SEO Archives - McLellan Marketing Group

Be findable!

December 18, 2019

Who doesn’t want to be found? Whether you have a retail shop or sell your time and talent – every business needs to be findable. There’s an expression that says “if Google doesn’t know you exist, then you don’t exist” and in today’s world, there’s a lot of truth in that statement.

We know that 80+% of people use the internet to do research before making a purchase. That number gets even larger when the purchase is expensive or is business related. If Google doesn’t offer you up as an option, you may never get the opportunity to try to win the sale.

For many businesses, their circle of influence and potential customers are within a certain radius of their physical location. If you’re a dry cleaners, then you know your radius may not be more than a couple miles. But if you’re a financial planner or lawyer, it may be 100 miles or more.

There are some strategies you can employ to make sure you’re found when someone in your local market conducts a search for your kind of business. None of this is a promise of first page placement but the more of these tactics you put into place and keep updated, the better your search ranking will be.

You absolutely can spend money on Google Adwords or other paid search options. But before you do that – make sure you have a strong foundation laid.

Make sure you are listed: Go to https://www.google.com/business and search for your business. You can claim your business (you’ll have to verify it through the mail or by phone). Be sure to include quality photos of your business, your team and even a few of the items you sell.

Even though Google is the king of search, don’t neglect Bing, Yelp, Apple Maps, Facebook and any other directories specific to your industry.

Establish citations: Citations are websites where you can list your business. There are a bazillion of these sites, so don’t try to do it all by hand. There are sites out there called aggregators that will provide your information to all of these citation sites. Or you can use a service like Moz Local (https://moz.com/local/overview) or Yext (http://www.yext.com/).

Actively seek reviews: Most business-to-business organizations dismiss reviews as being “a retail thing.” And most retail businesses dread the review discussion. The truth is, you’re going to trigger reviews, whether you want them or not. So why not influence them so you can invite your happiest, best clients to speak out?

Unless you’re in an industry that has a very well-known specialty review site, focus on Google and if it makes sense for your business, Yelp. Don’t waste a lot of time on obscure sites that don’t get a lot of traffic.

Credibility links: Are you a member of the local Chamber? Or is your company profiled on a trade association’s site? Think about all of the places your business exists online and link to them within the context of your site. Whether it’s a membership, an award or even a media story – take advantage of the power of the other sites’ credibility and Google juice by linking directly to them.

Build your site with search in mind: Some of the basics really matter. As you write or add content to your website, remember to be smart about key words, the number of words on each page and other organic search basics.

No matter what your company does, search is incredibly competitive. You can’t afford to ignore this marketing playing field any more. But, before you spend a dime, make sure you’ve done everything you can for free to impact your listings. That will become a much stronger platform to launch from.

This was originally published in the Des Moines Business Record as one of Drew’s weekly columns.

Be findable

February 14, 2018

Whether you’ve had a website for a couple decades or a couple weeks – you built it so prospects could learn more about you, customers could communicate with you and potential employees could find you and check you out. For most organizations, their website is the biggest workhorse of your marketing arsenal.

But a website is definitely not a “build it and they will come” sort of marketing tactic. You need to draw people to your site. Odds are you’ve talked about search engine optimization along the way. And rightly so. When done well, SEO helps people who are looking for what you sell, find someone with your expertise and locate a place to spend their money.

If your business has a physical presence, you should not just be worried about your keywords but you also need to focus on ranking for local results. While many of the standard SEO practices we know and love benefit local SEO, there are a few other steps to take so you can start showing up in the local results for your area. There’s huge potential here, and the competition is only getting more intense as time goes on.

Local results appear for people who search for businesses and places near their location. They’re shown in a number of places across all of the search engines. But for now, we’re going to focus on Google since it owns the lion’s share of search results relevance. Let’s say you search for “Mexican restaurant” from your mobile device. Google will try to show you the kind of nearby restaurant that you’d like to visit.

You may find that your business doesn’t appear for relevant searches in your area. We need to fix that so that your customers can find you and know you’re close by.

After you’ve set up your website (and maybe you’ve also added a business blog and some social channels), the next step is to start optimizing for both organic search and local results. Fortunately, many of the organic search efforts, like the blog and creating links back to your site through social, will also help with your local results.

But that’s not enough.

Create a Google My Business Page. Be sure you fill out the page completely and include your NAP (Name, Address, and Phone number), business hours and some high-quality photos.
Include your my Business Page on your domain email.
Make sure that your business listing is verified by Google. Easy and free to do, this is a biggie, so don’t skip it.
Put your NAP information on your site’s footer so it appears on every page.
Earn backlinks and citations from other local businesses and websites. Ideally, these backlinks would reference keywords that are very relevant to the work you do.
Encourage and earn reviews on Google, Yelp, and other sites. Link back to these review sites from your own site.
Utilize Schema Markup. Visit Schema.org and mark your NAP information at the Schema site.
Make sure your website is mobile responsive and your site (both desktop and mobile) loads quickly.

Even doing a few of these will deliver better local results, and your business will reap the benefits of your effort. Google just released some data that shows that over 50% of local searches result in a visit to the local location that very same day.

Remember that this doesn’t take you off the hook for organic and potentially paid searches. You still need to drive traffic to your site to impact your rankings. The local optimization alone won’t do it. But the combination of organic, paid and local search best practices means you’ll have more people on your site and in your store!

New CMO Council Report: CMOs Struggling to Meet Needs of Local Audiences

July 14, 2017

Marketing leaders and agencies are finding it increasingly difficult to keep pace with growing demands to localize and adapt their creative strategies when it comes to trying to meet needs of local audiences. Facing a widening range of digital and physical channels that each require rapid adaptation in order to remain relevant to individual geographic, cultural, and customer audiences, too many organizations are failing to take the necessary steps to improve their capacity and agility, according to a new study by the CMO Council.

The new study, entitled “Adaptability in Branded Content Delivery,” reveals that more than two-thirds of marketers rate their organizations and agencies below satisfactory in their capacity to translate and adapt brand marketing content across the markets and channels they serve. This has led to equally lack-luster marks in timeliness as only 30 percent of marketers rate their in-house and agency teams as either “advanced” or “doing well” in their timeliness and capacity to simultaneously support global and local execution.

Marketers admit these failures in addressing rapid adaptation is further challenged by mounting pressure by a variety of forces and factors, led by requirements for geographic localization, proliferation of new digital formats, the need for more visually enriched and engaging content, and operational cost pressures.

“At a time when the customer has higher expectations than ever for the relevance and personalization of content and brand interaction, marketing organizations will need to step up their game when it comes to brand content adaptation to address geographic, cultural, customer and other differences,” says Donovan Neale-May, executive director of the CMO Council. “Past research has shown that adaptation of marketing strategy and content can be major enabler of sales and brand success. Yet most companies have a long way to go to get it right.”

The study, developed in partnership with HH Global, is based on an online survey of more than 150 senior marketing executives polled in the second quarter of 2017. Respondents hail from global industries that demand an omnichannel presence including retail, travel, hospitality, technology, consumer goods and telecommunications.

Among the key findings:

Only 32 percent of respondents say their companies are either advanced or doing well in adapting brand content to different markets, partners and geographies. Another 34 percent say they are at least improving.
Just 20 percent are satisfied with their creative delivery process and marketing supply chain effectiveness.
Respondents point to speed of execution as a major challenge; less than half say they are able to deploy localized content across both physical and digital touchpoints within weeks of a campaign launch.
Marketers believe their top five process challenge are shortening turnaround times, ensuring quality and uniformity with brand guidelines, end-to-end workflow management, delivering creative on time, and measurement of the creative appeal and impact of content.

Change Is Too Slow

The study also finds that many organizations are failing to take important steps to improve their capacity to adapt and modify branded content. Just 18 percent have completed a formal assessment of their creative delivery process and marketing supply chain effectiveness, although another 24 percent say they have begun one.

In addition, many companies are utilizing only basic project management and collaboration tools to manage these processes. Just 20 percent use online approval and proofing systems to accelerate modifications. Even more surprising, 49 percent of respondents say the spend less than five percent of their marketing budget for creative adaptation and cross-cultural localization.

About the CMO Council

The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council is dedicated to high-level knowledge exchange, thought leadership, and personal relationship building among senior corporate marketing leaders and brand decision-makers across a wide range of global industries. The CMO Council’s 12,500-plus members control more than $500 billion in aggregated annual marketing expenditures and run complex, distributed marketing and sales operations worldwide. For more information, visit www.cmocouncil.org.

Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah’s SEO-Friendly ‘Bluebird’ and the Betterment of a Google Ranking

December 15, 2014

As you all know — I love all things Disney, so how could I pass on a guest post that used a Disney classic to talk about SEO! Enjoy this post from Lucas Miller.

American actor James Baskett was most famous for his portrayal of Uncle Remus, an extremely deep voice, singing the song “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah,” and inventing the word “satisfactual.”

However, what many fail to recognize is the prophetic, Nostradamus-like, subliminal message that Baskett originally fed American marketers at the time of his pioneering music video’s release in 1946 — exactly 60 years before Twitter and her globally-recognized bluebird ever became an actual tool for internet fanatics.

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As an SEO professional, if you’re not harnessing the power of the internet’s favorite “bluebird” — Twitter — you’re doing yourself and your client a disservice.

Says Todd Noall, President and Chief Strategy Officer of Fusion 360, an advertising agency in Utah, “How a brand performs in the digital world is based largely upon it’s ability to be found by potential customers.”

While that might seem like a bit of a “No sh*t, Sherlock” statement, continues Todd with the more difficult portion of the task, “… producing relevant content that customers not only want to interact with, but share with their friends.”

Enter Twitter, stage left. One of the most basic rules of the SEO industry is that quality content will, in time, lead to conversation flow.

According to SearchEngineLand.com, “Posting quality content will also encourage people to follow you. Building high numbers of followers will enhance your authority in Google’s eyes, meaning, any links you post will carry more weight.”

Though popular quick fixes like Twitter competitions and mass follow and unfollow sessions might prove beneficial as a temporary remedy, Twitter as an SEO tool becomes helpful when worthwhile blog posts, widgets, discount vouchers and articles are being shared on a larger scale.

The simpleton of SEO thinks he or she knows the entirety of the industry by one term: “keyword.” It should come as a surprise to no one that using appropriate keywords on a Twitter profile can help with Google ranking, but it’s an error made all too often.

By simply adding important keywords to Twitter bios and tweets, Google — however you view this all-encompassing, amorphous entity — will peg your tweets as relevant to your brand’s cause, thus improving page rank.

Lastly, and here’s the fun part: produce tweets in a way that people will want to retweet them. Depending on the client that you represent, this may mean looking beyond the low-lying fruit of YouTube videos containing hysterical groin kicks. There’s definitely more out there and digging into the deepest of the mind’s creative catacombs will, more than likely, be necessary.

Keep in mind that each tweet only allows for 140 characters. When calling upon the powers of wit, humor, sex, human emotion or anything else that us homo sapiens find attractive, remember that you’ll need to leave enough space for people to retweet your videos, links and comments, all while allowing enough room for them to add a thought or two.

Armed with the help of a certain “Mister bluebird” whispering into your ever-attentive ear the secrets of Twitter mastery, your clients, coworkers and boss will soon be joyfully singing, “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah, Zip-A-Dee-A! My oh my, what a wonderful day!”

They’ll look a little ridiculous, ya know, cause they’re full-grown adults, but what can you expect with a booming Twitter page and Google rank? Answer: nothing less.

Lucas Miller is a young, up-and-coming Wizard of Public Relations. When not writing, running or studying, he’s working tirelessly to perfect what he claims is the “World’s Greatest Pompadour.”

Is your website sales funnel-shaped?

June 24, 2014

Website Sales Funnel There’s always a lot of buzz about SEO (search engine optimization), SEM (search engine marketing) and of course, Google rankings.

Rightly so – each of those plays a role in how effectively your website can serve you from a marketing and sales perspective. Your website should be sales funnel shaped.

But I think most companies approach the web a little like the fable about the five blind men who were asked to describe the elephant that stood before them. The man who was near the elephant’s leg reached out, touched the elephant and announced that an elephant was like a huge tree trunk. The man who was by the tail, after feeling it, described an elephant like a bullwhip and so on.

While none of them were wrong – none of them were right either. That’s exactly where many companies are when they think about how to leverage their website. They’re not wrong but they haven’t got it quite right either.

Lets step back and take a more holistic view of the website’s purpose for being. You might have a website because it:

Gives you credibility – it proves that you’re real
Tells the visitor what your company is all about and why you exist
Lists/show what you sell/do
Educates your prospect on how you are different from your competitors and help them make an more informed buying decision
Helps your customers and prospects by making them smarter/better in some way
Is an information repository so your customers can access things like users manuals, support forums, case studies, testimonials or other forms of thought leadership
Provides ways to start a conversation, ask a question or give you feedback
May serve as a shopping portal and people can buy right there

But if we step back even a little further and take a look from the 30,000 foot level, we can see through all those functionalities, your website is the entry point to your sales funnel. For most organizations today — your website is the initial point of entry that could lead to a sale today or five years from today.

That doesn’t happen by accident. Getting them to your site isn’t the end of the game; it’s just the beginning. Now your goal is to move them into and through your sales funnel. You have to build your site and everything that happens on it with that intention.

Whenever I think of a sales funnel, I picture one of those plastic funnels people use when they do an oil change. The top of it is really wide and the bottom is a very skinny hole. The funnel coincides with the know • like • trust equation.

The top of the sales funnel – know

The top of the funnel is for catching all those people who have no idea you exist or that you sell anything they might need or want. This is where you are hoping they’ll get to know you.

The middle of the funnel is filled with all the ways you either keep them on your site or get them to come back. With repeated exposure, you’re hoping they’ll come to like you.

The smallest section of the funnel is where you’re hoping they come to trust you through repeated interactions, you continuing to be helpful and demonstrating a consistency in how you talk, behave and perform.

Once they’ve willingly squeezed themselves through that tiny little section of the funnel, they’ll be ready to buy. But not before.

Let’s look at the first stage of the funnel (know) and what you can do to catch the interest of your web visitors and encourage them to get to know you a little.

At the top of the funnel we have people who’ve never heard of you and may have no idea they need or want what you sell. They might discover you by clicking on a link in a blog post or after reading about you in the newspaper. They might have a problem and be Googling to find a solution and your site is listed in their search results. They may see a Facebook ad or type in your URL off your business card that they picked up at a trade show. But at this point, you’re a stranger. They don’t know, like or trust you. And we know we have to earn their trust before we can earn their money.

At that moment, your website has to be helpful or relevant enough in some way that they spend a little time on it so they begin to get a sense of you and how you might matter to them.

This is a do or die moment. If the visitor pokes around the site and then leaves, they might never return and you’ll never know who they were or if you could have served them. That’s how it works on most websites. If I asked you to show me a list of people who were on your website in the last six months, could you do it?

One of the appealing aspects of using the web to pre-shop is the anonymity of it. To get someone to introduce themselves to you — you have to either give them a compelling reason to keep coming back or better yet, you have to create the opportunity for an information exchange. You have to offer them something that is valuable enough that they’ll give you their email address in return. While it sounds simple – think of how many websites you visit and how few capture your contact information.

What does that look like? You want to offer something that’s a low barrier to entry. It doesn’t feel too intrusive. It could be any of these:

Sign up for our Enewsletter or regular tips
Get a copy of a how-to report, whitepaper or cheat sheet
Take an online course via email
Get access to unique content behind a firewall
Join a discussion group/closed forum
Be notified when new content/information is available
Download an eBook or watch a short video series
Sign up for a webinar or phone conference

Once you’ve done made that initial connection and you have a way to stay in touch – you can continue to be helpful which will keep the conversation going. At that point, one of two things is going to happen. As they get to know you/your company – they’re either going to decide they like you or they don’t. Both are great outcomes.

If they like you, they’ll stay in the conversation and get to know you even better. If they don’t like you, they’ll go away. Now you don’t have to waste any energy on someone who was going to be a bad fit.

The middle section of the sales funnel – like

To move someone from the start of the process into this section requires a mix of bravery and generosity on your part.

Keep in mind that most prospects are pretty skittish. Whether it’s in a retail store or online, they’re used to being chased around by over eager salespeople that pester the poor potential buyer until they flee. That’s one of the reasons many people do a significant amount of their shopping online. The anonymity allows them to browse without pressure.

That’s why you want to load up your website with lots of content that has no barrier to consumption like blog posts, testimonials and FAQs. Those elements will generate traffic to your site. The strategies we talked about last week – where there is an exchange of information (their email address for some downloadable tool or content) begins to thin the herd. The tire kickers will avoid the opt-in level, preferring to stick with your free content. And that’s fine. Until they move to the next level, they’re not ready to buy. Once they trade you their email address for some content, they’ve indicated that they are open to hearing from you.

I find it hard to believe I have to actually say this but I’ve seen time and time again that I do. There is absolutely no reason to collect email addresses if you aren’t going to actually send them something.

And that something cannot be a sales pitch. I’ve seen so many businesses stumble here. They didn’t give you their email address so you could hard sell them or immediately try to get an appointment or schedule a sales call. They gave it to you so you would keep sending them information that’s valuable to them.

That is your litmus test. Each and every time, before you hit send, ask yourself “is this going to be valuable to my audience?” Time for a re-write if your honest answer is no.

Assuming you keep producing helpful content and you actually send it out consistently – the prospects will let you stay in their in box. Week (or month or quarter) after week, you’re there. You’re teaching, helping and they are getting a little smarter and a little more comfortable with you each time they hear from you.

You should also use those regular emails (or however you decide to connect with them) to drive them back to new content/offerings on the website. Maybe you produced a demo video series or you’re hosting an educational event that you’d like them to register for.

While we are focusing on your website, it certainly shouldn’t be the only tool in your toolbox. Your sales funnel should be armed with both digital and traditional tactics. They work together hand in glove, each strengthening the other.

The days of your website just being an online brochure are long gone. Be sure your web presence is the sales workhorse it should be by building a sales funnel around the know • like • trust = sales equation.

The last section of the sales funnel – trust

Having the right timing matters. You don’t get to this part of the funnel after the first couple interactions. If I see one consistent mistake, it’s that people shift into these sorts of strategy way too early. It’s like meeting someone in a bar and proposing the same night. Odds are you aren’t going to get too many yeses.

I totally get it from a business’ point of view and have often felt that frustration myself. You’ve shared your expertise. You’ve answered their questions. Surely they should be ready to buy by now. They obviously like what you do enough to keep coming back. So why aren’t they buying?

In my thirty years of being in business, I’ve rarely met a buyer who is as anxious to make the sale as the seller. Sure, there are those customers who come to us in crisis, and we scramble to put out their fire but they’re not the norm. So what do we do? We hang in there, and we keep being helpful and we work to stay top of mind until they’re ready to move forward.

The other factor to remember is that while we are the ones who build the sales funnel, it’s the prospect that moves through it and they control the pace and direction. So while one prospect may linger in the getting to know you (remember our know • like • trust = sales model) or growing to like you section for years, another may whip through both of those and be willing to trust you enough for a trial purchase in a matter of a couple visits.

For your website to truly be an effective sales funnel, you need to offer different levels of engagement, so the prospects can move themselves through at their own speed. As we talked about in the last couple columns, that means free content (text and video if possible) and content that you’ll give them for an email trade. But what kinds of things should you have available for those who are ready to consider a purchase?

Believe it or not – one that many companies miss is having contact information on the site. Don’t make me look for your phone number or email address. If you have the capacity, live chat is great. But make sure I can contact you and give me more than one method. If you have a brick and mortar presence, be sure you list your street addresses as well, with a link to one of the mapping sites.

You can also offer the ability to schedule a call, demo or take an assessment that will require you contact them (usually by email) with the results.

Remember that most buyers want to be pretty sure they’re going to buy before they speak to a salesperson or company representative. When they do reach out, they may have some final questions but they’re very close to making a buying decision. Which means you need to be ready to respond quickly once they do trigger that next level of readiness. Test your site and all your internal systems to verify that nothing is going to get in the way of you finally connecting with this potential buyer.

Today’s consumers want to be able to shop us on the web. How well that works for you is completely in your control. Is your site ready?

P.S. I found the great graphic on a SocialFresh blog post.

Case Study: How Google Fails to Measure Mobile Marketing

August 31, 2013

Drew’s note: Here’s a fascinating guest post from the folks at ContactPoint.

We are not a mobile marketing company, but for testing purposes, we recently started conducting some click-to-call campaigns for some of our call tracking clients. We wanted to determine two things from these tests:

How many calls do click-to-call campaigns actually produce
What is the ‘quality’ of the calls that come from click-to-call campaigns (i.e. how good are the leads)
How many clients eventually purchase due to click-to-call campaigns

One very interesting test was with a Holiday Inn Express in Utah. Let me explain what we did and why it was interesting.

But first, let’s discuss what click-to-call mobile marketing is and how it works.

Mobile Click-To-Call?

Mobile click-to-call ads are ads that appear with a ‘tap-able’ phone number. You see the phone number in the ad and you tap it with your thumb (or any other appendage) and you can call the business immediately. The most common way to serve these ads is via Google Adwords. These ads appear after a Google search. Again, there is a phone number within in the ad itself. Google then charges the advertiser on a pay-per-call basis (each time the phone number is tapped) rather than on a pay-per-click basis.

This gives Google a way to monetize phone calls via mobile. And it gives advertisers a way to generate phone calls.

The Test: Background

When you set up Click-to-Call in Google Adwords (Google calls them call extensions) you have to input a phone number you would like to use in the ad. Most businesses simply use their regular phone number. But you can use any phone number including phone numbers that from call tracking providers. The calls are still auto-routed to your business.

The Test

We began the test in June 2012. We used local phone numbers provided via our SaaS, LogMyCalls, as the call extension number within Google Adwords. Thus we were able to extract call analytics from each call.

Holiday Inn Express – Logan, Utah – June 2012

Results
- Spend – $332
- Calls Generated – Google charged us for 60 calls generated via click-to-call. This means that 60 people tapped the phone number in the ad. Google bills for all of these taps because it believes they are actual phone calls. (Note: Most mobile marketers are stuck with this information and this information only).
- Calls Completed – Only 29 calls (48.3%) were actually completed and made it to the hotel. The rest were abandoned before the phone even rang. (Note: The only way we knew this is because we used a call tracking phone number to measure call analytics).
- Qualified Leads – Only 9 calls (15%) were actually looking for a hotel room. The rest were merely wrong numbers, confused or had a question about booking a future room. They were not qualified, sales-ready leads. (Note: Again the only we knew this is because we used a call tracking phone number and call analytics).
- Closed Deals – And 6 ended in a room reservation (10%).

Implications of the Test

If we had relied just on the information Google Adwords provided, our CPL, CPA and CPC would have been grossly inaccurate.
This has huge, huge implications for optimization, future spend, and of course assumptions about ad channels.
Mobile Marketing is Very, Very Effective – Even though only 10% of the phone calls resulted in room reservations, the marketing spend was still effective. Those 6 calls generated over $600 in revenue. The spend was only $324.

Bio: J ason Wells is the CEO of ContactPoint. Their new product, LogMyCalls, represents the next generation of intelligent call tracking and marketing automation. Prior, Jason served as the Senior Vice President of Sony Pictures, where he led the creation and international expansion of Sony’s international mobile business line from London.

Jason holds an MBA from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.

Social Sharing – what and when works

October 28, 2012

Figuring out what is best for your company’s social sharing accounts can be tough. Not only do you have to figure out what to share, but you also need to know how and when to say it. The folks at Compendium crunched the data of over 300 companies’ social sharing statistics, to identify some social sharing best practices.

One additional thing they did was break this data down as a B2B vs. B2C comparison, as they learned while going through the data that there were some significant differences between what works for B2B companies and B2C companies.

Check out this info graphic that outlines some of the findings. If you’d like to review their social sharing guides that looks at some of these results, click here.

Search versus Social – which one wins?

September 29, 2012

If you’re wondering which is more potent — search or social media — as is often my answer — it depends.

The truth of the matter is that every organization should be thinking about BOTH because they are the yin and yang for each other. Each feeds the other side of the equation. When you write quality content about topics that your audience cares about (social) you attract readers, shares and you earn social proof of your expertise.

That content then begins to influence search for those key words and phrases that exist within your subject area and content (Search) and before you know it, you’re impacting Google and the other search engines — becoming more findable and attracting exactly the right people to your content.

Yin. Yang. The perfect combo. This infographic, developed by MDG Advertising really makes the point. And should be hanging in your office to remind you to go for the one two punch of social AND search.

(Click here to download the full-sized version)