Our Marketing Plan
We treat every client on an individual basis but the underlying best practices stay the same.
If you don’t have a website currently, we set everything up from scratch – we actually prefer this! If you have an existing website and profiles for your business floating around, we whip them into shape.
Call us. Let’s talk!
Step 1
Website Design
Our websites are designed to be user friendly and convert visitors into leads
Your website should be the center of all of your business’s marketing efforts, whether online or offline.
Your website needs to accomplish several things. A website needs to appeal to real potential clients that will visit it AND search engines need to be able to understand it!
We do this very well for our clients when building their website from scratch, or when updating or redesigning their website.
Google Business Profile (Formerly Google My Business)) is a critical online property that should complement your website
Google Business Profile/Google My Business is the 2nd most important asset to any local service business after their website.
By optimizing your Google Business Profile we will increase your visibility in your local service area. This is how you get your business on Google Maps and enables your customers to leave your business Google Reviews.
Step 2
Google Business Profile
Step 3
On-page and Technical SEO
Optimizing your website for search engines is the best way to get your ideal clients on your website
You’ve probably heard of the term SEO by now. It refers to search engine optimization and is the art and science of optimizing the content of a website for search engines like Google.
We are the best in the business when it comes to local SEO for service businesses.
No. We are not going to bore you with the details but are happy to explain what we do to properly optimize our clients’ website’s for search engines if you are in the know.
Citations and directory sites allow your business to have a page on hundreds of other websites
These are websites like Yelp, Angi.com, Nextdoor, and the BBB. By claiming and fully populating your profile on these websites you solidify your business in your local service area and make it more clear to search engines of exactly what you do and where you do it.
We include optimizing your business Facebook page even though it is a social website, not a directory or citation listing website.
For a local service business, we consider 7 ‘citation’ profiles vitally important. The 7 must-have ‘citations’ for local service businesses are Google My Business, Bing Places, Yelp. Angi.com, Nextdoor, the BBB, and a business Facebook page.
Step 4
Major Citations
Step 5
Google Ads
Every business that is in ‘growth mode’ should be running Google Ads
SEO takes time to produce results. It is just the nature of the beast. So, we set up and manage Google Ads for our clients while we are waiting for the organic traffic to pick up.
Google Search Ads are the most effective type of ad for a local service business so that is what we focus on.
Your business most be actively updating content and posting to make it clear you are open and accepting new customers
Maybe posting to Facebook should be part of your business’s marketing strategy, but that is not what we are talking about when we say ‘post consistently.’
Specifically we are referring to posting to your Google My Business but it’s more than that. Business need to add new and update existing content on all of their online platforms to continue to benefit from them.
Step 6
Post Consistently
Step 7
Content Building
Blog posts on your website are the best way to target long-tail keywords
Search engines need content to better understand your business and when to rank it appropriately in the search results.
Obviously, the ‘core pages’ of your website such as your homepage, service pages, about us page, and contact page will provide search engines with the gist of what your business is all about. The problem is each page on your website should be laser-focused on a single keyword. By utilizing a blog, you can focus on long-tail keywords that will attract your ideal clients to your website! Genius!
It’s time to plaster your business across the web
We’ve already claimed and fully optimized the 7 most important citations at this point and now it’s time to create 30 more. In a couple of months, we’ll create 20 additional new citations. And, a couple of months after that, we’ll submit your business to the data aggregators which will blast out your business info to hundreds of additional websites.
Step 8
Additional Citations
Step 9
Build Reviews
Real user signals like reviews left online really matter a lot
Something not too many professional SEOs ever talk about is real user signals. Reviews are one of the most important real user signals. By ‘real user signal,’ we are referring to signals to the search engines that your business (or website) is valuable and worth ranking in the search results.
Google is the best place to get reviews online. Yelp and Facebook are tied for 2nd best because Bing Places does not let users leave businesses reviews directly on their platform, so they will show your business’s Facebook or Yelp reviews in the Bing search results.
It’s time to see how well Google and Bing understand your website so we can make some educated decisions
At the time we build or redesign your website, we will fully connect it to Google and Bing’s webmaster tools. These properties include Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Bing Webmaster Tools.
The data these free tools collect about how each search engine is interpreting the content of your website and how real people are interacting with your website is exactly what we need to improve its performance over time.
Step 10
Analyze Data
Step 11
Continual Improvement
If your business isn’t growing, it’s dying
Your website should be a living document and the same goes for all of your other web properties.
As your business grows and changes, the content on your website and directory listing should be updated to reflect that. By this point, it has been a couple of months since with built or fixed your website and we can now use the data Bing and Google’s webmaster tools have collected for us for continual improvement.
That’s How Websites Really Work
If you just read through our 11 step approach to successfully marking a local business online you should have a much better understanding of how websites really work. At the end of the day, the website itself is just one piece of the puzzle. Everything else we discussed and more is needed to find success online in 2022 and beyond.
We consider ‘successful marketing’ marketing that yields a positive ROI for the business. This means the cost of the marketing service should be recouped by revenue generated by leads it creates AND there is additional revenue generated that becomes profit for our clients.
The graphic below may help you understand our approach a little better. Please check it out.
