Your Profile Is Complete, Now What?
Once your profile is complete, you can start running simple campaigns like asking for and sharing reviews and adding Google Maps to your profile. Reviews are important when potential customers are looking to do business with your company. They give you a credibility that goes beyond the words of your best copy writer. Good reviews can help close business. While bad reviews aren’t ideal, it is important to respond to them to show you are taking care of the issue. It’s good to carve out time regularly to ask for and respond to ALL reviews. Now you are becoming a pro…your profile is looking good; you have happy customers…this is a good time to experiment with pay per click (PPC) and retargeting ads to take your business to the next level. Make sure someone on your team is up to date with Google as they constantly change their verifying process, rules, and reporting. If you don’t have someone who can help, I recommend finding a consultant.
Your Website.
Google can only handle so much of your digital marketing. You must lead people somewhere to close sales…this is your website. We have done other blogs on building a good website, for this blog we will discuss the importance of optimization--SEO (Search Engine Optimization). SEO drives traffic to your website and provides more ways for you to convert traffic to customers. Many businesses underestimate the power of SEO and will leave it in the hands of an intern or someone without experience. Other companies don’t do anything to optimize their sites at all. If you don’t have an internal resource, again, hire a consultant. Do your research on hiring an expert because finding someone who knows what they are doing isn’t easy. Start by asking for referrals, reviewing companies online or create a job post and hire directly. You will need to know what you are looking for and what the job entails which includes things like, meta-tags, backlinks, copy writing, keyword research, tagging images and doing work on your website and in social media to compliment all your efforts. are part of a successful strategy. As mentioned above, Google changes its algorithms often, so companies need to be up to date on the ins and out of SEO, so your page rankings don’t drop.
Going Beyond SEO to PPC.
Once you have your SEO sorted out and your site is improving, you can explore Paid Search. Again, we like to leave this work to the experts who can do keyword research, copy writing, testing, tagging, etc. Paid search is our number one source for traffic and conversions. In a short time SVF knows that 20% of our leads come from paid search. The quality of those leads is better since they are actively searching for products or services, rather than passively scrolling through their newsfeed. The more time you spend perfecting ads, the faster your results will improve.
Don’t discount other search engines.
Some are not a fan of Google and are choosing a more private alternative so you will want to consider adding other search engines to your marketing arsenal. These include Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, Baidu, etc. If you want to see how people are finding you now, you can check your Google Analytics for that and other information that will be helpful when setting up campaigns and expanding your marketing reach.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. In future blogs we will cover retargeting, social ads, boosting and other digital campaigns worth exploring.