The importance of Transparency

We work with a number of different clients all over the country.  Most of the industries that we work in are highly competitive.  Some of these niches are pretty well networked, and when someone is suddenly on page 1 for everything the competition notices. 

That being said, we have had a few instances where we were hired on by former clients competitors.  We have also turned down a number of high paying local SEO contacts because it was a direct conflict of interest.  We stay loyal to our clients and don’t take on their direct competition… as long as we are still working together. 

What is a Conflict of Interest in SEO?

While web design and site building are not a direct conflict; doing monthly SEO is.   Below is a screen shot from an SEO Facebook group that we are a part of.  Some of the answers are surprising to say the least.   It’s amazing what some “pro’s” have to say.

While some people have a rather jaded view of what their clients are all about, we value all of our clients and won’t pull shady nonsense like some of these guys.

False Promises

We have learned through experience that it is better to be upfront about everything and be honest… even if it hurts or could possibly cost us a client. When someone asks us for help with their SEO, we do an honest audit of the site and give reasonable expectations about time and deliverables.

Some people don’t always like that they hear, but you won’t hear false promises or outlandish expectations on any proposal that we send out. Promising someone “page 1” in a month is just bad SEO ethics.

Maintaining a good reputation

Good SEO shouldn’t hurt anyone, but it is an SEO’s job to get their clients ranking. There is always a limited amount of space on the first page, and everyone wants to be there. In our experience, many businesses don’t understand the importance of having a good internet presence until they no longer have one.

We try our best to be friendly with former clients. There have been cases where a former client have gotten quite upset that we are now helping their competition. The conversation was very close to having a heated conversation with a jealous ex rather than a former client.

Hiring an Ethical SEO

The best way to hire an SEO with ethics is to ask them questions before any agreement is made. We offer honest advice on our consultation calls, and don’t get butt hurt if someone decides to work with a larger agency that offers all the bells and whistles that we don’t.

Feel free to contact us for Local SEO help.

The post Business Ethics in SEO appeared first on Keep it Local SEO | Small Business SEO experts.

In this article we are going to go over some of the mitigating factors that influence your online reputation.

Bad Press

Bad press has more of a likelihood of going viral over good press.  This is an unfair truth to running a business.  One digruntled ex employee or customer can tarnish years of hard work with a social media post.  

While most small businesses don’t need to worry about the local newspaper writing up negative articles, it does happen from time to time.  The more likely situation is someone bashing your business on Social Media. 

Usually this is just someone ranting about how the waitress made them wait too long for a drink.  Usually it’s not a big deal. Sometimes a simple photo could scare people away from ever using your business again.

Reviews

One of the first thing that anyone looks at before they make a buying decision is your reviews. While it is impossible to keep everyone happy, having a mostly positive review profile will help your business. People base a good amount of their decisions on the feedback that other people leave about your business.

If you are like my wife, then you trust reviews more than you trust carefully written sales copy about a service or product. Sites like Yelp, Amazon, Facebook, Houzz and Angie’s List are just a few examples of where people can leave a review about your business.

Since Google is placing more importance on reviews, it is crucial that you are actively working on your online reputation. Businesses with great reviews get more calls and generate more money.

Engagement and Marketing

Having an active social profile can help your business. Certain platforms are better for different businesses. Restaurants and bars can promote events on Facebook to people in their general vicinity. Businesses that cater to other businesses would probably find a better audience on LinkedIn.

Even if your restaurant only posts pictures of your daily specials online, it’s better than not posting at all. A good looking picture of a meal can attract hungry clients for the new lunch special.

Does Online Reputation Matter?

No matter what kind of business you run, the answer is YES. People are always going to choose a place that they trust over an unknown. Trust is built with reputation management.

Businesses that struggle with reviews will always come in second place to businesses that show great social proof.

The post What is Reputation Management? appeared first on Keep it Local SEO | Small Business SEO experts.

Local SEO Marketing Mistakes

Digital Marketing and SEO is a constantly evolving process. There are plenty of tactics that worked great years ago that have been phased out or have been replaced with better tech. Most of this is common sense, but we still encounter this every week with new clients.

Here is our list in no particular order.

1 – Cheap Website Platforms

Everyday we see ads for different discount design platforms like Wix that advertise themselves as a great service for start up websites. While these may see more cost effective for you as a business, you will soon realize that these low cost platforms are very limited in what they can actually do.

Wix, Squarespace, and yes even Shopify are not as SEO friendly as they advertise. They are built on their own custom platforms that require specific coders to optimize. While they advertise great results, the time it takes to optimize is at least doubled for good organic rank.

2- Cheap Website Design

There are a thousands of web designs companies out there that offer low cost website builds. We literally just took on a client in June of 2019 who hired a web designer off of Craigs List who built them a beautiful website for a very little upfront cost. They thought it was great. 3 Months after the site was built, they still were not ranking for anything.

It turns out that the original web designer did not add any security to the site, and they were hacked. They were showing up for keywords in Austin, while they were a Dallas based business. They were showing up for terms related to steroids and weight loss, but their business was based in the home remodeling industry.

We had to go in and basically rebuild the entire site from the ground up. It added about 2 months to the ranking process but within 90 days we were able to take them from no rank to over 150 local keywords. We have increased their organic traffic by over 200% and it increases every month.

This could have all been avoided if they hired a proper web design team to build the site from the ground up. This way your local SEO optimization is set up correctly as the site is being built.

3 – Incorrect Info Online

There are been many times that a business owner has had different business and social profiles created by someone on their staff. The issue here is that the profiles and listings are created with an individuals email address and login. More often than you may realize is that people change jobs and careers a lot more than they used to. Which will often lead to a totally abandoned account.

If a company moves locations or simply changes their phone number; all of the business info needs to be updated. This is very difficult to do if you cannot login and access your social media and business listings.

YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and other sites require an email login and password. If your intern from 5 years ago created all this for you using their email address, you will have a hard time claiming ownership of these profiles.

The best bet is to use a company email address to create all of your business profiles and listings. Make sure you keep that email and password in a secure place for future use.

4 – Not tracking anything

I have met a number of business owners with websites who have never set up or looked at the analytics of their site. Being able to track your incoming traffic and where the traffic is coming from is a huge benefit to your online marketing. Not tracking your calls, visitors, traffic, etc is a big mistake.

If your business depends on phone calls, but you don’t have call tracking; you are missing out on valuable data. Analytics tracking is crucial in being able to see where your website visitors are coming from.

Quite often cheap web design companies will not do this for you or magically skip this step.

5 – No SEO

While every business is different, every business needs to have some sort of organic presence online. SEO does more than just rank your site for “target keywords.” Good SEO helps you own your brand online. It helps you attract customers.

Not doing SEO on a site is basically the equivalent of opening a store and not marketing. Good SEO is a good investment.

Another thing to consider is that there are niche marketing agencies vs general marketing agencies. A marketing agency for contractors will probably get better results for contractors and construction companies because that is all they focus on. A general agency works with anyone and everyone and needs to learn your customer avatar.

A dispensary SEO agency for cannabis companies will definitely get better results than a general marketing agency.

6 – Focusing on the wrong marketing strategy

I am also a huge Gary V fan, but not every business needs to focus on Instagram or the new hot social media campaign. Certain companies can utilize these platforms as a secondary or extra marketing strategy.

This refers back to tracking your data. We have a number of clients who are “influencers” in their own niche. While they do a good amount of social media marketing, their main traffic and lead generation comes from a combination of YouTube videos and organic traffic.

You have to know what platforms are bringing in the best ROI for your business. Not everyone needs to be marketing on Pinterest or Instagram.

7 – Misunderstanding Funnels

Shiny objects are usually “quick fixes” or the new hot thing that can easily distract someone from accomplishing their goal. This goes hand in hand with the wrong marketing strategy.

Quite often shiny objects come from someone “crushing it” with some new never heard of strategy… that isn’t that new. It’ probably just new to you, or they regurgitated an older strategy and repackaged it.

We’ve had people contact us about creating “funnels.” We have built plenty of in depth sales funnels for online client launches. Most of these calls simply needed a simple landing page (or home page) that allowed visitors to enter their information.

A real sales funnel requires much more than just a page to collect info. A real sales funnel needs follow up emails, retargeting campaigns, and much more. Don’t get fooled into thinking you need a funnel when you just need a good website and home page.

8 – Patience

It takes time to build a business. It take time to build and rank a business online. It definitely takes time to build trust for a brand and for a business.

Too often are people easily discouraged because they are not seeing instant results. Building a website, Facebook page or YouTube channel is the first step. While this is an initial investment (both time and money), it is just the first step.

Growing a brand takes time and dedication. Some of our clients have worked with us for years, and their business grows bigger and bigger every year because they are doing the work alongside us. This includes content creation, marketing material, and being on their A game when clients contact them.

We have taken websites from no traffic to over 10,000 hits a month. We have also taken YouTube channels from less than a 1000 subscribers to over 65,000 subscribers organically. We have taken websites from no search terms to over 300 high ranking terms in competitive markets. This was done over the course of time, and definitely did not happen overnight.

Be patient and do the work. It’s worth it.

9 – Customer Service/ Not answering the phone

One of the main reasons we recommend using call tracking for your business is to find out whether or not your calls are being answered. We had one client who was paying close to $50 a click for Google Ads and the person that was supposed to be answering the phone NEVER picked up.

His site ranked, he had ads in place, and the calls were coming in… but no one was answering the phone. His average clients were worth anywhere from $1500 – $10,000 a month. While his call volume wasn’t huge, his “assistant” was missing 99% of the incoming calls.

Once we figured out where the gap was in his marketing, he was able to quickly fix it. Without call tracking in place, this might have never come to light and he would have continuously been losing money. He would have also been paying someone for not doing their job correctly.

10 – Reputation Management

Reputation Management is HUGE for local businesses. Reviews have become the go to search term when it comes to a buying decision. Whether you are selling a product or a service you need to have positive reviews and feedback on all of your business listings.

Google now shows all of your reviews when someone searches your business. Yelp, Angie’s List, Houzz, Facebook, and other platforms all have reviews and show up in Google searches.

One of the biggest digital marketing mistakes that we commonly see is a lack of reputation management. Lucky for you, we have a system that we use for our clients to manage all of this.

The post 10 Digital Marketing Mistakes to Avoid appeared first on Keep it Local SEO | Small Business SEO experts.

This is a very common question that we get, and there is no easy answer.  In this post we will go over a number of different factors involved in ranking a website. If you really want to know how long does SEO it take for you site to rank, you have to understand the following.

How well is your website optimized for SEO?

This is one of the most important factors in helping your site rank.  A well optimized site is basically the foundation for how well your site will perform. Poorly constructed sites will take much longer, and generally we will have to do a complete overhaul of a site before we start working on anything external.

Many of our clients come to us with pretty looking websites that have zero on page optimization.  This is usually a combination of incorrect metadata, missing alt tags, incorrect header tags, etc. These small web design flaws will cripple a sites rank progress.

This doesn’t just apply to small businesses. We have seen huge companies that with a staff in the thousands that have garbage sites (in regards to optimization).  Don’t feel bad about it.  Let a professional fix it.

How strong is your online reputation?

You are going to hear us preach online reputation all day long.  Good reputation helps you rank. Great reviews on your Google Business Page will bring in more clicks to your website.  It doesn’t make sense to rank your site for a number of search terms if you have a 2 star rating on every business profile online.

If you look at most of the “snack pack” (Top 3 in Google Maps), they have great reviews.  If you have bad reviews or no reviews, that is something that needs to be handled while we work on your site.  This way when you do start ranking, your potential clients see great reviews and are more likely to contact you.

How much competition is there online for your business?

If you are like most business owners out there, you probably provide a service or sell products that are not exclusive to only you.  There are hundreds of plumbers, contractors, roofers, nail salons, real estate agents, etc in any major city.  Odds are some of your competition has been in business longer than you, and their site has been up longer than yours as well. Some business niches are highly competitive and if your competition has a strong site with a good online reputation, that will greatly affect how long it takes your site to rank.

Everyone wants to be #1. We understand this and do our best to help our clients achieve their goal of ranking high. Every one of your competitors wants to be #1 as well.  Ranking a site in a competitive niche is an uphill battle, so be prepared to stick it out and then maintain your position when you get there.

How big is your SEO budget?

Proper SEO is an investment. One of the top reasons we turn away potential clients is a lack of budget for SEO. While we do understand that you may not have a huge budget to optimize and rank your site, we know what it takes (and what it costs) to get great results. The more competitive the niche, the more it will cost to rank.

The cost of ranking refers to man hours, tracking, research, outreach, link building, maintenance and much more.

Unlike other SEO agencies, we don’t outsource our SEO to other companies overseas.  We do all of our digital marketing work in house.

Local SEO or National SEO?

Local SEO is targeted to a specific area.  While the process to rank a site is generally the same, there are plenty of differences involved. Local businesses have more specific needs to show up high in the search engines.

While we do have national (and international) clients, we apply different strategies to rank our local clients.

How much can you contribute?

While many people would love to build a site and magically have it appear on Google, this is just not going to happen. Unless you are the one and only chimpanzee trainer in the USA, it can take a few months to a year for you to see page 1 rankings.  You have to treat your site like a living thing.  It needs to grow.

Growing a site means adding new content that is up to date and will keep your visitors engaged.  Google only knows and crawls what you put on the site.  If you offer a number of services, but don’t have content on the site listing these out, then don’t be surprised if you are not showing up for these terms.

How fast can you rank on Google?

Hopefully this has given you a general idea of what we have to deal with when we take on new clients.  While this all may seem simple, it is a process.  SEO is an artform that is constantly evolving as Google changes its algorithms.  We as SEO’s must stay up to date with what is going on and apply our knowledge and work ethic to our clients sites.

The post How Long Does SEO Take? appeared first on Keep it Local SEO | Small Business SEO experts.