play in this game, you need to know both how to play by the rules and how to break them. If the consultant doesn’t know about these techniques, how are they going to know how to beat them?
What is a typical return on investment for one of your clients? This is always a great question. Depending on the client’s business, a good search marketing consultant should be able to come up with some kind of tangible ROI metric that you can relate to your own business. Instead of “increased traffic 50%” I like stuff like “generated five all-on-four implant cases at $9,500 a pop and twenty qualified leads in sixty days.” That one always starts a good conversation with the prospect. 
How do you measure your effectiveness? Pretty simple question. How are you going to prove to me you did what you did and that it worked? Typical answers include: increase in rankings for targeted terms, increased qualified traffic to your site, increased inbound email and phone calls (via a tracking phone number), and ultimately increased business.
How do you communicate your effectiveness to me? The consultant should have a system that regularly communicates what they have done, what is going to be done and when.
Who’s my point of contact? You or a 16-year-old? Enough said.
If we part ways, will you remove all your work from my website and the links you have secured? This is why it’s important to understand the consultant’s methodology from the get-go. SEO consultants often rely on networks of sites they control to get links to your site. Then they hold you hostage by threatening to remove those links if you don’t renew a deal. Make sure you understand up front that this is not the case.
Can you show me some representative results? If they can’t show you a company that they have successfully ranked #1 for a variety of competitive terms and give you an idea of how they did it, then say sayonara.
Can you give me some references?
Why do customers leave you? I doubt there is any agency out there that has a perfect record when it comes to performance and customer retention. Customers change their strategies. Consultants don’t hit home runs every time. An honest discussion about challenges the consultant has had with customers and how they are improving things is always a good thing. A good consultant should almost be proud of their mistakes. I like to tell my clients that when I started doing SEO I lost a lot of traffic and learned enough so that you don’t have to.
What sets you apart from other SEO companies? The answer here shouldn’t be “we get you ranked #1.” What you really want to know is why they think they deserve your business vs. the thousands of other guys out there?
For local small businesses, reaching consumers in your area is crucial for your online campaign. In addition to following best practices for overall search optimization and direct mail campaigns, locally-targeted videos can provide an important source of distribution. For local service providers or retailers, you’ve competing with a variety of companies who each want to reach your target audience, and proper distribution of videos can help put your firm ahead of the pack. Rather than investing your firm’s budget in expensive television commercials which reach only a fraction of their intended audience, online video gives you a higher degree of control over distribution in content.
There are a number of ways to distribute online video for target audiences ranging from local maps listings on Google to review sites like Yelp and video syndication sites such as You Tube. The good news is that once you’ve produced a quality video, you costs of distribution are quite low, opening up broad possibilities for distribution of the video across the web. When it comes to targeting local searches for videos, you can ensure you’re at the very top of the results, reading to follow up with the consumers to grow your client base.
Best Practices for Local Online Video Distribution
There are a wide variety of locally targeted sites that allow you to capture searches for your local area. For example, if you’re a foot doctor in Washington, D.C. you can begin by optimizing your local listings on sites such as Yahoo, Google, Bing, Yelp and CitySearch with accompanying videos. This will ensure you get the full benefits of video distribution to enhance your search rankings, along with the ability to reach targeted local consumers. So if a user is searching for reviews of a local foot doctor in the city, for example, you will be able to set your listings apart with targeted video in addition to your standard listing. In the search results, having these elements can ensure your listing is unique and encourages conversions through various channels such as your website, phone calls or direct lookups of your business. By including video as a core part of your marketing campaigns you signal your commitment to your business for local customers, improving your reputation and mind share locally.
The major advantage of locally targeted video distribution is that you are already working with targeted local clients looking for a solution. Therefore, once you are getting a local customer to watch your videos, you’re one step ahead of the curve and further along in the overall conversion process. When targeting local video searches, you’re also covering local reviews and business description searches at the same time. Therefore, you’ll want to produce videos which discuss your advantages, reputation, credentials and services to ensure consumers they have come to the right place. All properly done online videos should also include a lead generation component, where you directly encourage customers to follow up for further information online or via phone, helping to complete the conversion funnel from targeting to client.
You can just imagine a classifieds posting for a potential customer: small business seeks active consumer 25-55, preferably household decision maker, disposable income, with own vehicle and willingness to buy. With social network targeting, you can bring this vision of ideal targeting into reality, even if the exact methods of marketing are a bit difference. In fact, social networks allow for local targeting that is quite similar to a personal matching process via social networking. Within social drip marketing, you can identify consumers based upon their local market, targeting them with special offers tailored to individual locations which you can track.
Today, follow-up marketing campaigns are about segmentation and customization – there is no single better way to customize a social offer than to target locally. The probability of a consumer responding to an offer which mentions their particular city is much greater than a general offer, no matter how great the price might be. Over 40% off all internet searches are related to a specific local area, and just as the search engines have learned to harvest this data, so can your company.
Marketing Specific Social Offers on a Geographic Basis
Consumers differ across markets – they go to different schools, experience different weather and root for different sports teams. While the broad segments of demographics may be similar, users have an affinity for their home town and you can greatly increase conversion rates by targeting them locally. On Twitter, you can create lists of individual followers according to home market or create multiple Twitter accounts for each major market you serve.
The beauty of social media is that you don’t necessarily have to have a physical market presence in a given city in order to do business there: through social media you can create a “virtual” presence in a regional city, generating a loyal following in advance of a broader expansion. There are no limits to the types of markets you can target, and with demographic data you can segment your potential lead base into cities and market types.
Social media sites often let you target advertisements to users based upon their reported location, meaning you can purchase clicks from consumers in a particular market or send out a sponsored message to those users. Either way, you can refine your drip marketing list based upon demographics to improve click-through and conversion rates with customized offers and landing pages. Armed with demographic data, the sky is the limit when it comes to customizing offers.
For example, suppose you are marketing a new gift product that your company makes and you notice the Green Bay Packers had a great game. Immediately, you can send out a message to those fans along the lines of “Great game Packers – celebrate with a new…” followed by a link to a custom landing page. The possibilities here are endless, since you can adjust to the news in real time. Traditional drip marketing is great because it allows you to stay in touch with consumers, but real time social marketing allows you to take this to the next level.
In a previous generation if someone “Yelped” you might call a doctor; today you’re more likely to call your marketing consultant. We have extensive expertise in local social media marketing, and all businesses should pay close attention to trends in local social sites that impact their business. In addition to seeking out recommendation of direct friends, a number of local sites now aggregate reviews of local providers, creating both a rating and review that affects your business in a variety of ways.
Businesses today can go well beyond passively monitoring customer feedback on social sites such as Yelp, Citysearch, Maps, Merchant Circle and others – today, vendors are able to post special offers, response to consumer reviews and provide detailed information to consumers. Maintaining an active presence on local social sites can help you monitor your reviews, competition and general market trends. As part of a broader social drip marketing campaign, you can get a vast array of market data through local sites that can help shape a successful social marketing strategy.
Promoting and Defending Your Brand Online
Online marketers today have dual goals when it comes to promoting local businesses – on the one hand, marketers have to actively promote and defend their brand, while also marketing new offers and crafting new marketing messages. It’s common to hear that a single dissatisfied customer can have a broader impact than a dozen happy customers, so it’s important to constantly monitor your brand for reputation management, even as you work to extend your customer base.
While traditional marketing offers focused on featuring and pricing advantages, social drip marketing campaigns at the local level can focus on providing solutions, responsive feedback and the role of your company as a responsible corporate citizen. Consumers on many social sites want to know that you are actively engaged in improving the services you offer, as well as giving back in a meaningful way to reputable causes. Being a good corporate citizen today and putting forth a positive brand image is as important as the types of prices you utilize on your landing pages.
Developing a unique corporate ethos depends on your goals as a business owner and executive, but you can learn from successful companies such as The Body Shop, Whole Foods and Zip Car who have differentiated themselves from the competition on the basis of their social messaging. Being a family and community-friendly business can encourage consumers to become allies for your business and each aspect of your marketing campaign from the messages to the offers to the types of landing pages and colors you use in your design all impact your brand image.
In a social world, it’s inevitable there will be some consumers who aren’t totally satisfied with your business. By reaching out to those customers, adjusting your business practices and working actively to make sure you are dedicated to customer service you’ll improve your brand image, and improvements in your conversion rates and customer base are likely to follow.
When it comes to performing searches today, research suggests that a large minority of users are targeting their queries locally. Whether you’re offering a localized service, or are looking to improve the targeting on your SEO campaigns, starting with local searches is a great place to begin. From New York to Toronto, and everywhere in between, local users are increasingly seeing map and search results tailored based upon their IP. As a result, making your site more relevant to searchers largely revolves around creating localized content, quality maps listings and targeted information for each of the markets you serve.
We work with clients who have anywhere from one to hundreds of locations, and we understand the core ranking factors for local search. Within the last year, the major search engines have been integrating local searches into queries which are service related in nature. While previously a search for only a term such as “Denver Dentists” would show localized map and search results, today a search for “Dentists” from an IP in Denver would produce the same results. The major search engines test the quality of the results and found these are relevant to the query – in order to increase your business from local consumers it’s important to target a wide variety of search terms both inclusive of localized searches, as well as targeting general terms in your area.
Optimizing Your Site for Local Search
Properly optimizing your site locally does well beyond just keyword level targeting – in fact, one of the primary ranking factors locally is citations. Citations are defined as the number of local reviews, links, comments, brand mentions and web-pages by or about your company locally. Therefore, getting your site ranked is about interacting with the broader community beyond just keyword level targeting. For example, if you site is mentioned with positive reviews for Denver Dentists on Citysearch, Yelp or a variety of other local sites then this will help you get ranked locally.
While optimizing your site for external citations can be challenging, we can help business owners ensure their profiles are visible and optimized on these sites. You can also encourage your actual customers to leave reviews of your company, further extending the number of positive citations on these sites. Ensuring the integrity of your business decisions can make a big difference when it comes to focusing upon the long run potential for local SEO.
There are important steps you can take to increase your visibility including listing a detailed about us page, integrating web citations into your offline marketing efforts and encouraging a social media following. By following best practices with respect to your broader web marketing efforts you will find that local optimization can naturally follow from these activities. Getting your local business ranked highly in Google Maps, Yahoo and Bing Maps can drive significant business which will provide a robust return on your local SEO investment over time.
Studies have shown that consumers have become much more cost conscious in the past few months, and that the popularity of coupons is one the rise. Implementing online coupons can be an effective way to generate consumer interest in nearly every industry, and provides an additional way to track the effectiveness of each marketing campaign. Additionally, coupons provide a way of generating initial demand for time sensitive periods, and provide a way to target initial customers who can become life long clients based upon the quality of service provided.
One way to implement coupons is to utilize the built in feature within Google Local Business Center. This allows you to attach a customizable offer to your Google Maps listing, which can be customized for each location that you offer. Additionally, these coupons can help increase the authority of your local listing, resulting in improved local ratings. Google Maps provides the option to share the coupons, so friends can email the offer to each other, providing a network effect for generating more traffic.
Another option for coupons is to implement a referral program where clients can refer friends to your service for a commission. By providing custom links, banners and offers to promote, your clients and marketing partners can actively promote your special offers on their sites and social media outlets. Building a high quality coupon referral program can result in increased business volume throughout the year.
We just launched a new series of free reports that you might also be interested in. You can opt in for them at http://www.smartboxwebmarketing.com/free-report.htm
Make sure you bookmark that page and check back regularly, as we’ll be adding new information all the time!
Welcome to what could be the most advantageous adventure you will take this year in getting more patients to your office. I know that sounds like a bold statement but it is true. The report you are about to read is packed with information many brick and mortar businesses, including dentists, have yet to discover – but every word is true and every step is a game changer.
This information will open your eyes as to the possibilities for practice growth and profitability simply by changing from “the ways things have always been done” to a progressive realization about how your practice needs to market in the 21stcentury. If you are like most dentists, by the time you read the information your brain will not be able to shut off thinking about the possibilities.
Click the link to download the report now: http://www.smartboxwebmarketing.com/reports/86-of-100-dental-report.pdf (PDF)
At the same time I want to let you know about the information that will come your way every few days to supplement the report – real life examples and explanations that will have light bulbs going off in your head all the time as you think about what could be in store for you and your practice. Here are a few of the topics I’ll be covering:
The information you are about to read and the subsequent information I’ll email you every few days has taken months to put together. It describes the best ideas, outlines the latest and futuristic trends and lays out all sorts of possibilities for your practice – all designed to get you more patients. They are out there waiting for you – so let’s get started.
If you haven’t already downloaded your information do so now, clear your mind and be prepared to have your eyes opened. Let’s get you more patients!
Get our Free Special Report: The Dental Website Audit.
Included inside our 102 "audit" checklist will show you how your dental website can Attract The Patients YOU Want™.
