Content is king:

The content on your website is important, but content alone will not provide your site with quality organic search rankings on competitive searches. What is more important is how many quality websites link back to your site. The more credible places online that say your website is a great source of content for “xyz,” the more search engines will trust your website as a source of content for “xyz.” The more they trust you, the more inclined they’ll be inclined to rank your website higher for searches related to “xyz.”

Google AdWords affects your organic rankings:

It would make sense that Google would favor those companies paying money to advertise on their AdWords platform with higher organic rankings for their website. That is simply not true. Thousands of trials have been conducted on this very issue and none of them have shown any correlation between Google AdWords spending and organic rankings.

 Quantity of links matter:

This isn’t an arms race. If one site has 10,000 back links and another has 100, the site with 10,000 won’t necessarily rank higher. It’s the quality of links that matters most, not the quantity. If you have 10,000 links from sites with low PageRanks and little content – you will probably not outrank the website with 100 links from credible websites with high PageRanks and unique content. With Google all votes are not equal, which is a good thing!

Social media is critical for SEO:

Social media is important – it can help build your brand name, connect with your audience on a deeper level and showcase your expertise. But don’t think that Facebook likes, some Twitter tweets or a few shared posts is going to help your website rank higher organically for competitive keywords. Do you think that Google, which competes with Facebook for advertising dollars, is going to make Facebook an important factor in their search algorithm?

Regular updates are necessary for higher organic rankings:

This is something that was more true to say a few years ago. Look at some of the websites that rank well on competitive searches and you’ll see they haven’t been updated in awhile. The takeaway – don’t just add content and update your website for the sake of it – only update the website with meaningful, relevant content.

Have additional questions or thoughts? Feel free to contact Local Search Masters and we’ll be happy to discuss.

If you have any questions on the information feel free to contact us. Thanks everyone!

2012 Nashville Business Journal Best in Business Awards – April 19

So you’ve had someone post something bad about your business. Maybe they had to wait past their appointment time, or didn’t get what they expected from you as an organization. Well, let’s talk about what your next steps are. You don’t want to A. alienate the customer or B. inflame the situation. Your first thought might be to simply delete the post bashing you, your company and your mom (I added that last part) and think “out of sight, out of mind,” however your customers aren’t stupid. They’ll eventually notice that you’ve disregarded their feedback. Remember, just because you deleted a persons post doesn’t mean you’ve deleted their thoughts, future actions or spoken words to their friends.

Most customers that have a poor experience never reach out to the company, instead they write-off the experience, tell their friends and move on. This is a conversation that brands should strive to be a part of. My high school rodeo coach had a saying, a person that has a good experience tells 3 people, but a person that has a bad experience tells 10. I’m paraphrasing here and granted he was talking about people visiting our school for our home rodeo, but I think the sentiment holds true. The reason I think that is because I’m guilty of this as well. I look back on the restaurants where I’ve truly felt taken advantage of, or that my service was horrendous (sushi place on West End, I’m looking at you) and it’s true. I’ve taken to the airwaves of my friends and family rather than confronting the restaurant/business about it, because it’s not only easier but it’s a way to insure my peeps don’t suffer the same fate.

All that being said, are you starting to see why this is a GREAT opportunity for you? You have the ability to actually jump into that conversation and FIX IT. You can show your love for your customers, and help someone that may have not had the best experience. I mean let’s face it, we’re all human and someone is going to leave your establishment not completely satisfied, so let’s take this chance and use it.

My general steps are:

1. Acknowledgement: Acknowledge the person’s complaint. If they had a poor experience, say you’re sorry it happened. Empathy and a genuine “I’m sorry,” can go a long way to making things right.

2. Make it Personal: Give the person a way to reach you (the owner or representative) personally, such as a cell phone number or email address. This shows that you care and you want to talk about their experience, and also has the side benefit of taking the conversation to a more private channel.

3. Follow Up: Post any changes or improvements that have been made in policies as a result of the person’s experience. Such as, if the person is complaining about not getting any response back after sending messages to the reservation email address, you should let the customer know when the issue has been resolved.

4. Express Gratitude: The person had the guts to reach on a highly public forum and tell you about a problem or issue they had with your brand. This deserves recognition and it is also helpful if the person has pointed out a flaw that you hadn’t known about before. A quick “Thank you, you’re awesome” shout-out never hurts.

There are a few caveats to the above procedures. If the person commenting is being offensive (using slurs, profanities etc.) you may have a good reason to delete the comment, or if it’s someone with a grudge against your brand that doesn’t actually have anything to do with their complaint (think ex-employee, etc.), you may also have permission to delete those comments.

I hope this post has helped anyone out there waffling on how to respond to negative reviews. For some interesting statistics regarding twitter customer engagement check out Jay Baer’s post entitled, “70% of Companies Ignore Customer Complaints on Twitter.” – Alyson Dixson

Your Internet marketing team should be focused on two goals – making you more money and creating a positive ROI for their retainer each month – but they can’t do this alone. If done correctly Internet marketing should be a team effort and a two way street for success. Let’s breakdown some examples:

Let’s use Google marketing as our case study. You can either pay to have your Ads shown on Google for potentially valuable keyword phrases, or you can invest in a company to have your website show up organically on search engine results on searches determined to most likely be performed by your target audience. Your Internet marketing team can get in you right in front of your potential customer and track things like phone calls coming in from their work, the amount of traffic your website receives and where the traffic came from. The two things they can’t do are close leads they bring in for you (except in the case of an e commerce based business) or calculate exactly how much revenue they bring you annually.

Your Internet marketing team will look at the numbers they can control. They may report to you things like an increase in organic search result rankings, the flow of traffic on your website, AdWords traffic, lead form submissions and phone calls. What really matters though? The same thing that matters to all business owners - RESULTS. It is up to you as the business owner to set up clear metrics for measuring your incoming leads.

Start by categorizing your leads and placing them into a CRM system like Salesforce. Be sure that all of your incoming leads are tracked and labeled; what you can measure you can manage. However you receive leads, be sure to have a clearly defined process for categorizing where they came from. Each month you should audit your lead flow and determine which marketing avenues are successful. Knowing this will help you determine ROI and where you can best invest your marketing dollars.

Again – please, don’t keep this information to yourself! Be sure to communicate to your Internet marketing team each month what the exact revenue numbers are from your website and from their other work. If the numbers don’t look exactly as you’d like your team can change their strategy to help make the work more efficient. If it’s a good source of revenue you can expand your investment – if it doesn’t work out then at least you have a better understanding as to what  does and doesn’t work for your business.

All marketing should be focused on finding a return. Measure and communicate your level of return with your Internet marketing team and your Internet Marketing efforts will have a far greater chance for success.

Trevor Emerson

President/CEO Local Search Masters

Below are a few reasons why you should think about swapping over your account if you are currently employing your personal Facebook account to promote your business…

- It’s actually against Facebook’s terms of use to use a personal page in this fashion.
- Fan Pages are set up for business use so they have much better usability.
- You can easily convert your page to a fan page without losing any of your “friends.”
- Personal pages are not searchable in search engines while fan pages are.
- Personal pages can only have up to 5,000 friends, while a fan page can have unlimited fans.
- Fan pages have analytics and statistical information for who sees your posts and also how they interact with you.

You may say, “But I’ve already put all of the time and effort into it, I don’t want to start from scratch!”

That’s fine, Facebook actually has a very easy way for you to convert your personal page into a fan page and NOT lose any of your previous work. It’s super-easy… check out the steps below for more information.

Step One:
First you need to save your current information just in case something goes wrong. Login to Facebook and go to Account Settings. You can download your information from here (it literally says “Download A Copy of Your Facebook Information,” in shaded letters on the bottom.)

Step Two:
Here is the link to begin the migration: http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php?migrate *Please note that you’ll be asked to choose the type of page you want to create (examples include: Local Business or Place, Company Organization or Institution, Brand or Product… you get the idea.) It’s best to just pick the one that you feel identifies your brand the best way. It’s very easy to get confused, I mean if you have a company it can still be a local business and vice versa. Just try to pick the best one and move on in the process (I would suggest “Company” for a more B2B based set-up and “Local Business,” for a storefront type business.)

Step Three:
By migrating your page you have moved over your contacts and profile photo, however you will still have a profile page as your fan page will need this for an anchor. From here however, you can add folks to your business page as admins. This is reserved for people that you wish to have posting privileges (as the business) and to monitor fan activity on the page, so choose wisely.

For more information on this topic just Google “Facebook Business Page,” for countless slideshare uploads, articles and blog posts that detail out more of the finer points. For now, happy Facebooking!

Mr. Google himself, Matt Cutts

Upon entering the Google Analytics session on Wednesday I was honestly shocked at the amount of folks that were there to learn more about Analytics. Literally packed to the gills, there was almost no room, however I was able to squeeze in and settled down to learn as much as possible.

Unfortunately there weren’t a whole lot of the physical applications that I was able to take away from the session. Most of the tools/tips we are already utilizing, however it was brought to my attention during the session that Google is preparing to link up everyone’s Google+ pages with Analytics. This is HUGE, as it will have all kinds of connotations from a client, personal and in-house perspective.

The most obvious thought that came to my mind relates to the main difference between Facebook, twitter and Google+. Search engines see Facebook and Twitter as private websites, this means that all of your browsing within these are not visible to Google bots, however pairing a social profile based site with a search engine and then giving it the tracking ability of analytics would have huge opportunities.

Another takeaway from the session was that the “old,” layout of Google Analytics will soon be retired (beginning of next year) so you will be forced to swap over if you haven’t already.

Other than that, the short session was really just an exercise in patience as the gentleman behind me proceeded to leave his messenger notifications turned up so every few minutes of the presentation was punctuated with the lovely dings of incoming chat messages.

Enjoy!

We are listening to the history of marketing and how it relates to Internet marketing. The LSM crew is excited to be here! Lots more updates to come.

Follow our feeds from PubCon on twitter: @LocalSearchMstr

So, what is PubCon?

PubCon is the premier search and social media conference and expo. Held yearly, this year’s conference is being held in Las Vegas during the week of November 7 – 10, 2011 at the Las Vegas Convention Center South Hall in sunny Las Vegas, Nevada. PubCon Las Vegas 2011 will be the biggest and boldest gathering of search and social media innovators they have ever assembled, offering an unrivaled highly-productive conference experience at cost-effective rates, and with the leading technology and online marketing visionaries who will be in Las Vegas, as the committee is confident in the speakers and specialist that have descended upon Las Vegas, we are confident that every attendee will come away with valuable new ideas and solutions for search marketing. Content c/o PubCon, learn more by visiting www.PubCon.com/pubcon-vegas-2011