Managing Your Online Reputation With Google Alerts

set up google alerts

Google Alerts can help preserve your online reputation.

Promoting your brand, along with its good reputation, on social media and other platforms is important. However, things can get a bit complicated when you have to deal with bad reviews.

First, keep a good reputation by being honest, transparent, setting clear expectations for your customer, and by being in business because you genuinely want to help people around you. It goes without saying that shady practices are a no-no.

Second, you have to prevent any dissatisfaction by a customer from escalating by addressing every complaint you get. It has to be fixed at this level immediately while the customer is still trying to reach out to you. Because once they have felt frustrated and think they have to warn others about your practice, things can get messy.

Nonetheless, you have to set your radar for negative reviews. One good way to do this is to set up Google alerts for your brand terms and name.

What else can you do to safeguard your brand?

  • Claim your brand name
  • Build a consistent identity

Whether your brand is your name itself, your business name or your product name, you need to make sure that no one else can misrepresent you online by owning a piece of your brand. Make sure that you own domain names and usernames associated with your brand.

Build a consistent identity on major channels:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • YouTube
  • Pinterest
  • Tumblr
  • Quora

Publish content regularly:

The content you publish will define and reinforce who you are, what you stand for, and what your business is all about. This will make up the values associated with your brand. Anything inconsistent with these values will not be immediately convincing to your customers who know you.

Let me know if you need more information. We’d be glad to help.

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, please reach out to us.

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Say Hello to the Future. Get a Virtual Storefront And Be Open 24/7.

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What does it mean to have a virtual storefront?

The information age can be great. It gives customers nearly limitless information when trying to make a purchase decision, and it gives business owners like you new and exciting ways to reach those customers. It also makes it of the utmost importance to have a solidified and well-crafted website to make your case to potential customers.

Yes, your website is your virtual storefront. Open 24/7.

Not sure where to start? We can help.

Your website needs to sell you and these six things are proven to do that in the most efficient way.

1. The way that your product or service navigation is organized must be primarily based on your potential customer’s needs, and not based on, say, alphabetization.

2. With featured products or services, you can quickly direct your customer to what they are most likely to need. If the weather is heating up, make sure you don’t feature coats. Make educated guesses to showcase what’s hot for each season.

3. A product or service catalog makes sure your customers know exactly what you offer. It allows them to search through and identify what aspects of your product or service that fit your needs.

4. For each product listing, make sure you identify the benefits, features and product specifications. By ensuring you answer all the customer’s questions, you help them arrive at the “yes!” more quickly.

5. FAQs are found on almost every website. Whether they’re questions about shipping times or your return policy, you want to make sure anything a customer may wonder about is clearly spelled out.

6. Testimonials take advantage of the fact that customers trust their peers more than almost anything else when it comes to buying a good or service. If you have happy customers, make sure you utilize that to sell yourself or your products to new clientele.

Feeling overwhelmed? We’re here to help!

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, please reach out to us.

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Search Engine Optimization: Are You Gaining From What You’re Putting In?

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Are you getting a return on investment (ROI) on your search engine optimization (SEO) campaigns?

You’re not alone if you’re not sure how to answer that question. Indeed, 40% of marketers say proving the ROI of their marketing activities is their biggest marketing challenge according to HubSpot.

But measuring the ROI of your SEO efforts is possible, and we’re here to help you do just that.

Here are 3 things that need to be in place in order to calculate ROI:

1. The right attribution model.

Attribution models are the basis for allocating credit to each marketing channel. There is no right or wrong attribution model. Each one is different and comes with its own strengths. We’ll help you find the model that’s the best fit for your business.

2. Google Search Console and Google Analytics.

You may already have these tools in place for your website(s), and if so, that’s a great start. GSC is a key SEO tool for capturing and understanding website metrics. And the data from Google Analytics (GA) or a comparable website analytics package is crucial for understanding ROI.

3. Marketing automation and CRM.

These tools supplement website analytics data by providing data on individual buyers. This helps you ascertain the lifetime value of individual customers, which in turn help you determine the lifetime value of a particular marketing channel.

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, please reach out to us.

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8 Questions You Should Be Asking to Win More Customers

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Winning more customers can be as easy as answering these questions.

Wouldn’t you like to know how what your customers are thinking? How are they going to act? Well, you can! You just need to track how your current customers are interacting with your business.

You or someone on your team needs to be continually answering the following questions in order to get to know your potential customers.

How many customers are you getting every month?

Even in the craziness of running your business, you need to make sure you have a way to keep track of all of your customers that you are serving. You also need to make sure that everyone on your team is on the same page and using the same system for tracking.

How many of them are coming from your website?

You need to be asking how your customers found out about you and keeping track of customers that are coming from your site.

Are they coming from your SEO efforts? Social Media? PPC?

You or someone on your team need to be monitoring how users are finding your website to learn what is working for you and what can be tweaked.

What percentage of your visitors are converting?

Track how many people who are coming to your site are actually becoming customers.

How high is your bounce rate?

Monitor the percentage of people visiting who are just viewing one page of your site and then navigating away.

Which pages are most visited?

Take note of the pages that users are going to the most often and see if they are the pages that will lead them into making conversions.

Which pages do they spend most of their time on?

You should study the pages that users are spending a lot of time looking at and see how you can make other pages interesting to your potential customers.

What’s the winning conversion path?

Find out what path the customers are taking to make conversions and make sure that your site is designed around making that path as easy as possible.

Make sure someone on your team is answering these questions often so you can optimize your website design to get a greater number of conversions.

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, please reach out to us.

If you like the information you are receiving, please share this post.

5 Easy Ways to Better Engage Your Audience

engage your audience

You need to engage your visitors!

Every time a user comes to your website or social media page you have the opportunity to interact with them and turn them into lifelong customers! We want your customers to enjoy coming to your page and to look forward to viewing your content. So that leaves us with the question, what does your target audience want to see on your page?

Here are some of the top ways that you can encourage viewers to get involved on your page:

Trivia Questions

Give your followers a chance to show off a little bit of their knowledge! Also, if you can come up with interesting bits of trivia for them, it will spark a lively conversation on your page and give viewers a reason to share your post.

Interactive Infographics

These are a great tool because they are visually pleasing and eye catching, but they also can pass along useful information about your business or industry to your potential customers.

Polls

A poll shows your audience that you want to hear what they think and gives them a chance to make their voice heard on your page.

Live Video Streaming

There isn’t a better way to make the viewer feel like a part of your company then by giving them a live window right into your office! They can feel confident knowing exactly who you are and what you do!

Interactive Mobile Apps

Make an easy to access App for your customers to use. It will allow them to stay constantly connected to your business.

All of these tactics are going to give your targets the opportunity to engage with your business. This will show that you care more about just making the sale; you care about your customers and want to hear from them. This will go a long way towards building followers that will stay with your business for a lifetime.

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, please reach out to us.

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Ask These 8 Questions And Win More Customers

win more customers

Asking 8 simple questions can win you more customers.

Wouldn’t you like to know how what your customers are thinking? How are they going to act? Well, you can! You just need to track how your current customers are interacting with your business.

You or someone on your team needs to be continually answering the following questions in order to get to know your potential customers.

How many customers are you getting every month?

Even in the craziness of running your business, you need to make sure you have a way to keep track of all of your customers that you are serving. You also need to make sure that everyone on your team is on the same page and using the same system for tracking.

How many of them are coming from your website?

You need to be asking how your customers found out about you and keeping track of customers that are coming from your site.

Are they coming from your SEO efforts? Social Media? PPC?

You or someone on your team need to be monitoring how users are finding your website to learn what is working for you and what can be tweaked.

By what percent of your visitors are converting?

Track how many people who are coming to your site are actually becoming customers.

How high is your bounce rate?

Monitor the percentage of people visiting who are just viewing one page of your site and then navigating away.

Which pages are most visited?

Take note of the pages that users are going to the most often and see if they are the pages that will lead them into making conversions.

Which pages do they spend most of their time on?

You should study the pages that users are spending a lot of time looking at and see how you can make other pages interesting to your potential customers.

What’s the winning conversion path?

Find out what path the customers are taking to make conversions and make sure that your site is designed around making that path as easy as possible.

Make sure someone on your team is answering these questions often so you can optimize your website design to get a greater number of conversions.

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, please reach out to us.

If you like the information you are receiving, please share this post.

You Need SEO, Whether You Understand its Complexity or Not.

seo complexity

Does SEO  complexity confuse you?

If so, you are not alone.

SEO is a complex process, indeed. In fact, Google has over 200 ranking factors!

Plenty of research is being conducted quarterly and yearly by different organizations to understand Google’s ranking factors. Here are some of the findings from a recent study:

– Between the top 3rd and 20th position in Google search results, there is a 45% difference in content length.
– Between the 1st and 10th positions, there is a 10,000 difference in referring domains.

Content and backlinks are extremely important in SEO.

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, please reach out to us.

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Boost Growth and Sales for Your Small Business With Facebook Ads

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Facebook ads can help you grow your business.

Businesses around the globe continue cashing in on Facebook’s massive audience and unique features to increase their growth, sales, and overall success.

Is your business using Facebook Ads yet? Or are you apprehensive about getting into Facebook Ads?

You can get a well-deserved Facebook boost by:

1. Capitalizing on Facebook’s huge captive audience: Facebook has over 1.7 billion active users, and features that help you target your ads so that they’re seen by your potential customers.

2. Transforming Facebook visitors into customers: turn your cash into traffic to your landing pages and conversion funnels. Facebook even lets you re-market towards users who have engaged with you before.

3. Utilizing Facebook’s powerful Call-to-Action feature: Unlike others, Facebook Ads lets small businesses choose from a variety of call-to-action options, which lets you focus on exactly what you want your audience to do.

4. Developing demand generation advertisements: The average Facebook users spends 40+ minutes a day there to explore, connect, and discover. Help them discover just how much they need what you have to offer!

5. Testing your content before you spend money to maximize engagement: Another reason to advertise on Facebook is that it lets you get the most bang for your buck. How? You can test how engaging your content is by posting it on your page for free and analyzing your Insights. Then you can put your money on the most successful posts!

6. Creating video ads: Facebook videos have high rates of engagement and can help create buzz around your business.

Ready to begin your next Facebook Ad campaign?

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, please reach out to us.

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Did You Know Accreditation by the Better Business Bureau Can Increases Sales

bbb accreditation

Getting Accredited By The Better Business Bureau Builds Consumer Confidence

The Better Business Bureau is a non-profit accrediting organization that gives its stamp of approval when a business meets high standards of quality, responsibility, and trustworthiness.

So why is this BBB logo so important? Recent studies have shown that 8 out of 10 consumers recognize the BBB seal, and when they see it displayed on a website or business, it instills confidence and trust.

And those consumers are likely to purchase based on this. Reviews are important online, but 90% of consumers don’t bother hunting for a lot of reviews and will read less than 10 reviews before forming an opinion.

Most of those consumers are going to go right to the Better Business Bureau first. And sometimes that one review is enough to make their decision. But what if your business is not accredited? This could actually hurt your business as becoming accredited shows that you’re a company that is accountable and can be trusted.

And a company that is trusted, makes more profit.

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, please reach out to us.

If you like the information you are receiving, please share this post.

Your 5-Minute Website Workshop

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Take a 5 minute website workshop and improve your customer experience.

Your website is a vital piece of your business, and we want you to have the most traffic possible going through it every day. That is why we put together these “Must-Haves” that you need to be checking on a regular basis in order to ensure you are gaining the most customers possible.

While working through this list we suggest pulling your website up next to this window so that you can properly analyze your site.

First, we will take a look at whether or not the website is correctly designed.

Your website…

  • Must be user-friendly
  • Must set a clear path for customers to make a purchase
  • Must have trust signals
  • Name of the Business Owner
  • Address, Phone
  • Must have security
  • Use HTTPS or Secure Sockets Layer
  • Must have customer support contact information

Now let’s take a look at the answers that the customer is looking for when they get to your website. No matter what point the customer is in the buying process, they are going to have questions and concerns.

You need to have the answers to these questions readily available to them or they will quickly move on to another site that does.

  • Why should they buy from you?
  • What benefits your product/service will give to them?
  • What Features does it offer?
  • What are the technical details and specifications?
  • Where are the guides and tutorials?
  • Do you have any testimonials from real customers?

These are all things that you need to have on your website to ensure the steady flow of customers coming through your site. Even addressing one or two issues that you noticed while reviewing this list can have a major impact on the number of customers you see moving through your website.

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, please reach out to us.

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