How Digital Marketing will Shift in the Coming Years

With the continually rising popularity of the internet, many companies have found it very effective to advertise online. The practice of marketing a service or product on the internet is called digital marketing. Digital marketing has evolved a lot since it began when the internet was just becoming common in the average household. As the internet becomes a larger part of the daily lives of millions of people around the world, companies have turned to digital marketing as a primary source of advertisement. With the rise in demand for digital marketing, there has been a push for another evolution in the industry. In recent years, companies have tried to seek out the most effective style of advertisement and digital marketing companies have helped to make it happen. This has pushed the digital marketing industry as a whole to focus more heavily on conversion rate optimization and user experience in online advertisements.

Local Digital Marketing Services – Helping a Variety of Industries Achieve New Success

For years, companies have focused almost solely on search engine optimization when thinking about their digital marketing. Search engine optimization occurs when an advertiser works to increase the visibility of their online advertisements in order to get more potential customers to see their product or service. Although important, search engine optimization is meaningless if the people who see the advertisement immediately scroll past it and fail to purchase the product. That is why conversion rate optimization has become much more important to many businesses in recent years. Conversion rate optimization is a company’s process by which they attempt to convert more people who see their advertisements into actual paying customers. Digital marketing is becoming more and more important to companies every day, and that is why the industry is evolving to better serve the needs of advertisers. The more actual customers a company gets from an online advertisement, the more likely they are to pay digital marketing firms to put out more advertisements. This allows both the digital marketing firms and advertisers to make money. As more and more companies look to get into the digital marketing sphere, there will be a natural shift in focus from search engine optimization to conversion rate optimization.

One very important part of a good conversion rate optimization strategy is a focus on user experience. An online advertisement that is not accessible and user-friendly will not lead to an increase in customers. Digital marketing firms in recent years have discovered this very quickly. Potential customers do not have much patience for poorly designed digital advertisements. If they have trouble accessing or interacting with an advertisement, they will simply move on. To keep this from happening, digital marketers will continue to evolve their practices as they come up with new ways to increase customer satisfaction. One very important and easy way that a company can improve upon their user experience is by making sure that their advertisements are compatible for smartphones. By making a digital advertisement accessible on computers, phones, and tablets, a company can further increase their potential customer base. In the coming years as companies search for new customer bases, widening the platforms on which their advertisements are accessible will give them a wider range of potential customers.

The digital marketing industry will also seek to enhance the user experience by making advertisements more interactive. Most traditional advertisements today do not require any action from a potential customer except perhaps to click a link to a company’s website. The future of digital marketing will likely include advertisements that engage a viewer by asking them questions or even asking them whether or not they are interested in the product or service in the advertisement. By doing this, digital marketers hope to set certain advertisements apart from others and improve conversion rate optimization. There are a limitless number of new ideas that could potentially enhance the user experience in digital marketing. There is no doubt that the future of digital marketing will focus specifically on conversion rate optimization and enhancing user experience.

Important Steps for Personal Injury Lawyers to Follow When Marketing Themselves Online

 

  • Make sure your website is smartphone friendly: The first step to marketing yourself as a personal injury lawyer is to make sure that your website is accessible to smartphone users. More than half of all internet searches are now conducted on smartphones. This means that it is absolutely crucial that your website and any advertisements you run can be viewed not only on computers but on smartphones as well. Most modern websites will be built on a responsive platform, that will adjust the size based on the device, from computers to mobile phones. If you do not take the time to make sure your website is easily accessible for smartphone users, you run the risk of losing 50% of potential customers simply because they could not access your website on their smartphone.

Digital Marketing Strategies that include SEO, PPC and YouTube Marketing are Key Factors for Attorney Marketing in 2020

  • Use advertisement extensions: Whenever you purchase internet advertisements, make sure you spend the extra money to add advertisement extensions. Advertisement extensions are links that are displayed under the large text of your advertisement. They often come in the form of location extensions, sitelinks, or call extensions. Although often overlooked, advertisement extensions can increase the number of people who click on your advertisement by up to 15%. This can translate to thousands of dollars in extra business based on just a single internet advertisement. Advertisement extensions are particularly valuable to personal injury lawyers because they will make your specific advertisement stand out from the hundreds of other personal injury lawyer advertisements, especially as you are working to build up your organic search profile through search engine optimization. Additionally, advertisement extensions will allow your advertisement to take up more space, which pushes competing advertisements farther down the page.
  • Get a high google review score: When someone searches for a personal injury lawyer online, one of the first things that they will see is a list of law firms in their area with the firms’ Google reviews. This score is the average google review out of five stars. If your firm either has a low google review score, very few reviews, or no reviews at all, potential clients will view this very unfavorably. You may spend thousands of dollars on advertisements, but all that money may be wasted if the first impression potential clients get from your law firm is that it has negative reviews. To make sure you have a good google review, ask your clients to rate you on google. It may make sense to give them a small discount if they rate you with a five-star review. Although you may make less money from that particular client, the high google review score will attract new clients, which will increase your profits. 
  • Test out call-only advertisements: Call-only advertisements are a new alternative to traditional online advertisements. These advertisements feature a phone number alongside a description of your services as a personal injury lawyer. If a potential client clicks on the advertisement, they will immediately be prompted with a message that asks them if they want to call the phone number. Call-only advertisements are great because they create many more phone calls directly to your law firm. Once you have them on the phone, you can make your sales pitch much better than an online advertisement can. 
  • Use online retargeting services: For an additional fee, you can add retargeting services to your internet advertisement. Retargeting services push your advertisement to potential clients that have already clicked on your advertisement at least once. Without retargeting services, you may be spending money targeting people who will never actually click on your advertisement. By using retargeting services, you can make sure that the money you spend on advertisements will target potential clients who are most likely to actually hire you to represent them as a personal injury lawyer. 

 

3 Tips for Improving Your Search Engine Rankings in 2017

There are several factors that Google take into account when ranking a website. No one knows exactly what factors are being used for ranking a website but you can try various SEO tips to get your website rankings moving up in Google in 2017. The following are 3 tips on how you can get your website ranked in 2017.

1. Keyword Optimization for Every Webpage
Optimizing your webpage with the right keyword is important if you want people to easily find your website on the search engine. You should invest in a good keyword research tool to look for keywords with high conversion rate. It is best to look for long tail keywords with 4 or more words as these words have lower competitions. Most of the short tail keywords are reserved for authority websites only so new websites that want to rank on the search engine should be optimized with long tail keywords. The keyword should be something that your prospective customer is looking for. Keywords should be mentioned in the content, content title and meta tag. You should also blend in your keyword into the anchor text of the external link that is pointing to your site.

2. Spying on the Competitors’ Sites
You must spy on your competitors’ websites and find out information such as ranking position in the search engine, number of backlinks, popularity of the sites that link to them, keyword used in the webpage title, and MozRank. You should find out how much traffic your competitor is getting and how much of the traffic is organic or paid. If the traffic is coming from from organic search result, you must find out the keyword that they are ranking for. You can go through your competitors’ websites to find out what type of content you should also include on your website. By spying on your competitors, you will know how to optimize your website and outbeat their search engine ranking.

3. Make Sure Every Post is Long and Detailed with Relevant Content
Typically Google’s search engine likes to rank pages that have long and detailed content. You should try to make your post long and cover as many information as possible. Most of the authority sites that rank on the first page of the search result have long post. For example, Wikipedia comes up on almost every keyword that you enter into the search box because almost every entry in Wikipedia offers thousands of words of high quality content that is rich with information. The ideal length of the blog post in 2016 should be at least 2,500 words. If you cannot come up with any idea on producing the in depth content, you can visit your competitor’s site and take some of their ideas.

Should Your SEO Company Help You Optimize Your Google My Business Listing?

Many local SEO companies are offering Google My Business listing optimization services for small businesses in the local area. Google My Business (GMB) refers to the search result that shows the local businesses operating in a particular area. It will include a map with red balloons to show the shops located in different places of the local region. It provides information about your business address, closing hour, reviews and directions in going there.

Google My Business used to be known as Google Places or Google Local in the past. GMB listing is vital for small businesses operating in a particular region because many people like to search locally when they are looking for shops that sell the products and services they need. Most of the people that arrive on your site by searching on a broad region are unlikely to be your prospective customers. The advantage of getting your website ranked well in the GMB listing is that it will enable you to get a lot of free traffic from the local search result to your website. These free traffic have high conversion rate as they are customers that are likely to buy.

You have to submit your business information on the Google My Business site in order for it to appear in the local search result. The local SEO company will fill in the correct information and choose the right category for your business at the Google My Business website. If your business has been listed on Google My Business for a long time, you may get a request that ask you to resubmit your business information. The local SEO company can resubmit your site to get it verified again for the Google My Business listing.

If you hire a local SEO company, there will be expert staff managing your GMB listing so that they rank on top of the search result at all time. They are equipped with staff who are knowledgeable in the complex algorithm in Google My Business. They can help you to submit your website to the local directories that are trusted by Google. These directories include authority directories like Yelp as well as other high quality directories. The local SEO company can help you to verify your business for the Google My Business listing.

They can get your customers to leave positive reviews on your GMB listing. Having a lot of positive reviews that offer more than 4 stars rating will allow your website to rank higher than other local businesses in the Google My Business search result. On top of that, the local SEO company can promote your site on the Google Plus One social media site. Google has put priority on Google Plus Ones over other social media sites. They will also promote your site on social media sites increase the ranking of your website in the search result.

Utilizing All Available Tools To Maximize Your Online Marketing ROI

Online marketing is far from a perfect science. Helping customers generate and track leads is often an area of ambiguity when small business owners interview media companies to help define goals and roi. One of the key differences that we are able to offer our clients is full transparency. We are able to accomplish this by utilizing a full spectrum of tools to help our clients manage their ad spending and lead generation results. We set up tools to monitor traffic (Google Analytics or Statscounter) are both good options. We create custom forms to capture online inquiries that are both mobile friendly and easy to navigate. We also use call tracking from Hosted Numbers, which offers a bevy of online options for call tracking including recording customer phone calls, tracking all phone calls, length of time customers are on the phone, what areas customers are calling from etc. The ability to listen to you customer phone calls (there is a whisper prompt to make sure that anyone who calls is aware of the call) is a great tool for all small business owners.

The amount of information you can gain by listening to how your phone calls are answered, your level of responsiveness in handling both customer service issues and potential sales inquiries is very important towards finding areas of improvement for your organization. For online marketing this data is pure gold, we can correlate visitors to conversions to better understand what messages are working and what keywords are bringing you the right types of customers to ensure that we are helping you achieve your goals and manage your marketing budget as effectively as possible.

Our team works hard to create the right strategy to help you achieve your marketing goals. What sets us apart from our competitors is that we are constantly monitoring our results with a focus on constant improvement. You can learn more about lead generation and online marketing by contacting us today for a free evaluation.

Simple Tips For Managing Social Media In 2015 For Small Business Owners

Social media can be a gamer changer for any marketer, yet it is often misunderstood by the very marketers looking to harness its advantages. Social media (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest), if used correctly can bring remarkable success for your online or brick and motor business. First things first lets examine what SMM or social media marketing is at its core, it is a form of internet marketing communication and brand awareness. Social media marketing almost always entails the sharing of content either articles, images or videos that hopefully the customer or potential customer will find engaging and share with his or her friends or network. The best SSM is accomplished when a piece of your content goes viral, meaning it is viewed, shared and liked by many people spreading via word of mouth.

Now lets discuss what social media is not. First it is often not free, you have to invest in it. That investment could be money or more often than not time, which leads us to the second thing that social media marketing is not, social media marketing is not instant. It can take weeks, months or even years for social media to help build up your brand or your offer but certainly it will not happen over night. Any agency promising you instant results is more likely than not lying. SMM is not complicated, anyone can figure it out, it is not rocket science. Lastly social media can not make up for having a poor website, poor SEO or a bad product or service. For social media marketing to work your website needs to be top notch both looks wise and ease of navigation as your goal will be to get traffic from social media to your website where your products or services are fully detailed. That being said there are some keys to success with social media which we will discuss in greater detail.


Key to Social Media Success #1: Engage and respond to your customers and leads!
Between 60% to 70% of all companies online do not respond to their customers on social media. When you fail to respond to customers and leads comments or questions your brand is now just another faceless brand in a sea of competition. When you respond to your own leads and customers and even in some cases your competitions leads you create a relationship. You can even take a negative and turn it into a positive by responding, such as to a complaint. Now most of us do not like complaints and many of us would get the urge to delete a complaint off of our social media pages, but answering a complaint publicly in a helpful manner can do wonders for your business, it shows you stand by your product or service and put customer satisfaction in the forefront.


Key to Social Media Success #2: Listen!
You can learn a lot about your customer base and even your competition by listening. I once ran a sound streaming service where customers could lunch their own online radio streaming. I thought I had all my customers and potential customers needs served, until I visited a rivals Facebook page and discovered that quite a few people were using the service to stream in online video games and needed a higher stream rate and varying sized streaming packages, which my competitor was ignoring. I went back to the drawing board and relaunched my service and aimed it at the video game crowd and increased my overall ROI, all by listening and then responding to my competitions customers, who became my own customers. Listening to your client base can and does reap dividends!

Key To Social Media Success #3 Leads are there for those who merely look
You can easily use social media to find new customers just using social media engines search tools. For example on twitter if you are a DJ simply do a search for “need a dj”. Your customers are out there asking for your services! You merely need to look then follow through on those leads, the success of landing a new customer depends on your sales skills or pitch and the quality of your service.

Key To Social Media Success #4 Share do not hard sell!
Social media works best when you share. Use it to tell your stories, about you, your customers, even how your product or service helped someone. Make it personal make it human, not bland or faceless or filled with “we are the best blah blah blah in the industry”. You can make use of webinars to reach customers live, you can do fun videos, you can write fun or light hearted stories. Inspire your readers to share your story. The key to a good story or piece of content is to ask yourself “Would I share this content with a friend?” If the answer is yes then you are on the right track.

Key To Social Media Success #5 Highly targeted PPC
Social media networks like Facebook know all the little details about their users thanks to massive data mining. With Facebook it is not about having your add seen by 10,000 people a week or a day but being seen by the right 100 or 1000 a day or week, the people who best fit your demographics. With Facebook you can target your ads using details such as age, location, sex, job title, education level and even interests! This means that you can reach a much higher ROI than traditional PPC advertising. Whats even better is like minded people often associate with like minded people so the chance of your product or service being spread word of mouth to their network of friends and family is also much higher.

Key To Social Media Success #6 Give stuff away
With social media you can gain customers for life by giving away value. If you give a small discount of say 10% to 20% you are marketing, if you give 50% to 60% off you are giving away true value. If you give your client base something for free, even just good content and information you can gain customers for life. You can give away samples, content, webinars, articles, and ebooks. If you provide good information on a regular basis you will have return visitors that while they may not buy your goods or services today, they may very well convert to paying customers later on. A good thing about return visitors is that your business stays on their mind, even if only in the back of it, waiting for a time when they do need what you offer!

Panda 4.1 Roll Out A Good Reminder To Small Business Owners About Content

The News Of A Change In The Google Algorithm Was First Posted on 9-25 by Pierre Far The Google Panda Algorithm Has Updated Again

The latest update of the Panda algorithm has caused a major shift for millions of websites, most of which would be described as medium to larger in size and scope. In general the Panda algorithm does not impact small business owners and is generally designed to help small business owners get a bump in impressions and traffic. Panda was brought to market by Google as a way to help reward good content and identify websites that are using low quality, auto generated or content that is not deemed as beneficial to the searching audience.

For small business owners the impact of Panda is most likely negligible at best, most experts are anticipating another major algorithm update by Google in 2014, the Penguin updated, which is much more likely to have a larger impact on the small business community. The first penguin update occurred in April of 2012 and was aimed at business owners who were aggressively pursuing links relating to key search terms, often from low quality websites (free directories, bookmarking sites, etc). This update had a dramatic impact on the search landscape and brought a heightened awareness to SEO and linking building, with a new emphasis on quality versus quantity.

The magic formula to rank well on Google will always be changing, but one key constant has remained the same, you need to write great content and update your website on a regular basis to provide a compelling reason to have visitors return on a regular basis. With great content you have a huge advantage over your competition as your content is more likely to be shared on the web, posted and share on social media platforms and create citations for your business, all of which can be beneficially in helping to get your website to rank and retain customers when they visit your website.

The Hidden Dangers To Your Website Rankings By Aggressive Link Building

Having a website is critical for a business, but it is not enough to merely have a website and great content, you also have to be found in the search engines. Searches are done via key words and search terms and the websites at the top of any search have done their link building correctly, usually with the help of SEO experts. In today’s world nearly everyone looks for services and goods online and very few people go past 20 results in a web search, so you need to get on top of the search rankings. Getting on top of the search rankings however requires great link building practices. Top search engine rankings result in organic website traffic, which is basically ad free advertising.

Google, Yahoo and Bing SEO

Trying to do your own SEO link building can be down right dangerous for small business owners to try on their own. Your website is an investment in time, money and your brand name, the first point of contact many times between you and your potential customers. The major search engines use what is called an algorithm to determine how to value links, and every year Google pushes out changes to this algorithm between 500 and 600 times. While many of these are small adjustments, some are rather huge updates such as Google Panda and Google Penguin. Google Panda and Google Penguin each caused tens of thousands of websites to loose massive search engine rankings, and quite a few thousand more were entirely removed from the search engine. Not all of these sites were bad, in fact many were top notch websites, but their SEO and link campaigns were somewhat sketchy.

You know you need links, and you know you need your website to stay competitive. But trying to build your own links and understanding which links are good for your site is something best left to a SEO professional. Years worth of work can go up in smoke with a single Google update. The better professionals also know which links to take down following major updates to the search engines. Google is constantly pushing out algorithm changes, and these changes can take weeks and months for the everyday person to figure out, figuring out what effect the have takes someone who does this as a full time job, which it is. The reason Google and the other search engines do not tell people the exact workings of the algorithm is to prevent spammy sites from dominating the rankings. Yes link building will cost you money, but it is a cost of doing good business online. It does not mean it has to break bank, far from it, good link builders can do great work over time that will see your website thriving in organic search without breaking your bank account.

One piece of advice when hiring a SEO firm or link builder, stay as far away from foreign entities. Besides Simply Google India/Pakistan/Etc SEO + scam and read thousands of complaints, its truly epidemic. While they charge less than an American company, and certainly a few do good work, many are bad actors in the SEO field, they talk a good game, have a great sales pitch and the price seems right but when it comes to delivering a good service that is where it all falls apart.

If you are going to hire a professional link builder, and you should go with a professional, look for one with a portfolio of clients they currently work for. You want a professional that can show you the results of their work, not simply throw you a great sales pitch and have a nice looking website. You also want a professional that has been doing link building for more then just a few years. In SEO duration means they have tackled major changes in the industry and not only survived but also thrived, in an industry where many simply fold after 2 years.

Lastly you want a link builder who understand the entire SEO process not just links. A link builder who understands the entire process can better design a link campaign to help your website succeed, taking into account on site and off site factors, relevancy of content to sites linked to, changes with the SERPs, and exciting changes happening such as Google’s new “In-depth articles searches and how to capitalize on it with your website and incoming links. In short if you value your website, and you rely on organic traffic invest back into your website by hiring a professional to take care of you offsite link building needs to protect your investment.