Internet Marketing Secrets - What The World Wants!

What Does the World Want?

Last time we talked about making sure you narrow down what you do very, very well, and then to focus on that niche in your internet marketing. The next step is to make sure you know what the world wants when it comes to that niche. Think about it this way - you might sell the best upside down green widgets on the planet, but if nobody's typing "upside down green widgets" into Google, you're not going to get found. Instead, if people have a different way of searching - maybe they type "solve my widget problems"! If you know that, you can present your information in a way that meshes with search habits and also addresses their concerns in a very direct way. 

Learn more about focusing on what the world wants to rocket your internet marketing success upwards with this article.

Move Strategic Thinking to Strategic Doing

We follow Sam Geist, a top business strategist who posts great advice in his newsletter called "Quick Bites." This week's post is worth repeating! 

A couple of weeks ago, I once again facilitated a roundtable discussion on execution. I relayed to the group that studies have shown that the reason 95% of businesses are not successful is that they are 

not willing to do what the 5% who are successful are willing to do.  

We then made a list of what they felt was required to join The 5% Club.
Take a look at seven of the achievements on the list:

• Operate the business with a sense of purpose. Have a plan of where your business is going. No aimless wandering.
• Engage in open and clear communication. No big secrets. No tall silos. No excluded employees.
• Focus on accountability. Who does what by when. Delegate responsibility. Give authority. Stay in the loop.
• Encourage flexibility and adaptability. Be willing to collaborate for the well-being of the company. Be ready to "zig" when the competition "zags."
• Take a circular approach. Change is continuous. Improvement is continuous. Execution is continuous. No beginning, no end.
• Maintain "a company of leaders" perspective. Learn from everyone in the company. Teach everyone in the company-from top to bottom.
• Use all your resources-internal and external-beneficially. 

Innovation, strategies and plans cannot move forward alone. Without execution they lie dormant in a heap.  

LESSON LEARNED: 
"Execution is everything today. Get your people to execute. Take charge of execution. Move strategic thinking to strategic doing."

--Sam Geist   

Read more about Sam at http://www.samgeist.com/

We're an extension of your team. Please keep us in "the loop"!

Our Ideal Client Communication

“We believe in helping people achieve their dream of a successful, growing business and an abundant life…starting today!”  We do this by employing a vast number of internet marketing and SEO strategies and tactics. However, our work is not done in a vacuum! We need consistent communication and content from you to maximize your success. We encourage you to think of your SEO Specialist as an extension of your team. 

We design your SEO campaign to work best for your  particular customers, products, and services. Your expertise in your business and your knowledge of your customers’ needs is invaluable to us. 

Here are a few examples of the kinds of information you can help provide:

• Phone calls – who is calling or emailing you, and what are they asking for? – Let us know, early and often! 

• Upcoming sales and events:  If you have a big sale or open house planned – Let us know!

• Cancellations:  If an event or promotion is cancelled that we’ve advertised for you – Let us know! 

• Conferences and community service projects:  Your staff “Races for the Cure” or attends a special conference or training session – Let us know!

• New products or services:  You change your hours, launch a new product, recall a product, or find a new use for it – Let us know! 

• Awards and recognition:  If you or a staff person becomes a member of an organization, your business receives accolades, or the baseball team you sponsor wins a tournament – Yep, you guessed it! Let us know! 

• Industry news:  You recently read any interesting trade journals or blogs related to your business – Let us know!  [and please provide us with a link or copy of the article]

• Staff news:  You hire a new employee, an employee retires, or other notable events occur like marriages, certifications, graduations, babies, etc. – Let us know! Are you noticing a theme yet?

• Customer testimonials or reviews.  Stories about customers are worth their weight in gold.  Your staff went above and beyond to help a customer – Let us know! 

Are you wondering what a staff change or a community service event could have to do with your SEO campaign?  For getting the word about your business out there, ALL news is good news!  We can add your keywords into almost any content. Not only that, any “feel good” or personal news will tend to attract more human visitors via social media, especially if you provide us with photographs! 

Speaking of photographs, when you have an event, it’s really, really important to designate someone to take
photographs (with permission) of happy customers to post on social media and your website.  We’re serious! It would be wonderful if you would assign someone the task of taking photographs and ONLY taking photographs, to make sure photos don’t become an afterthought.  

The more you “Let us know,” sooner rather than later, the more successful your SEO campaigns will be!

SEO Ann Arbor Shares 9 Absolutely Essential Things You Should Do With a Negative Review!

Do you hesitate to ask your customers for reviews?
Are you worried that they might write something you don’t want to hear? 
Have you felt the sting of a harsh review of your business or product?
 
Studies show that approximately 61% of online purchases are a direct result of online reviews about that product or service. However, some people may still decide to buy your product, even if they read a negative review, because they know they can get a refund if they dislike the product. So, why not take a chance? 

Well, negative reviews can be a deal breaker for some people. That’s why it’s so important to monitor your reviews and respond as quickly as possible.  Some media platforms (such as Google+, Facebook, and Twitter) allow you to respond. This will show the reviewer and other customers that you’re responding and taking an interest in your customers. 

When you discover a negative review, you’ll most likely be upset, perhaps angry.  But here are some tips that may help you handle them:

• Don’t respond until after you’ve calmed down. 

• Apologize if the situation deserves a reasonable apology.

• Thank them for the review.

• Offer your thoughts as to why you believe the review is incorrect (if applicable.)

• Share what steps you’re taking to improve the situation.

• Offer a refund, discount or additional service to keep the reviewer as a customer

• Respond directly to the customer

• Never write a harmful or disrespectful message toward a customer.

• Keep your message as positive as possible.

It’s important to respond to every review, both positive and negative. Always engage the reviewer by asking more questions – if applicable – and make sure you share details about the product/service they mentioned.  When a customer is shopping, and sees a negative review about your product, he or she may still buy it if you handled the situation well. If your competition doesn’t monitor positive or negative reviews, your involvement with your own reviews will definitely give you an advantage!

If your company gets negative reviews and you’re unsure about how to handle them, contact SEO Ann Arbor today. We’re dedicated to helping our clients achieve their dream of a successful, growing business and abundant life … starting today! 

The One Minute Google Expert

By Nick Suino - SEO Ann arbor

As featured in the Oxford Property Management Newsletter

Business owners need to know the key concepts of marketing online. They are critical to making good decisions about how to spend your marketing dollars.
Google — if you understand nothing else about the internet, understand Google! Google is the largest search engine, and 80% of the world uses it to search for information, shopping, or leisure activities. When you search using Google, using a single word or a complete sentence, the results are often divided into three parts: organic search, Google Local, and sponsored search.
Organic search results appear on the left side of your browser window, occupying about four-fifths of the visual real estate. These are websites and documents that closely match your search. If you typed "commercial real estate ann arbor" you’d see a list of real estate and management companies. Websites closer to the top have more content related to your search.
Google Local results appear in the same results list. They usually contain the address of the business and a small balloon that corresponds to a location on a map. If you include geographic information in your search, Google provides results for that area.
Sponsored search results appear on the right side of and sometimes above the organic search results. These are ads businesses pay for in Google’s Adwords program. Th ey show up based on the match between your search terms and the advertiser’s keywords. When you click on an ad, the business is charged a fee from one cent to a few dollars. Next month, we’ll explain a bit about how you can improve your website’s position in the organic search results!

Why You Need SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?

So you spent a bunch of money to have a website designed and built and you think it looks pretty good. You took a lot of pretty pictures and wrote some great text describing your business, and now you’re waiting for the clients to start rolling in.
Awesome!
Except, for most of us, the “rolling in” part never seems to happen. Sure, we get a call or two, maybe even find that a few people contact us to ask where we are or what our prices are. But for the vast majority of businesses, the end of the rainbow simply doesn’t point at the proverbial pot of gold. Want to know why?

Web Marketing Can Separate You from the Huge Crowd

There are many reasons, but the quickest answer is that, depending on who you ask, there are between 344 million and 644 million websites on the internet. That means almost no matter what product or service you offer, there are a LOT of other people in the world offering it, too. Unless you do something really unique or really spectacular, you’re going to have to find clients the old fashioned way – through personal contacts, networking, and word of mouth. That can make it tough to earn enough to pay your overhead.
Another reason – closely related to the sheer number of websites out there – is that consumers are overwhelmed by all the advertising they encounter every day, not just on the internet, but on TV and radio, in their reading material, on billboards, and surrounding them while shopping or sightseeing. If you want outstanding sales, you’ve got to find a way to stand out.

Page One of Google is the Best Place to be on the Search Engines

One way to stand out is to be sure that your website appears on or near page one when people search Google or one of the other search engines. As we stated above, there are millions of websites, but only around ten of them appear on page one when you do a search. As we pointed out in this article - What is Search Engine Optimization?
According to some experts, 95% of real traffic to websites comes from the results on page one of search engine results. That means if your business appears on page two, you are competing for the leftover 5% of potential customers. If this seems extreme, think about the last few times you searched for a product or service on the Internet. Like most of us, you probably went to Google and typed in a word or words that you thought would get you to the businesses you wanted. When you found one or two likely listings, did you keep scanning through the results? No? We don’t either, and most people who use search engines (which is almost everybody these days) click through to the first likely listing they see.

It May Not be Enough to Have a Website

Search engine optimization is the science and art of adding the right things to your site and in other places on the internet to help the search engines find out how important and relevant your website is. Even if your business is the only one in Ann Arbor offering purple and green widgets, there may be other businesses in other parts of Michigan or the US offering purple and green widgets, and if they’ve had competent SEO work done, they may well appear above your business in search engine results.

Web Marketing Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry

We don’t want to assume that you’re like everybody else, but in our experience the vast majority of business owners overestimate the “natural” importance of their businesses on the internet. We probably notice this because we made the same mistake when we started out. You’re rightfully proud of your business and hopefully you’re optimistic about the chance to make millions this year, but the noise of advertising is getting louder and louder with each passing year. Great results on the internet are made, not born, and the process of making them is called SEO.

You Can Do All Your SEO Yourself … Maybe

You can do a lot of the things that an SEO expert will do for you, if you have the time. You can do research to determine which words and phrases people are most searching for when they look for products or services like yours. You can cull out the words and phrases that don’t relate exactly to what you’re offering. You can write keyword-rich text to include on your home page and on other critical pages on your website. You can include appropriate keywords in your URLs, page titles, meta-descriptions, and text. You can seek out partner websites to link back to your site. You can write cogent, keyword-related articles to post on your site.
You can create and manage social media campaigns on sites like Facebook, Twitter, Youtbue, Linkedin and Pinterest. You can check your HTML to make sure that it is error-free. You can ensure that you use CSS appropriately, and that your site is submitted to all the relevant search engines and listing places. You can manage your Google Places and other geographical listings. You can develop and manage mobile versions of your site or apps that help generate traffic for your business. And you can do any dozen or two of the many other things that ensure you a steady flow of potential customers for years to come.
Or not.

Do It Yourself SEO is a Great Idea for Some Businesses, and Terrible for Others

If you’re actually a lot better at doing the thing that your business does, and you make decent money while doing it, then you should probably consider hiring experts to do your web work, SEO, and social media management for you. We’re fond of saying, “If you have more time than money, do your own SEO. If you have more money than time, hire someone to do your SEO for you.” It turns out that most good business people can make a lot more money doing their thing than trying to do DIY SEO.
We do SEO everyday, and we’re pretty good at it. Our clients’ websites get to page one of Google, either quickly or over a reasonable period of time. Because we work with SEO every day, we know what to look for, and we have efficient ways of doing it. We’re also local, so if you have questions or concerns you can sit across the desk from us or call us on the phone (in the same time zone!) and we’ll make sure your questions are answered. But whatever you do yourself, or whoever you decide to hire, make sure you understand and use SEO. It can make all the difference to your success! If you’d like more information or have a few questions, feel free to call us today!