Our Holiday Gift to You - Ten Top Must-Do's for Marketing Your Business Online

Identify!

1. Identify Your USP

            What is Your Unique Selling Proposition?

            What do you do differently or better than anybody else around?

           

If you have an existing business, get help figuring out what it is.

If you’re thinking about starting a new business, figure out what people need or want (see “keyword research” below).

Example: At SEO Ann Arbor, we started out serving SE Michigan businesses. Our selling proposition, which was somewhat unique in internet marketing, was that if you aren’t getting the results you want, you can sit across the desk from one of our founders and tell us exactly what you DO want!

If you don’t have a USP, create one!

2. Identify Your Best Customers

What customers are most profitable, the least trouble, and the kind of people you most enjoy doing business with?

Most business owners who take the time to research this are surprised by how often the most troublesome customers are the least profitable, and the most rewarding customers are the least trouble!

Can you identify your best three customers? What makes them the best?

3. Identify the pains or problems of your best customers that you can solve!

            My website’s not on Page One of Google!

            I can’t get my web guy to call me back!

            My neighbor’s sister in law designs websites and ....

            What are some pains or problems of your best customers that YOU can solve?

 Engage!

4. Explain Your Solution in “Engaging” Terms

            Engaging 1 - From the customer’s point of view

At last, someone I can meet with face to face who can explain what I need to do to get on Page One of Google!

            Or: Wow! A web guy who actually returns my calls!

Remember your USP? Keep in mind that if you make promises in your marketing, you have to structure your business to KEEP the promises. Nothing will destroy a bad business quicker than great marketing!

Engaging 2 – Designed to convince the customer to enlist or take action.

                        Learn Based Marketing

A lesson in SEO

                                    How to shop for internet marketing experts

                                    Top 5 List

                        Offer something in return for their participation!         

5. Use the contact information you get to build a base of interested people

Treat those people very, very well.

Be generous with your information. The days of withholding professional information are over. I can find virtually every secret of what you do on the internet. My problem is not finding the information, it’s finding the time, the specialized equipment, or the expertise to do what you do.

Inform, educate, entertain, and nurture your customer base.

6. Craft Niche Campaigns – one at a time!

            Base each campaign on a specific segment of your target customers.

            Dentist Offices: what do you say besides “hey, customers, I’m a dentist!”

            Pain: I get frequent headaches!

            Our solution: We diagnose TMJ problems.

Customer point of view: “Amazing! My dentist cured my tmj headaches in four appointments!”

Is it within your USP?

            Are the customers within your target customer profile?

            Can you fulfill the promise made in your marketing?

           

Saturate!

7. Create marketing copy

            Articles

            How To’s

            Top Ten Lists

            FAQs

            Videos

            Write for the web

            Engaging

            Divisible

8. Be social, be very social

            Twitter

            Facebook

            LinkedIn

Youtube         

Blog

            Articles

            email Newsletter

           

            Stay within the niche campaign – create Page One Power!

            Educate, inform, entertain .... enlist!

9. Be consistent, continuous, and considerate

            Pick a day every week to add info. Or two. Or three.

            Don’t miss those days. If you have to use Hubspot or Hootsuite.

            Don’t stop doing it.

            Make sure you provide a way to opt out.

            Actually provide useful information – don’t waste people’s time.

Test and Measure!

10. Test and Measure

            Are you actually getting more calls or emails?

            How many unsubscribes?

            What kinds of calls are you getting?

            Can you tweak your content to get different kinds of calls?

Don’t use the word Cadillac if you want Toyota customers!

Five SEO Tips You Can't Live Without!

First, find the best keywords! 
There are two things that the average business website does that are NOT very helpful to SEO. 

First, they choose words that only a person who already knows about their business would type into Google. For example, a local heating a cooling business we know optimized their site for the word “mechanical.” Now, an educated person might know that “XYZ Mechanical” would repair and install home furnaces, but someone whose furnace just quit will probably type in “furnace repair.” You have to make that kind of calculation for all your keywords.

Second, they choose keywords that very few people are searching for. If you have limited space on your site (and you SHOULD limit the number of words on your homepage, at least), then you want to focus on the keywords that most people are searching for. There are a number of good tools to find out, including the keyword tool on Google Adwords, and many free services offered by the search engines. Make sure the keywords you select are actually ones being commonly searched in your area of specialty. Don't forget to check your successful competitors!

Find out how many incoming links your competitors have, and their top five keywords. This will give you very specific guidance as to (1) how many links you’ll need to compete, and (2) what keywords they deemed important.

You’ll have to dig a little deeper to make this information meaning, however. The quality of incoming links is at least as important as the number, so you can use of the many free back link checkers to find out the Page Rank of your competitor’s incoming links. 

You’ll also want to go further with your analysis of your competitor’s keywords. Review them just as you do your own – make sure they’re keywords that are widely searched, and figure out how to incorporate them into key phrases that generate sustained search interest.

Third, add great content! This is the thing Google is trying to get you to do, anyway. You want to include actual content that inspires people to visit your site and share it with others. If you aren’t a great writer, find someone who is. In the large context of your advertising budget, freelance web writers are often very affordable. Here are some of the qualities of good online content: originality, usefulness, worth sharing, accuracy, detail, excitement. One way to learn more about shareable content is to visit one of the free sites that allows you to search for most shared articles. Study those articles and you’ll figure out some of the things they do that make them so shareable.

Fourth, make sure you optimize your page titles and meta description. Page titles are those words that appear at the top of your browser window, usually in the gray or blue space above the URL (uniform resource locator). Make sure your page titles contain as many of your top keywords as possible while still reasonably indicating the purpose of the page. There’s a lot of evidence to suggest that Google only considers the first 66 characters of a page title, but many SEO experts still advise including as many words as you think are necessary to adequately describe the page. 

The meta description is a phrase that often shows up in the snippet of text Google shows below the link to your site. It’s a chance to point out what your page is all about. As part of what we call “four-in-one” keyword optimization, we like to be sure our most important keywords are included in the URL, page title, headers, and text of our home page, and to make sure the meta-description is compelling.
 
Fifth, be sure to use title and ALT attribute 
The title attribute is included in the html of a link. Though the viewer won’t see it (unless she’s looking .. or actually, if he or she is blind. Browsers for the visually impaired often read the title and ALT attributes) it tells the search engines more about where they will end up if they click the link. Since this isn’t meant to be a technical article, we’ll just say here that the link will not only contain the URL of the destination page, but also a short description of it. Once again, this is a good place to employ keywords.

The ALT attribute is also for the search engines and those who use browsers or readers for the visually impaired. It gives more information about an image, which otherwise wouldn’t have any value to the search engine.

This is far from an exhaustive list of SEO methods. But it will help get you started. If you’re not inclined to do this kind of work for yourself, or if you’re too busy, give us a call at 877-815-6974. We’ll do a quick FREE evaluation of your website, and let you know if we can help get you to page one of Google!

Why Web Hosting Matters!

Why Web Hosting MattersHere at SEO Ann Arbor, we offer to host our clients’ sites with a service we call “Business Class Web Hosting.” Actually, to be accurate, the hosting is done through our sister company, Network Services Group, LLC. To be even more accurate, we actually require 99% of our SEO clients to use NSG hosting. Why, you might ask, are you guys so particular about web hosting?

Thanks for asking. I’m bout to tell you!

But first, let me share a typical story we hear from callers and potential clients on an almost weekly basis. The names have been changed to protect the evildoers and their helpless victims.

“My Website Keeps Going Down, Help!”
 Yesterday, we got a panicked call from somebody at NicePantsDude.com (their office is only about two miles from ours). Their site was been down all day, and it's back up and running now. Their web guys say it was caused by a DDoS attack directed at SoftMembrane.  Apparently they (The Bird Brain Group – NicePantsDude’s web developers), are using a hosting service called CheapAssHost, which appears to be one of those "pay us $8.50 per month to host your site" companies like GoDaddy or 1and1.  Just for reference, we typically charge people $300 per year to host their sites.  It’s not really a profit center for us because of the costs involved in maintaining our robust, redundant services, but we offer it for a variety of reasons, a few of which we’ll explain below. By the way, a good friend of ours who has a highly effective website and SEO business in Florida charges $85 per month for hosting ($125 per month for hosting both a website and blog), and it’s worth every penny.

CheapAssHost appears to have their servers hosted at SoftMembrane. SoftMembrane (formerly MyOrbit and now owned by HCN) is actually where NSG has several of their servers, though the NSG servers were unaffected by this supposed DDoS attack.

There are plenty of companies that charge $8 per month (or less) for hosting, and, at first glance, that sounds really good.  In fact, when Don Prior first started NSG back in 2001, he signed up with a couple of them.  After all, why go through the expense and hassle of setting up your own servers, paying the monthly fees to a data facility (hundreds or even thousands per month) when you can pay as little as $3 per month per site?

The fact is, they seem to work pretty well, especially at first glance. You pay your $8 for the first month, and voila! You have a website that works...  most of the time.  It turns out, however, that those sites had an odd habit off slowing down at random times or not submitting form data properly, and of course if you call to talk to someone, you are talking to a "script reader" who, when you get down to it, really knows nothing about web hosting or servers. So paying $8 per month makes a lot of sense, but only if low cost is more important to you than having a site that works all the time and having access to good support.

We've seen this happen with our clients’ sites too. National Sandwich was originally hosted with Craftwerk Solutions. Their site had an odd habit of timing out or crashing a couple times per week right around 6-7pm when everyone went home and started ordering sandwiches. We transferred it to NSG servers and … the problems stopped!  The NSG servers even survived their super bowl ad. We've had people transfer from GoDaddy or one of the other commodity hosting companies and the comments we get are usually something like this: "gee, it sure is nice to have reliable email for a change!"

Within a couple months of starting NSG, Don quickly decided that having sites that work most of the time – and not having full control over his hosting environment and servers – probably wasn't the best recipe for success. He bit the bullet and purchased servers that NSG controls, and all the problems went away. NSG spends a lot of time and money setting them up, hosting them at a data facility, and maintaining them so they continue to run well. They have servers in multiple data centers, so that if one blows up (don't laugh - it actually happened) they can switch to the other. They backup to one another, and also to servers at NSG world headquarters here in Ann Arbor.




Losing Your Site Can be Bad, Okay?

It's not that our servers never go down. But it has happened pretty rarely, and NSG goes to great lengths to make sure that they would be able to recover from a failure and get people back up and running on another server relatively quickly.

Price is what you pay. Value is what you get. So think about that the next time someone asks why our web hosting costs so much. $8/month for a site that works most of the time … it doesn't sound so good when you say it like that!

Or as one of the great minds at NSG puts it:

“One thing people need to realize is that when we host their sites, it represents the shortest possible path between the people who care about what’s happening with their site and the people who can really work the magic to make things happen if there's a problem or if they need something special. With canned hosting providers, there's a very big gap there.”

Our focus, first and foremost, is relationships. We market SEO Ann Arbor in part on the fact that our clients can sit across the desk and yell at us – if the need is there. What happens most of the time is that they sit across the desk and tell us how much better their websites, social media, and blogs are doing now that we’re helping out. Whether they’re shouting insults or heaping praise on us, it’s always better – both for them and for us – because of the direct connection. We care about their success, and if they aren’t our friends when we first meet, many do become friends, so we have a vested interest in seeing them succeed.

It’s truly a joy to be around people who are wired to work hard and help others succeed. That’s one of the biggest intrinsic rewards of what we do. And because we spend a lot of mental energy on “getting it right,” we’re lucky enough to be around a lot of those people. So, remember this the next time you’re thinking about whether to go the “cheap” route or the “good” route: price is what you pay. Value is what you get. If you’re after price, think GoDaddy, 1and1, or another discount hosting service. If you’re after value, think quality, think local, and think SEO Ann Arbor!

Quick Reminder - Website Design Tips

Good website design keeps visitors on your site longer!

1. Have a clear headline! Headlines and phrases in bold stand out to make your message clear. 
2. Images are important! Friendly faces and photos that represent you and your company belong on your home page. Showcase your company’s personality. 
3. Make your purpose clear! If people can’t figure out what you do, they won't stay.
4. Make navigation easy for visitors. Stay away from headlines like “why work with us”, “what we do”, and give easy choices like "Contact Us!" and "Discounts!"
5. Avoid clutter! Too many links, photos and graphics can confuse your visitors.