online advertising

Too Busy to Advertise Online?

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

Some customers tell us that they WANT to sign up, but they just don’t have time to do it. What they’re really saying is that they don’t want to take an active role in the promotion of their own business.
We understand that you’re busy, and that being a small business owner often entails a hectic schedule, but if you don’t take the time to actively participate in promoting your business as accurately as possible, the consequences can be disastrous!
No matter how many jobs you have lined up or how complicated your schedule has become, it’s critical that you take an active interest in the information circulated on the Internet regarding your company. So shuffle your calendar or take a quick break, and spend a little while focusing on how your company is being promoted on the web. Remember, the content generated and distributed by an online advertiser on your behalf DIRECTLY reflects on your company and represents your brand.
If you allow inaccurate, low-quality, or just plain wrong information to spread out all over the Internet, the message you send to potential customers is that your reputation and professional image are not important to you in the slightest. Customers will assume automatically that these errors and inaccuracies are an indication of how you conduct yourself as a general rule, seeing them as symptoms of an overall lack of professionalism and customer service.

Web Advertising: How Much Time Should You Spend?

So, if taking a little time to sign up for a program that promises to create a web presence for you (in the form of a website, advertisements, etc.) is to the benefit of your company, how long will it take? The answer varies from business to business, but you can be certain it’s more than two minutes!
Consider it this way: Could you walk up to a stranger on the street and describe each and every service you offer in just two minutes? Probably not! So why is it fair to expect a third-party advertiser to understand all the nuances of your business in that short an amount of time?
Here at Prospect Genius, it doesn’t take long to sign up, but we do make sure we learn all about your business. The time you invest at this stage gives our team more ammunition to promote your business online, in the end helping drive maximum traffic back to you.
Just how long does it take? Well, in our experience, when a new client signs up with PG, the initial interview typically takes between 20 and 30 minutes. The follow-up interview usually lasts another 10 or 15 minutes. If you’re a chatty person, or your company offers a number of different services, you could spend up to 90 minutes on the phone with us going over the type of work your business does and what makes your company unique.
Everything that you tell us about your company is the fuel we need to make sure your business is represented accurately and promoted efficiently on the web, ensuring you get the most out of your new online presence.

Food for Thought

If a web advertiser says the signup process will only take 30 seconds, or even just 5 minutes, shouldn’t you be concerned? How will they learn anything about your company in that period of time? Especially if all they want is your billing address and credit card number, the red flags should go up.
At Prospect Genius, we take the approach of using in-depth interviews with a number of different goals in mind:

To make certain you get the types of calls you want (for example, calls for repairing large appliances rather than small appliance repairs)
To ensure we promote your business in the correct location and service areas
To identify the details that make your company special, unique, and different from your competitors

All of these goals are for your direct benefit!
If another online advertising company does NOT invest time in getting to know your business when signing you up (by asking for specific, detailed info about your services, etc.), you may find yourself facing several problems:

They may not be planning on doing a whole lot of work for you, so detailed information would be irrelevant.
They may be planning to send you every and ANY call out there, including junk calls. This can be an especially major issue with a pay-per-lead or pay-per-call system.
They may just be planning to copy and paste from your existing website, duplicating content and potentially earning penalties from Google.
They may be planning to spam Google Maps by posting a slew of phony addresses on your company’s map listings page. This may give your company a quick boost in Google rankings, but any unverifiable addresses will be blacklisted by Google. Since your website will be connected to one of those map listings, you’ll also be risking a penalty on Google’s results pages. In extreme cases, Google may even penalize your business name and phone number across the board.

Why It Really Matters

So what? What’s the worst that can happen if you choose to use a web advertising company that doesn’t take the time to learn about you and your business? That’s a really good question because one answer is that you could even go to JAIL!
Sounds extreme, right? Never gonna happen, right? Actually, we’re not kidding. Imagine you sign up with “Advertiser X” and spend just one minute giving them your credit card info and business name, but almost nothing else in terms of information. Then, if Advertiser X puts content on your website that includes false claims of certifications, memberships, or licenses you don’t actually have, you could easily end up on the wrong end of a sting operation.
Several states, including California, are seriously cracking down on these types of violations because the resulting fines are a source of revenue for their cash-strapped coffers. In fact, some of our clients have endured similar situations because they failed to comply with some aspect of state law regarding exactly how you can advertise your services.
Of course, these are the most extreme examples, but the threat of fines and penalties is REAL. In the end, it’s up to you as the business owner to verify that the content on the Internet regarding your company is 100% accurate.

Vet Advertisers Carefully

With all that can go wrong through cutting-corners or just plain sketchy online advertising, it’s vital that you be careful when choosing who will represent your company’s interests on the Internet. In the same way you wouldn’t hire just anyone to answer your phone, you’re better off not hiring just anyone for online advertising.
What an advertiser puts out there about your company invariably becomes the basis for first impressions for many potential customers. If there’s information on the web that’s untrue, misleading, or even misspelled, it could end up costing you a whole lot more than the 30 minutes it would have taken to do it right in the first place!

Voice Mail: Solution or Danger

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

At Prospect Genius, we work with a broad spectrum of small, local companies, and that puts us in a unique position to observe trends in the ways small businesses handle their operations. Recently, we’ve noticed that some of our clients, especially the one-person outfits, are too busy to answer their phone during the day. Instead, they let the calls go through to their voice mail and return the messages once they have time.
On one hand, this is great news: We’re excited that so many folks are getting enough work to keep them this busy. On the other hand, this may end up being a major problem for your company: That’s because when you let your calls ring through to voice mail, you may actually end up missing out on phone calls that could lead to additional customers and additional profits.

The Issue With Voice Mail

With online advertising, we’ve observed that the majority of customers will pick up the phone and call you within a minute or two of landing on your website. Unfortunately, we’ve also noticed that if a real person doesn’t answer the call, these prospective clients will likely hang up without leaving a message. In fact, only a very small percentage of callers will actually leave a message on your voice mail. Worse, most will just click the “back” on their web browser, return to the search results page, and call the next company on the list—likely a direct competitor!
The biggest problem with this scenario is that not answering your calls means that you lose the ability to capture what could be extremely profitable jobs. Think about it this way: It’s great that your business is keeping busy with multiple jobs, but in an ideal world, you’d be able to hand pick the closest, most profitable jobs instead of working yourself to the bone on projects that are farther away or have a lower profit margin.

Option #1

The good news is that there are ways to balance the issue of a ringing phone with the project on hand. Perhaps the easiest solution, yet one many folks don’t even think of, is an answering service. This option is surprisingly affordable, and in many cases, there are even companies that employ only native English speakers if customer service and communication skills are a concern for you. With an answering service, calls will be answered on your behalf, with messages being relayed to you as if you just stepped away from the phone for a moment.
Some answering services immediately send you an e-mail or text message explaining the nature and priority level of the call. Others may even provide you with an option for specifying which calls you would like forwarded to you without delay and which calls you would like to receive a message about.
With an answering service, your customers get the benefit of talking to a real person and you get the benefit of uninterrupted time to work on your current job without missing out on potentially profitable work for the future.

Option #2

If hiring an answering service isn’t in the cards, and your budget doesn’t allow bringing in a receptionist or assistant to answer the phone, your best bet is to simply make the most out of your voice mail recording.
Start by making certain your voice mail sounds as professional as possible. Assure your clients that their call is important to you, and that their message will be returned as soon as possible. Here’s a great example:
“Hi. You’ve reached Bob’s Plumbing of Boston, MA. We are unable to answer the phone at the moment because we are busy providing first-class service to one of our clients. We want to provide this same level of service to you, so please leave us a message, and we’ll return your call later today.”

Prospect Genius Voice Mail Solutions

Did you know that you can enable a separate voice mail account just for your Prospect Genius campaign? Our system allows us to intercept calls after a few rings and play a message like the one shown above. We’ll then e-mail any message left on your voice mail to you immediately.
This service can be extremely helpful if you’re trying to juggle multiple businesses on a single phone line or if you just want to keep your PG campaign separate from other advertising efforts. If this voice mail service sounds like something you’d like to explore for your company, just give us a call, and the Prospect Genius team can help you out!

Don’t Get Banned From Google

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

Spam: It’s Bad for Business

In past blog posts, we’ve talked about how Google works: the changes to Google Maps that display search results as a combination of organic rankings and map placement; the Google Spam Department, led by Matt Cutts; etc.
But we wanted to talk about all this again because Google’s Spam Department has been stepping up enforcement. They’re taking spam activity on Google Places so seriously that your business may even be banned if caught!
The most important thing to understand is that Google will attach any spamming penalties that they dole out to any available pieces of information, including:

Your business name
Your URL (http://www.bobsbusiness.com)
Your phone number
Your address

In their quest to deter spam activity on Google Places, Google looks for business listings that appear to be for the same business yet contain slight discrepancies in information.
For example: Bob wants his appliance company to have a higher ranking in all of the smaller towns surrounding the metropolitan area he serves. So he starts by creating a map listing for his company, including all of the relevant data:

“Bob’s Appliance” in New York, NY; phone number: 212-555-5555; address: 1234 W Main Street; website: www.bobsappliance.com

However, then he creates more listings, each one with slightly differing information:

“Bob’s Appliance” in Queens, NY; phone number: 212-555-5555; address: 567 Broadway Ave; website: www.bobsappliance.com
“Michael’s Appliance” in Bronx, NY; phone number: 212-555-5555; address: 1234 W Main St; website: www.bobsappliance.com
“Bob’s Appliance” in Brooklyn, NY; phone number: 212-111-1111; address: 1234 W Main St; website: www.bobsappliance.com

If he gets caught, what could happen? The short answer is that all of his information could be flagged and banned. That means any new listing containing a SINGLE piece of the flagged information would be rejected from Google Places. In some extreme cases, that information could be entirely banned from all of Google, in which case your website—and by extension, your company—would essentially cease to exist online. If you get to this point, and all of your information is banned on Google, you really only have two options: grovel at the feet of Google and beg for a reprieve or completely change not only your address, phone number, and website URL, but also your business’s name!

Staying Safe with Google Places

Surprisingly enough, remaining in the good graces of Google is actually a lot easier than it may sound. If you don’t want to get blacklisted or banned from Google, just tell the truth!
Follow Google’s guidelines by accurately representing the physical world in your online profiles, and you won’t have to worry about penalties or blacklisting. If your company really has two physical addresses in the real world, feel free to make two listings online, one for each location. If you only have one real location, don’t just make up a second one! And so on and so forth. You can even list your home address if it’s your only place of business.
What you don’t want to do is list the address of your auto body shop, your cousin Larry’s house, and then go on to make half a dozen more listings for an empty lot, abandoned church, etc. If you do that, Google will catch you and they will punish you. It could take days, months, or even a year, but Google will eventually catch you and subsequently ban or blacklist all of the addresses—and other information—associated with the spammed business listings.
Remember, having an effectively optimized Google Places listing connected with an equally well optimized website is crucial. Together they will work to get you the best overall placement in Google search results.

Making SEO Work for You

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

Double Trouble

When your sink is leaking, would you call in two different plumbers to fix the leak at the same time? Would you have two different dentists fill one cavity? Having two pros in to do the same job, at the same time, just doesn’t make much sense.
Of course, these are rather ridiculous examples, and you certainly wouldn’t follow through with either of these scenarios. However, many small companies do work with two separate SEO companies at the same time, hiring both to market the same business… The perception is that this commonplace tactic will help the company get ahead: Two is better than one, right? The truth is that working with two different SEO companies at the same time can be quite damaging. That’s because instead of helping each other out, the two companies are struggling for control of the SEO campaign, and your business ends up caught in between their tug-of-war. The end result is more often a penalty from Google or Bing for activity that looks like spam than it is successful SEO for your company.

The Tortoise Is Better Than the Hare

The reality is that slow and steady wins the race. If you choose to use SEO for your web marketing campaign, the smartest choice is to carefully select a single company to work with. Let them focus on optimization for three to six months, and THEN consider whether you’d like to try a different company.
During that first three to six months, do be involved in and aware of what’s going on with your SEO campaign, but don’t be obstructive or intrusive. SEO doesn’t happen overnight! Contrary to what your high-speed connection might have you believing, the Internet is actually a very slow entity. It reacts and adapts very slowly due to its sheer size and immensity. Google and Bing have to constantly sort through and analyze billions of pages of information to do their jobs effectively, so they may only get to your site every other month or so. Essentially, this means a change on your site that’s implemented today might not be seen for 30 or 60 days.
Because the Internet reacts slowly, SEO can also be a slow process. In order to do it right, small business owners need to realize that Google owns the ball, the bat, the gloves, and the ballpark: if the Internet is like a baseball league, you’ll have to play by Google’s rules if you ever want to see a good ranking for your site.

So, That Means I’m Stuck, Right?

Just because you need to give SEO time to work doesn’t mean you’re stuck with whatever company you choose from the get-go! If they’ve provided zero return on your investment over a six- to nine-month period, and you’ve provided all of the information and resources requested, it’s time to start looking for a replacement. After that much time, a lack of results means you may want to switch to a second SEO company.

Okay, What Should My Business Do?

If you want more than your current SEO campaign is providing, there are still a number of options that don’t include sabotaging yourself by bringing a competing SEO company on board. While you’re waiting those three to six months for your SEO program to develop more fully, you can also promote your business online by:

Using a pay-per-click campaign. PPC can be implemented on your own or with the help of a professional.
Hiring a lead generation program that works differently from an SEO provider. This might include companies similar to Service Magic or Yodle (this is not an endorsement). Each of these drives leads to your company in a way that may complement, not compete with, your SEO campaign.
Expanding your Facebook page and Twitter profile. Putting time and resources into these pages can help your Internet exposure. This type of work can be handled either by a professional or by business owners themselves.
Posting ads on Craigslist. This service is free and will take you just a few minutes.
Exploring the possibility of a radio ad that would promote your business name or website. This can set the stage for more web traffic and be a complement to the SEO work.
Putting a sign on your fleet truck(s) or other vehicles. Not having signs means you’re missing out on an important branding opportunity.

Giving your SEO campaign time to develop fully doesn’t mean you have to sit by the sidelines for months. However, trying the aforementioned options will almost always end better than trying to stack the deck by working with two different SEO companies at the same time–which nearly always backfires!
Have questions? The PG team would love to help. Feel free to contact our customer service professionals for more information.

Stand Out From the Crowd With Pictures and Reviews

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

Pictures: Why Your Website May Be Dead in the Water Without Them

Online advertising has one goal, right? To get your website ranking as well as possible with search engines like Google and Bing.
However, using the right keywords, linking strategies, and off-page work to make your site rank highly isn’t always enough. That’s because the ultimate goal of Internet marketing is actually not just to make your site number 1 on Google or Yahoo! It’s to generate more business for your company. To do that, it’s PEOPLE who need to pick up the phone and call after clicking on your well-ranked website. If they don’t contact you, all you end up with is a highly placed website that does nothing at all to generate business or help your company succeed!
It’s hard to believe, but something as little as the right images can have a huge impact on whether or not people call after visiting your site. Pictures make folks feel more comfortable with your company and help put them at ease, which can be especially important if your business performs services that require you to enter customers’ homes or vehicles. And, ultimately, comfort with your business has a LOT to do with whether a prospective customer picks your company or goes with a competitor.
Don’t just take our word for it: here’s a great example. Safelite, the national auto glass company, is now e-mailing each customer a photo of the actual technician who will be coming to work on their vehicle. Obviously, Safelite understands this puts their clients at ease and makes them more likely to use Safelite’s services rather than the competition’s.

Why Your OWN Pictures Matter

The simple truth is that not all images are created equal. Your own photos of your own team at work are, quite frankly, worth a lot more than stock photos of some model posing as a plumber, roofer, or other professional.
That’s because there are loads of duplicate stock photos out there. Everyone has seen that gal or this guy on numerous sites… And people aren’t dumb. They begin to recognize these pictures and realize that the photos are of models and actors, not your actual employees. Then they may begin to subconsciously wonder why you aren’t willing to put images of your actual staff on your site… In short, having your own photos of your employees performing services will get you more phone calls than stock photos will. Hands down.
You’ve probably seen images like some of these highly over-used pictures below:

Yup: they’re all stock art (from istockphoto.com). If you’re honest with yourself, it’s pretty easy to tell that these people aren’t your actual staff. While stock photos are better than having an imageless website, they don’t provide the same benefits as real photos of you or your team doing the work that you do.

Reviews: Why Your Website May Be Dead in the Water Without Them

Your company has hundreds of competitors: You probably already know this, because if you’re the only game in town, then there’s no use spending money on advertising… But since the make-believe world in which your business has no competition doesn’t exist, you need to make your company stand out from the crowd. Putting pictures of you and your team on your website is a great way to differentiate yourself from the other guys, and so is having sufficient customer reviews available.
Remember: it’s important not to just have reviews on your site, but it’s vital to keep those testimonials current. That way, prospective customers can see that your company not only did a great job for a client back in 1999 but that you’re also providing great service today and into the future.
New reviews can be posted in a number of places from Google Maps to your website. Here’s why you need to put your reviews in a variety of different locations online:

Google Maps: Adding reviews to your listing will help you get better placement in Google Maps.
Facebook: The better your Facebook popularity, the better your site will perform on Bing.
Your website: Reviews play a big role in converting site visitors into paying customers, so don’t forget to make sure your glowing testimonials make it onto your website as well. If you’re a PG customer, just send your new reviews to our team, and we’ll make sure to keep your microsite up to date.

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