SEO for Local Small Business

You can be sure that your competitors are vying for the top spot in Google SERPs. If you aren’t throwing your hat into the ring, you’re giving business away. As a small business owner, it’s imperative you do everything you can to get your brand in front of as many consumers as possible.

This means embracing new advertising methods, especially given that consumers are spending more time now on their mobile devices than they are in front of their TVs. It’s no secret that the best way to reach Internet-savvy customers is to position yourself highly in Google SERPs.

Google has taken a special interest in aggregating businesses based on their geographic locations. This allows Google to provide its users with useful information on the go, which ensures that the company remains relevant as search transitions from the desktop to mobile.

In order to rank highly in these lists, however, you’re going to have to optimize your on-page SEO, and you’re going to have to engage with customers on a whole new level.

On-Page Optimization

Google analyzes your website to determine what your business is all about. If any on-page factors are off, the search engine will rank you lower than it otherwise would have. And lest you think that you don’t need Google, keep in mind that this means that your competitors will take your place in the SERPs.

The first crucial on-page factor is your domain name itself. Ideally, your domain should speak to what you do and where you are located. The simplest way to go about this is to combine the two pieces of data. Let’s say you own “Bob’s Sports Apparel,” and you operate out of Detroit. Your domain using this simple setup would be:www.bobssportsappareldetroit.com.

Throughout your site, you want to use keywords naturally, and you always want to create copy for human readers. Read your content aloud and ask yourself if it reads naturally. If you have any doubts, you should probably rewrite. Additionally, you’ll want to add your NAP—name, address and phone—data to each page of your site.
Finally, share the love. Your content should not be all about you. It’s important that you present yourself as part of a vibrant community. To that end, you may want to consider collaborating with a local business or donating to a local charity or event. Anything that gives you a reason to blog about your community is great for SEO.

Reviews

Reviews are the lifeblood of brick and mortar businesses in the Internet age. This consumer-generated content gives you immediate social proof, and it definitely increases your visibility in local search engines. Take note: while certain retailers on Amazon are known to purchase reviews from unscrupulous third parties, the same strategy can backfire spectacularly for brick and mortar businesses.

If caught, you might find yourself forking out thousands to a PR firm. You should never pay for reviews. What you can do, however, is encourage your customers to leave organic reviews with in-store leaflets, website callouts and follow-up emails.

Sure, you will receive the odd negative review, but there is no honest business in existence that does not receive at least a few complaints. The truth is, the odd three-star or two-star review makes you look more genuine. When you create your in-store leaflet, you’ll have to decide whether to direct the reviews to your own site or to a review aggregator like Yelp.

Keep in mind that the reviews on your own site won’t hold nearly as much sway with consumers as those found on a third-party site. When responding to negative reviews—if you respond at all—it is of the utmost importance that you do so positively.

Thank the author for their feedback and ask them how you can resolve their issue. If you satisfy the customer, they may alter their review. Antagonize them, and they will come back with friends.

Keeping tabs on the social media marketing landscape is central to your success. If you’d like to have access to even more powerful marketing tips, as well as a way to generate conversion-ready Internet marketing prospects each month, click here to learn about my done-for-you system.

Hank

Building Your Business on Raving Fans

In 1993, author Ken Blanchard published a groundbreaking book called “Raving Fans: A Revolutionary Approach to Customer Service”. The very influential book was used as a framework by many brick and mortar companies to revamp their customer’s experience.

While it has been more than 20 years since the book was published and much of the business landscape has shifted to the web, the principles outlined in Blanchard’s book remain critical to retaining and expanding any business’s customer base.

Blanchard’s premise was simple: Business owners are responsible for creating good relationships with their customers so that they will keep coming back.

This principle was supported by research that showed that customers who have an emotional attachment to a business are more likely to continue to do business with that business—and also recruit their family, friends and associates to use the business as well.

Putting this premise into the context of web-based businesses, if you can create strong emotional bonds with your customers, you can convert them into “raving fans” who will evangelize for your business to their social media contacts and others.

Boiled down to its core elements, Blanchard’s Raving Fans program can be expressed as three secrets:

Secret 1: Be Clear on What You Do

Decide ahead of time what you want your online business to do then stick with your decision. It’s easier for customers to “buy in” to your business if you offer a consistent brand with every interaction.

If you are too diversified or your brand message can’t immediately be grasped by your customers, they are going to have a more difficult time engaging with your business. Remove any obstacles that prevent your customers from trusting and feeling comfortable with your business during every by being consistent and credible.

Secret 2: Give Them What They Want

The purpose of just about any business is to provide customers with something they want or need. To build trust bonds with your customers, you should strive to continually discover what your customers want and try to find solutions that give it to them.

This requires modifying what your business does based on your customers want. What they want today could be entirely different than what they want next week or next year.
The best way to understand what they want is to continually engage in a dialogue with your customers. In other words, if you want to know what they want, ask them.

Secret 3: Consistently Over-Deliver

To build trust bonds and create raving fans, your objective needs to be to “wow” customers with every interaction. Find ways to deliver more – Blanchard refers to this as “plus one percent more” – than what your customers expect.

When you over-deliver with your customer service, you set your business apart from all your competitors. Your customers will notice that you are going the extra mile to genuinely please them, which is something they probably can’t find anywhere else.

And, this is what causes them to be raving fans and to evangelize for your business to their family, friends, and (most importantly for online entrepreneurs) to their social media contacts, which will enable your business communications to go viral.

To learn more techniques like these for improving the profitability of your business, check out our lead generation system by clicking on this link now.

Hank

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3 Reasons Why Asking Yourself “What Would Jesus Do” Kills Your Faith!

Ensure Your Content Marketing is Mobile-Optimized

Increasingly, we are using our mobile phones as our primary means of communication. In fact, mobile devices have now surpassed the desktop computer in terms of sheer numbers. This fact should govern how we create our content.

As more people shift from desktops to mobile devices, marketers need to design for mobile-first. This represents a significant shift in marketing strategy. Those marketers who design content with mobile devices in mind will be ahead of the pack.

With this in mind, here are some tips for creating mobile-optimized content:

Design with a Goal in Mind

You only have a few moments with your target, so you should focus on your goal and getting to that goal as quickly as possible.

Write Strong Headlines

Good headlines are always important and every serious marketer should spend time learning how to craft compelling ones. This is more important than ever when it comes to mobile content. Mobile users generally don’t have a lot of time and skip around from activity to activity on their devices. As a result, you have only a few seconds to pull someone in to your content. That is the job of your headline. Don’t be afraid to test several headlines to find which one works best. Some copywriters advise trying at least thirty headlines for copy or important content.

Design Content in Modules

Since mobile screens are small, and time is short, it is a good policy to design your content in modules or chunks. These can be digested in parts or as a whole. Either way, it makes your content more digestible for mobile users.

Reveal Up Front

With mobile users, you are racing the clock to present your content. It is a good idea to mention your most important points right away. Most people read just the first few lines, or skim the sub-headers. You want to make sure that your audience gets your message.

Copywriting for mobile

Copywriting for mobile devices is different than traditional web-based copywriting. The most important thing to understand is how consumers use their mobile devices. For example, people frequently turn to their mobile device to fill in a pocket of time such as waiting in a car, or for an appointment. The idea then, is to get right to the point and keep the copy short. The old-school, long-form sales letter won’t work on a mobile device.

Test, Test, Test

As with any other form of marketing, testing is crucial for optimizing your mobile content. Since mobile devices are a relatively new advertising medium, there is not as much information or knowledge regarding what works and what doesn’t.

The best way to learn what your audience wants in terms of mobile content is to test your results. Study and measure engagement in order to continually improve your mobile content.

Monitoring the social media marketing landscape is vital to your success. If you’d like to have access to even more powerful marketing tips, as well as a way to generate conversion-ready Internet marketing prospects each month, click here to learn about my done-for-you system.

6 Easy Steps to Creating a Killer Offer

If you have an effective sales funnel, every new customer represents not just a single sale, but a series of sales that increases the average life time value (LTV) of your customer base. But the success of your online business requires driving new customers into your sales funnel.

While there are many techniques for driving traffic into your sales funnel, one of the easiest and most affordable is to create a squeeze page on which offer for free something your niche’s customers will perceive as having high value. This is known as a “killer offer”.

Developing your killer offer can be broken down into a 6-step process:

Step 1 – Research the Competition
Providing a free killer offer in exchange for a prospective customer’s personal information –email address, phone number, etc. – on a squeeze page is nothing new. It’s the exact same platform that many of your competitors currently are using to drive traffic to their sales funnels.

The first step of creating your killer offer, then, is simply seeing what other Internet marketers within your niche are offering as the giveaway on their squeeze pages. You can expand your research by looking at killer offers on squeeze pages outside your niche as well.

Step 2 – Polling Your Existing Base
The best source of determining what your future customers want is your existing customers. Create a short survey that asks such questions as:
• What are the biggest problems related to (your niche) that you currently are experiencing?
• How to you prefer to consume content: Video, PDF, audio files, links?
• What type of content do you like best: Step-by-step tutorials, personal narratives, case studies, or other types of content?

Step 3 – Brainstorm a List of Potential Ideas
Take the information provided by your existing customers and use it to brainstorm a list of potential killer offers. Don’t hold back or be afraid to think outside the box. The purpose of brainstorming is to come up with as many ideas a possible so that you can whittle them down to the two or three best ideas later.

Step 4 – Settle on the Best Idea and Format
Using your brainstorming list, your research on what your competitors are offering, and your existing customers’ input, develop a single killer offer and format that you want to offer for free on your squeeze page.

Step 5 – Build a Framework for Your Killer Offer
It’s time to transform your killer offer from an abstract idea to a genuine product that you can give away on your squeeze page. You can create it entirely on your own by coming up with a few basic central concepts, building a framework around these themes, then filling in the offer with content.
Another option is to see if a similar product already exists as a Private Label Rights (PLR) product that you can either offer as is or modify to fit your needs.

Step 6 – Promote Your Killer Offer on Your Squeeze Page
Once you have created your killer offer, post it on your squeeze page and monitor how responsive your visitors are to it. You may need to tweak it so that it is more appealing and converts more visitors into customers.

To learn more techniques like these for improving the profitability of your business, check out our lead generation system by clicking on this link now.

Hank van den Berghe

Become an Authority Using Case Studies

A major goal of most marketers is to become an authority within their niche. Why? Because people trust, respect and make purchases from authority figures. One excellent way to demonstrate your knowledge and expertise is to provide case studies. A well-written case study will help you position yourself as an authority. Case studies are compelling because they provide concrete evidence or proof of how well a product or service works.

There are two basic kinds of case studies that you can put together, both of which we will examine in this article: The customer based case study and the information based case study.

How to do a customer-based case study

A customer case study is a great way to demonstrate the value of a product or service. Potential buyers naturally trust other customers. This is known as social proof, and it is a very powerful marketing tool. If you have done your market research prior to launching your product or service, you have identified a problem to solve. In the case study, you’ll want to show how your product or service solves this problem.

The key to a great customer case study is detail. Provide concrete evidence such as before and after numbers, percentages and statistics. Data provides concrete proof, which builds credibility. Consider the following two sentences.

“Our sales increased after we used ABC Marketing System.”

“After three weeks of using the ABC Marketing System, we saw traffic and sales increase by 20 percent.”

Which of these two is more strong and convincing?

The second sentence is automatically more credible because it gives specific numbers. “Sales increased by 20 percent.”

Once your case study is written, you can make it more accessible by formatting it for readability. Use info-graphics, images or a slideshow. Break up your text with headers and bullet-points as well.

How to do an information case study

The first step in an information case study is to identify a problem that is related to your niche. Search forums, social media and Q&A sites to find questions that people are asking. A great candidate for a case study is a question that comes up frequently, but there are very few answers being offered.

Once you have a question or problem to solve, do a Google search and study the questions being asked and the quality of the answers. Take notes on the various tips and select the best, most interesting and creative ones.

Next, try out the tips yourself, and gather information on the results. Write up an article that details your experiment. Be sure to include screenshots and images that show exactly how you came up with your results. You earn bonus points if you create a video case-study.

Monitoring the social media marketing landscape is vital to your success. If you’d like to have access to even more powerful marketing tips, as well as a way to generate conversion-ready Internet marketing prospects each month, click here to learn about my done-for-you system.