On Saturday Ayla Crippen, a Senior Internet Marketing Consultant at Reach Local, conducted a seminar on “The Best of the Best in Online Marketing”. She was a fantastic speaker who provided a ton of great information that we’d like to pass on to you. You can follow her on Twitter at @AylaCrippenIMC.
Where are you on the web?
Ayla continually touched on the topic of where your business is on the web. More and more people are using online searches as their first option for answering the questions, including where they can find a process server in a given area.
Hire a professional
As a small business owner it can be worth the investment to hire a professional such as an Search Engine Optimization (SEO) consultant to boost your search engine rankings. Before beginning decide what you expect the outcome to be and discuss this with whoever you hire to make sure you are clear on anticipated results. While some results may require a higher investment, your consultant should be able to clearly let you know what can be accomplished within a given budget. As you move along, continually monitor your results.
The results that turn up on a search engine page, called organic results, are where an SEO consultant can help you out by moving you up in rank. Another option is to utilize ads, particularly Google Adwords. You can pay for listings to show up for certain search keywords and have the option of PPC (pay per click) or PPI (pay per time user sees you ad).
Online reputation
Many sites offer the option to leave a recommendation, such as Yelp or Google. The first step is to make sure that the information under such accounts is listed correctly and to claim your listing as the owner. For Google, here is their business listings section where you can learn how to claim your listing: https://www.google.com/places/
Once that’s done the next step is to gather recommendations. Invite your clients to do this and offer them an incentive to do so, such as 10% off their next service. While we all provide the absolute best process service we can, there are bound to be one or two bad recommendations. As they say, you can’t make everyone happy. The key is to get plenty of recommendations stacked on top of these so they are pushed back in date, making it less likely a potential customer will see the negative response.
Mobile
Did you know 80% of customers abandon a mobile site if they have a bad user experience? It’s imperative these days to have a mobile site that is easy to navigate. Ayla provided a great resource called Go Mo which creates a mobile site for you and gives you free premium service for a year. We’ve created our mobile site using this already and couldn’t be happier with the ease of use and the results!
Stay tuned for the next part of the NAPPS Convention Series: Kitty Hailey & Ethical Business Practices!
