Winning New Customers

Foxxr’s recent interview with Bright Local on Winning New Customers was recently featured on Search Engine Land.

Back in January, Sophie Kemp of Bright Local reached out to Foxxr and a few other SEO agencies for feedback on our relationship life-cycle with our prospects and clients.

In this interview, we shared our strategies at Foxxr on winning new customers, the steps we take once we engage potential customers, follow-up actions and sales cycles.

Recently, Myles Anderson, Founder of Bright Local and contributor to Search Engine Land, posted an article highlighting these agency interviews. In this article, Myles talks about the intense competition within the SEO industry and shares some proven ways to attract new customers. It’s not a surprise that #1 on the list for attracting new customers is Local Workshops/Events. With sales and marketing strategies shifting to a “give value first” environment, workshops are a part of our business plan that provide value to the community and help us stay on top of the latest industry changes.

Have a glance at this article and read what Foxxr and other agencies are doing to stay on track and ensure their customers are getting the best there is to offer. Please comment with your opinion or best practices.

For most of our web development and Local SEO projects, we use a collaborative project workbook to get our client involved and the project moving forward. It’s important to nail down some of these fundamentals and save them for future reference on your Local SEO project.

7.5 Local SEO Tips:

1. Identify your business - ensure your name, business address (verify it) and phone number (NAP), website landing page for citations, categories and your business description are well defined.
2. Identify your competitors to get an idea of what you are up against. Try Google query – related:yoursite.com
3. Brainstorm keywords -try it with friends, family, customers, staff or grab a clipboard and go to the mall and ask people what search phrase they would use to identify a service like yours. This type of brainstorming and research will be helpful later to perform “official” keyword research.
4. List your audience types - think local first. Not just your typical demographics, but rather your everyday encounters, friends and family, meetup groups, chamber events, local sporting event attendees. This market information may prove to valuable and it a great way to build quality inbound links to your site through sponsorships, events, workshops etc.
5. Make a list of the local cities you would like to target -don’t limit yourself to your own backyard. Check-out the populations of surrounding areas with zip-codes.com and plan accordingly. They provide valuable population and demographic information that will help you determine the geo-targeted landing pages to create.
6. Write your about page – this will be referenced over and over during and after your project. Start with 5-10 random things about your company, then move on to: who you are and when did you start doing what you are doing, what do you do and how it addresses the needs of your customer or audience, how are you accomplishing what you claim you do (staff, tools,techology, experience, education etc.). See this article from ProBlogger for on how to write your about page.
7. Research and note your directory listings and social sites – although we do a lot of this through Yext and Bright Local’s SEO tools, we still maintain a tab on our workbook devoted specifically to the major directory listing services and aggregators. Additionally, we keep a record of Google, Bing and Yahoo accounts, plus social media URL’s.

7.5  Download these worksheets

You’ll find some handy links and easy to follow initial steps to get your Local SEO project on track. Click on any of these images to download the .pdf

Organizing keywords

The Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress does a great job of providing a snapshot of your page summary view,  but for many of your target keywords, you won’t yet have a page and you’ll need to create one. By using a spreadsheet you can easily see where in your site’s architecture you’ll want to put it, and define key information about it before you start writing.

I have found that keeping track of your keywords in Excel or a Google spreadsheet in a structured way helps you with your content development strategy. It also helps you document which pages are targeting which keywords to refer back to in the future.

Google Spreadsheet or Excel works well

I use Google spreadsheet to outline my keyword research and keyword strategies for content generation.  Once the initial keyword research is complete, I’ll export these keywords into the spreadsheet (after sorting by volume highest to lowest and competition lowest to highest). This is a method for local search Foxxr has found to be successful, but national search involves a more detailed method using more long tail keywords.

On this spreadsheeet,   I created a column for the list of keywords we’ll be targeting, the URL of the page, the title tag, the meta description, the meta keywords (some directories still use meta keywords, so I decided to include these). I also added the character count function so that I can see how close we are to our general targets. The targets are 70 characters for a title and 165 characters for a description per the Yoast SEO plugin. These are  guidelines that will avoid search engines truncating this information on the search engine results page.

Match keywords to your pages and posts

The first step in organizing keywords is to populate the spreadsheet with your existing web pages. The search engines want to see unique information for each and every page, creating a list of keywords here is a good way to quickly spot any duplications. Then take a look at the keywords from your keyword list and find the most appropriate pages of your site for each of the keywords.

You should make sure to distribute one keyword per page and try not to force anything. Search engines prefer unique and relevant content. So if you have a keyword that doesn’t match any page of your site, you’ll want to create a new page. When you add a new page to your spreadsheet, the good news is that you’ve got a blank canvas. You can define the SEO-friendly URL, title, description, and header right here in the spreadsheet.

The meat is in the body

Writing content when you know the how to organize keywords and create a list of keywords you’re optimizing it for upfront allows you to really dial-in on all of the best practices of content writing for keywords that you are covering. Remember, the meat of each page is the body copy (about 300 words), and you’ll probably need to go back through your existing pages to make sure that they’re really optimized for the keyword you’ve defined as a target.

The Yoast SEO plugin has a great on-page analysis tool. Another great tool that you have to pay a monthly subscription for is Scribe by Copy Blogger.

The suggestions from these tools can really help guide the changes you’ll be making to your pages.

Organizing your list of keywords on a spreadsheet will help you in a number of different ways.

• It gives you one place to organize and document the content of your site that will support the keywords that you’re targeting.
• It serves as an excellent resource for your copywriters, and will help streamline workflows.
• As a Google spreadsheet, it acts as a collaboration tool that can be updated in real time across all team members.
• It  keeps your content strategy on track.

At Foxxr, we track organize our client’s keywords on a collaborative Google Web Development Workbook. Click below to get a .pdf of this specific keyword tracking page.

Join Foxxr and other Santa Cruz Marketing Roundtable Pros at the DeLaveaga Golf Lodge for an exciting presentation from professional speaker Sunil Bhaskaran. During this 90 minute interactive lunch presentation, Sunil will offer scientific solutions to everyday challenges.

Sunil Bhaskaran, a premier speaker in the Bay Area for 20 years, will talk about how in the last five years, brain science researchers have discovered more about the brain than in the last 100 years of medical research. Learn how this new information has tremendous applications in the world of business and for you: Both in terms of day-to-day work and results.

On Tuesday, November 13 at noon, Sunil will share new approaches on:

• More results with less stress & in less time
• How to avoid failure points
• Handling distractions and staying focused
• Better time management
• Effective decision making and problem resolution
• Managing your moods effectively
• Brain science and leadership effectiveness
• And Much More …..

Cost is only $20 and includes lunch!

Click Here to Reserve Your Spot

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Update to this post

Google rolled out a new service called Google Takeout. This will allow you to download data from one account and import it into another acccount.

For a complete list of the Google products you can transfer to another account, see http://www.dataliberation.org/

Got a Google+ Personal Account?

For those of you that may have setup your Google Plus account with your personal Google or Gmail account, Google Plus finally launched today Google+ for Google Apps accounts, but there is no merge functionality.

Should you setup two different Google+ accounts?  If you are logging out of your Google Apps account to use your Google+ personal account and you like to +1 web pages, I say go for it. If you can wait a few weeks, Google says that they will have a solution.

Google+ Migration Tool Coming Soon

Google announced that  for those who’ve already started using Google+ with a personal Google Account and would prefer to use your Google Apps account, Google is building a migration tool to help you move over.

No Need to Rebuild Circles

With this tool, you won’t have to rebuild your circles, and people who’ve already added you to their circles will automatically be connected to your new profile. Be patient, Google doesn’t expect this migration option to be ready for another few weeks.

Go ahead and get started with your Apps account now and merge your connections once the tool is available.

Note: Although promised weeks after their Google+ for Apps launch, Google still does not have this migration tool available as of 2-29-12.

The social media site that has everyone buzzing is Pinterest. Lydia Snider will talk about how to use Pinterest for your business to maximize your reach on social media.

In this interactive discussion, Lydia will cover:

Learn About:

• How to build Pinterest Boards for your business.
• How to use Pinterest to drive traffic to your website.
• How to create images that people will repin.
• Principles of social media that can be applied to Pinterest and whatever comes next.
• Much more

Lydia Snider has spent decades studying how the human brain learns and creates permanent changes.  Her mission is to teach people how their habits of thoughts, emotions and decisions create their reality.  Lydia helps her clients develop the habits that will lead them to the happiest and most successful version of their reality.  She developed expertise in social media as a side effect. Sharing these ideas with people on the street, that’s considered crazy.  Share it on social media and people really “like” what she has to say.

To learn more about Lydia, please visit http://www.lydiasnider.com/

Note: Lunch is included with this meetup. To learn more and RSVP your spot, visit http://www.meetup.com/marketingroundtable

Whether you are new to Linkedin or think you have already optimized your profile, Cole will offer you some of the best tips and inside information on how you can use LinkedIn to influence your business and career.

Join the Marketing Roundtable as we welcome Cole Fox to help you make the most of what LinkedIn has to offer. Cole was a sales professional with LinkedIn from 2010 til just recently and knows the in’s and out’s of how to utilize LinkedIn to grow your business.

• Develop business without a paid subscription
• Create the ideal LinkedIn profile
• Understand, create and manage your personal brand
• How to find and get hired at your dream job
• much more.

Cole joined LinkedIn when it had 50 million users. Nine months later it became a public company at 130 Million members and 2,200 internal employees. During his time at LinkedIn, his focus was to help companies leverage the network to hire the best talent at scale with LinkedIn’s corporate hiring solutions.

Cole will be covering several topics that are not commonly understood with social media and LinkedIn, in particular.

We welcome any questions that you would like us to address during this presentation.

Cole has just embarked on his latest journey as Sales Director for OVIA, a video candidate screening platform.

Learn how to leverage new opportunities for marketing dollars! Discover the innovative thought processes that have help Plantronics effectively leverage their marketing dollars while adding value to their channel partners within the business communication device industry.

Boris Seibert, Sr. Director, Strategic Business Partners at Plantronics will present on how Plantronics leveraged their channel partner relationships to optimize Search Engine Marketing dollars.

Their “Three Box” model helped Plantronics focus on the end user and generate their own “Aha Moments”. A collobarotive competition approach, or as Boris calls it, “collabotition” helped Plantronics create an environment where their online spending was a win for both Plantronics and their channel partners.

Learn how you may apply these same principles with your business as Boris reveals ideas that can help you tap into marketing dollars you may have thought never existed.

This event is being held at the newly designed Plantronics revolutionary workplace. Check-out their modern office design that set the desk jockeys free, resulting in enhanced collaboration, innovation, and individual contribution.

Click Here to RSVP

2. Add your business information. Fill out the following categories:

• Basic Information – Business Name, Phone Number, Address etc. Always use a local phone number and address. The closer to the city center you are targeting is better. Use not only a phone number with the right area code but the right prefix for the area if possible. Use descriptive terms that contain a keyword or two that best describes your business. For example if you own an insurance agency, write “Acme Insurance Agency always has the best insurance solutions for any occasion.” For the Category Section you are given 5 sections to categorize your business. You will also want to use keywords that describe your business. People who search Google for your business will be typing in keywords for example “Capitola Insurance” or “Insurance Agent in Capitola”.

• Service Areas and Location Settings – There are two options to choose from. Select one of the two options. No, all customers come to the business location. Yes this business serves customers at their locations. If you select yes this business serves customers at their locations. Then specify how far you will travel to service customers.

• Hours of Operations – You can choose to not specify your hours of operations or select the days of the week and the time you are available for business.

• Payment Options – Specify how customers can pay at your business.

• Photos – Add some photos of your business and perhaps your employees. You can add up to 10 photos of your business. Post at least five. Make sure that you read Google’s photo submission guidelines.

• Videos – Add some videos for your business. You can add up to 5 videos for your listing. Upload your videos to YouTube first, then copy the YouTube URL of your video.

• Additional Details – Enter in any other details you want customers to know about your business. Such as if there is parking available or any particular brands of products that you offer.

NOTE: You want to complete all the different sections of information requested to their entirety. You don’t have to upload 10 photos or 5 videos, but initially try for at least five photos and one video. Getting a favorable ranking in Google Places will depend whether you filled out all the information. This is a huge mistake that most companies make when submitting their business to Google Places.

3. Once you are listed in Google Places, take the next steps. You should be indexed with a couple of days and no more than 3 weeks. You can check to see if your website has been listed by going to Google and typing in your business name along with your city name. Then on the left side of the Google search results click on “More” then “Places”. You may have to go to second or third page to find your listing.

4. Address optimize your website – The only changes you should make as far as the website goes for Google Places is address and services areas. Copy the address exactly as listed in the Google Places listing and add it to the bottom of each page of your website and your website should have some form of a contact us page. On the Contact us page it should be listed in the content of the page also.

**ADDRESS CONSISTENCY IS VERY IMPORTANT FOR EVERYTHING YOU DO RELATING TO GOOGLE PLACES**

Use the same exact address format for everything you do for your business that requires an address. This includes the domain registrar contact information.

For Example you want to avoid mismatched address information:

Address in Google: 101 Main St.

Address on your website: 101 Main Street

5. Ping Your Pages. Pinging your website to let Google know changes have been made. This will index the changes into its search engine. You can ping your website by going to http://pingomatic.com/ and submitting your website name and address. Wait until the new pages are indexed in Google before moving on. To check if your changes have been made, typesite:www.yourwebsite.com in the search field. This will display all of your website pages that Google indexed in the search engine. Move to the next step once you see you the changes are indexed.

6. Get Reviews – You want to hit the 5 reviews mark. The reason for the 5 reviews mark has to do with the rating process. If you have 5 or more reviews then you get a star rating also and this gives a small boost to your listing. DO NOT make fake reviews. Google has hundreds of the best PHD computer science majors and they are employing lots of techniques to determine review validity. Any computer you ever use to login to your Google account is recorded and any review posted from that account will be tracked to your Google Places listings.  Some great ideas to get real reviews is to just ask your best customers and provide them a link to http://www.google.com/hotpot . Another tip is to include the linkhttp://www.google.com/hotpot in your email signature for your business reviews. Don’t shoot for 5 reviews in one day. Spread it out over a period of time.

7. Build Links – This factor has always been important for Google Places but with the recent beat testing of mixed Organic within the Places ranking it is going to increase as a factor. The idea is to get back-links that include your service area and address. Use the service area as the anchor text and then within the article or posting include the address. The number of back-links you need to do will vary based on the competition. I have found it very helpful to building back-links to your Google places page using address, business name, phone #, and related keyword phrases. To find your Google Places link, login to your Google Places account, look in the top right hand corner and select “Link”. This is the URL that you will build backlinks to.

8. Get Listed on Other Directories – You should be listed in all the major 3rd party directories like Merchant Circle, City Search, etc. You do not have to do the paid listings with any of them. If the directory does not have free options then skip it. A great website to help you http://getlisted.org

9. Local Citations – Don’t miss this important step. It plays a big part in your position within Google Places. You want to be listed in all of the local sites like your local chamber of commerce site or Think Local First (if your area has this type of local business support organization).  You may not be able to get an actual link in many of them but you can in most every case post a citation. This means having a listing that mentions your company name and address. I have heard of many people on the top of Google Places by doing creating local citations.

Where do you get started? The answer…..right where you are sitting at this moment. Stop, open your calendar and make an appointment with yourself for two hours twice per week. Utilize this time to engage with your audience and position your brand.

1. The Brand is You

The first order of business is to discover which makes you unique in the marketplace. The first order of business is to get your own URL (website) name now if you haven’t already. They are only $12 per year on GoDaddy.com. Next is your personal brand statement, an essential component to communicating your brand to your audience. Click here for example.

Finally, use a consistent professional profile picture across all of your online networking sites. Just as a logo breads brand familiarity, so will your professional picture. Keep it consistent with LinkedIn, your Google profile, meetup.com, and any other sites you use to build your business.

2. Attract Local Search Queries with Google Places

3. Discover The Power of YouTube

Ted Williams is an iconic symbol who demonstrates the power of YouTube. Ted was homeless standing on a street corner with his brand statement on a piece of cardboard. This guy pulls up in a car, videos Ted, then posts it to YouTube. 13 million hits later, Ted Williams is on Dr. Phil, Jimmy Fallon, The Soup and more. He has landed numerous voice over jobs since. Most smart phones these days have video capabilities built-in. Use this feature that is at your fingertips and video your office, employees, or customer reviews and post.

4. Get a WordPress Website

The brand is you. You are the industry expert and the best platform demonstrate this to your audience is blogging. Blogs are literally mainstream and the best and most cost effective platform is WordPress. Blogs should be entertaining and informative and provide value to your audience.

Where to Find Content – The Power of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) has quickly become the backbone of how people receive information online. View content at a central location from several sources online. I personally use Feedly to help gather my RSS subscriptions into magazine style format. Another great site is Alltop.com. You can also try using a local copy writer or visit Ezine Articles and grab a relevant content. It’s free as long as you don’t alter the article and include author credits.

5. Engage Your Audience with Email Marketing

Email, the original social media, is at the core of all communication online. There are some negative connotations with email like spam, but the positive truth is that as long as you segment your audience so that your message is relevant to their needs and has value to, your readers will welcome your message.

We can break email down to about three categories:

Newsletters - should be educational and fun and sent about once per month.

Announcements - are event driven. They include holiday greetings, thank you’s, anniversaries, birthdays, etc.

Promotions, Invitations and Surveys - have limited content and should encourage click-through’s or calls to action.

Ace of Sales and MailChimp are my top two recommendations for simple and effective email programs. You can even try Ace of Sales Free for 30-days.

6. Get a Facebook Business Page

Facebook pages have become popular as a way for companies to establish a stronger presence on Facebookand, at the same, engage with the fast-growing Facebook population of more than 500 million active users. People spend triple their time on Facebook versus Google. Additionally, 71% of internet users in the United States are on Facebook. Facebook just launched some great new features to their business pages that make it easier to manage with multiple administrators.

7. Craft Your LinkedIn Profile

LinkedIn ranks very high in Google with more than 100 million business users and is growing at a phenomenal rate. Get a custom URL by editing the default URL with your full name. Include keywords relevant to your services just as we discussed about Google places and position your headline to include your top specialties. My headline reads President – Foxxr | Branding Strategist | Web Design & eCommerce Consultant | Organizer Santa Cruz Marketing Roundtable.

Expand your network both online and in person. Use business cards you acquire to build your network. Include a link to your LinkedIn profile in your email signature, create buttons on your blog or website linking people to your profile.

8. Twitter Really Does Have Value

I used to think that Twitter was a colossal waste of my time. I now understand that Twitter is a great platform for marketers and/or business folks to get message out instantly (virally in some cases) and generate feedback that can help you measure the pulse of your audience.

The Brand is You

At the end of the day, most people will buy from you because they trust you and like you because of you. Jeffrey Gitomer wrote, “The more valuable you become, the more the marketplace will reward you”. In other words, become a resource for others and others will become a resource for you. So get out there and let r rip.

Amazingly Simple

Whenever you open an email, Rapportive uses the senders email address to search their social networks. It will tell you whether you are connected and let’s you connect with them in a click without leaving your Gmail inbox.
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• View your Gmail sender’s picture
• Manage and grow your socila network within Gmail
• Connect with your Gmail contacts on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and more
• Post on Facebook from your Gmail inbox
• Record thoughts for later by leaving notes
• Spread the Word

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I tell all of my friends about this app and they love it. It’s easy to install and doesn’t cost a penny.

Get it at http://rapportive.com

Share your passion

Online messaging is coming at us from all directions. Videos, email, apps, RSS feeds and tweets pull us in all different directions. The addictive nature of web browsing is shortening our attention span below nine seconds, according to a recent article by BBC News.

Make sure your website is able to quickly attract your readers and keep them coming back for more.

Here are 5 tips to a great website:

Once you determine a few areas where you can improve, develop a plan to start implementing changes.  You don’t have to do them all at once – just do a few at a time until you have a website that really converts.