You’re launching your new business and you need a website. With so many “low cost” website builders to choose from, a DIY solution seems like the perfect place to save money, right? It’s easy to get dazzled by $19.99/month plans and drag-and-drop website creation, but what you don’t see are the myriad of hidden costs lurking behind the so-called easy solutions. In the long run, a professional website designer can actually save you time and money, and set your business up for success. There are many reasons why a DIY website costs more than you think. Here are a few:
1. Search Engine Rankings
There’s no point in having a great looking website if no one can find it when searching for your product or service in major search engines like Google or Bing. That’s why having a solid search engine optimization (SEO) strategy is critical to your success. And the more control you have over your content and the structure of your site, the better. Sure, the low cost website creators have gotten better about incorporating some behind-the-scenes SEO best practices, but what they can’t offer you is the one-on-one attention you will need to formulate that strategy from day one from keyword research to competitive analysis. A professional will give you sound advice, like not including text on your images because search engines can’t read them, and other valuable tips based on years of experience.
2. Growing Your Site
It’s hard to see five years into the future when you’re just getting started, but like birthdays and holidays, they come fast! What happens when you’re ready to add that online store, or integrate your website with another platform? When your needs become larger than a drag-and-drop builder can provide, you might just discover that you don’t actually own your site. Those low-cost monthly rates are actually more akin to rental fees. You can’t port your site over to a designer in order to incorporate more complex features because the site isn’t actually yours. It can come as quite a surprise to learn that your site will need to be re-built from the ground up.
3. Credibility is Priceless
When you have aches and pains, you see a doctor. When you need legal advice, you consult a lawyer. When you need a website that conveys trustworthiness and credibility you go to a… DIY website creator? Sure, drag-and-drop design is easy. But what is the end result? An experienced, savvy professional website designer can craft a website into one-of-a-kind user experience that can make a small company look larger, more established and unique. A professional can help you convey what your business stands for. In a well-designed site it only takes one click for potential customers to “get you.” And if they don’t? There’s always your competitors…
4. Security
Any good website design firm is well versed in internet security. And should anything malicious occur, you can be assured that they are prepared to handle it. From backing up your site to keeping on top of the latest security protocols, they are pros at responding to issues before you even know they exist. Unfortunately, many of the drag and drop website providers are vulnerable to attacks, as a quick Google search will reveal. It pays to know up front how security issues are dealt with and if there are any hidden costs to data backups and site restores.
5. Design Pays
Think you don’t care about fonts or color combinations? Spend a half hour with a professional website designer and your head will be spinning from the endless possibilities. Yes, serif fonts convey a different feel than non-serif fonts. Color does matter. And what about custom logos that convey your brand personality? There is a level of personalization and expertise that you just can’t get from a DIY solution. And it shows.
6. Add Ons Add Up
Drag-and-drop services can reel you in with low monthly fees but what happens when you want access to your website analytics? You’ll have to upgrade to a premium account. Need more storage? That will be extra. The bottom line is that as your business grows, your needs will grow. You’ll want to be sure that whatever platform your website is built on can handle your future. But what if you don’t know what you’ll need in five years? A professional website designer can offer experience-based guidance. It’s basically the next best thing to a crystal ball.
7. Keeping up with Technology
Let’s face it. Technology is fast moving and ever changing. Making sure your website is optimized for mobile devices and tablets is just the tip of the iceberg. Professional web designer will make sure your website is up to par – even behind the scenes. They will make sure any plug-ins you use are updated and functioning properly and will provide ongoing advise about new developments that will keep your website running smoothly and efficiently. And what about analytics? A pro will be able to run an analytics installation and start capturing your data on day one – valuable data that will help you with future marketing decisions. In short, professional website designers offer so much more than design.
Using an out-of-the-box, drag-and-drop website builder might seem like a cost savings initially, but using a professional website designer from the beginning can save you time and money in the long run. And that doesn’t even count the opportunity cost of lost revenue from a website that doesn’t look unique and professional. Before you build a website, do yourself a favor. Talk to a professional. The alternative will probably cost you more than you think.
Looking to launch a new website or overhaul a current one? With nearly 20 years experience working with clients of all sizes across many industries, Infinite Web Designs (IWD) can help. Founder Amy Delardi also offers consultation services to help you get your business pointed in the right direction right from the start. See what IWD can do for your business. Call today. 203.307.5107
Infinite Web Designs is a full-service web design and development agency also offering digital marketing services that drive traffic to your website, increase sales and generate leads and build brand awareness.
5 Reasons to Have a Different Facebook Page for Each Business Location
Does your multi-location business have a separate Facebook page for each physical location? Well, maybe you should! With Facebook Locations, a page management feature offered by Facebook for business, it’s easy to manage multiple pages in one place. Plus, there are so many advantages to having a separate page for each location. Here are five:
Search engines, search engines, search engines!
If your business has more than one location, your customers can find the appropriate page when searching for you in popular search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. Not only will you be easier to find, your customers will be directed to the page most relevant to them.
Show your locations on a map!
When you use the Facebook Locations feature, you’ll have a main brand page, structured like a “parent page” with several sub-pages, one for each of your business locations. On the brand page, a map will appear which clearly shows each location. And clicking on a map marker will redirect to that location’s specific Facebook page. In addition to the map, each page will be listed under a Locations tab on your brand page. Your customers can see your whole business at a glance, yet easily find a specific locale.
Customer Reviews
If you have a separate page for each location, your customers can leave reviews specific to the place they visited. Online reviews are becoming increasingly important in customers’ buying decisions so making it easy for them to link a review to a specific location offers value. And it helps you to understand your customers’ experience from one location to another.
Offer localized content
While Facebook Locations makes it easy to share the same content on each of your pages, sometimes you want to share localized content. Maybe you are running a promotion in only certain areas. Or maybe you want to feature a particular employee, customer or vendor or highlight job openings specific to one location. Having a separate page for each business gives you the ability to tailor your content to your individual audiences.
Run ads and see insights specific to each location
Running location-based Facebook ads is a great way to generate awareness for a specific site. And the insights from those ads can be valuable. If you have a separate page for each business location, you can find out how people connect with different locations, see how different markets respond to content and even grow your local audiences by providing content that is highly local and relevant.
With Facebook Locations, you can connect and manage all of your business locations in one place. That means time saved. Now who couldn’t use more time?
Still not sure if multiple Facebook pages are right for your business? Give us a call. 203.307.5107
Infinite Web Designs is a full service digital agency offering social media management that drives traffic to your website, increases sales, generates leads and builds brand awareness.
On Episode 4 we are talking all things Paid Social Media Marketing. Click to listen above or you can read the transcript below. You can also subscribe on iTunes »
Here are Some of the Highlights:
According to Neil Patel, “Social media marketing as the process of creating content that is tailored to the context of each individual social media platform, in order to drive user engagement and sharing.”
BE SOCIAL! Connect with your followers. Follow back. Follow similar brands and be sure to like, comment and share.
Balance is key. If you post too infrequently, people will forget you. If you post too often, you will overcrowd their feed and they will unfollow you.
Facebook has more active users than China has people. (Approx 1.39 Billion)
Content is collaborative. If you are working with an agency, be sure to share enough of your business expertise so they can adopt your voice and provide value-added content.
Welcome and thanks for tuning in to another episode of Infinite Web Chat with your Hosts and Web Marketing Specialist, Amy DeLardi and LeeAnn Holmberg
Amy: Hi welcome to the Episode4 of our infinite chat with Amy and LeeAnn. Hi LeeAnn
LeeAnn: Hey there!
Amy: So last episode we talked about more of an organic posting and social media marketing on the different maybe Social Media platforms and we didn’t really get into too much about that paid advertising through the platform. So today, we’re going to talk about paid content on social media because we’re finding that just creating great content organically isn’t enough anymore to keep customers engaged and to keep Social Media platforms that willing to serve our content to our audience. So, paid advertising ad can range from a promoted tweet or to a smaller one-off budget to an extensive campaign with a major budget. So, what’s nice is that anyone can really take advantage and leverage promoting paid advertising on social media OK. So what do we suggest to our clients that don’t really have a full scale budget to run these campaigns?
LeeAnn: So for clients that don’t have full scale budgets, what we suggest is that they run ads consistently over time even with a smaller budget, because what we’re finding is that Social Media platforms will reward you with more views and more reach, the game you mentioned before when you’re consistently running ads rather than turning it on and turning it off, even if you have a small budget. So, I know that can be kind of a pain to stretch it out over the month but we can definitely help do that, we have clients that range from really small to several hundreds of dollars to the thousand dollar budget every month. So of course, there are exceptions to that; so what we like to ask our clients to keep something running all the time.
Amy: During this episode, we’re going to talk about attracting, targeting in particular and the major target main Social Media platforms that we work with then and we leverage their advertising tool and we’re going to talk about some tips to ensure a little towards the end. So, why don’t we just jump right in and start talking about tracking and how do we set up tracking when we’re starting to work within a platform?
LeeAnn: So this is probably the unsexy and unfun part of the program, a lot of people who run their own ad campaigns skip right over this one because they don’t understand or they don’t know how to do it but it’s really, really, important. If you want to see their return on investment or how your ads are performing whether you’re setting up a pixel or typically the each platform will give you a little snippet of code that will go on your website or on your landing page or wherever you’re driving your traffic to. So, it’s really important to take that step and do that or to have somebody you on your behalf. You can also sometimes within each Social Media platform set up goals, you can also set up specific URL so that you can track those that can be done two ways it can be done within a Social Media platform, it can also be done in Google Analytics or and another paid analytics tool and then you can kind of match those because the will not deliver 100% all the time but what that does for you is, 1. It tells you how effective your ads are. 2. It tells you what’s working, what’s not working. So, you don’t want to know that it’s running especially if you’re using all of your marketing spend right here and you’re really wanting to see something happen. You want to be able to monitor and adjust and you need. So it’s really important to do that upfront.
Amy: What I find to the client sometimes jump too much into looking like too quickly and to looking at the you know the results of a campaign that they’re running. Do you have like a base line for you know should I think it that we run it for at 30days not that they that we said in forget it for 30days but you know we’re checking on it we’re making sure that the budget didn’t get messed up when we got it making sure that it’s not you think up more money than anticipated. But what good it praying to get is a campaign to run before we start looking at the measured result.
LeeAnn: You know that will really vary where we start with your ad campaign if you’ve been running ads in the past or not; but a good rule of thumb for me when I see is that if I’m starting an ad campaign on an account that hasn’t been running ads in the past, it usually takes and social media network around a week that can be from 4-7-10days to really believe they can make you see that you’re going to pay to play and start sort of your ads in a way that you can start to look at those results. Now, just like you said, that more in there we’re making adjustments now in the time period I really don’t suggest making any kind of sweeping change to your account, specially if you know if you make a change that will impact the entire campaign. So, we look at it we monitor like you said all of those things but then I think 30days is a good rule of thumb Let’s see how it’s performing you know where we approach running if we have at budget to run more than one ad let’s see how that’s doing how is your audience performing? Which is the next thing you know we’re going to jump right into, targeting. How is your audience responding? How can we narrow that down and really focus? So it does depend on where you are and what you’re spending is that I start to see that traction in the first week and a half and then start honing in and making adjustments. Then we look at that and decide how we want to move forward with your ad campaign after about the first 30days.
Amy: One of the things that I love about being able to run ads on these different platforms is you get to set your target audience, you can really hone in on that you know that the demographic, that they look at you know the city or they the type of people that you’re looking that you want to see your ad. So let’s talk a little bit more about targeting that’s my one of my favorite things is sometimes organically you know it’s like your page that’s really going to see your post or how you hashtag them maybe sometimes depending on the platform. But when you’re picking a way you can really set that a little bit more and be more specific. So, let’s talk a little bit more about that.
LeeAnn: Sure and if you heard me giggle into my breath because I completely agree with you too this is probably the biggest area I see clients who are trying to run their own ads make mistakes so like Amy mentioned, each platform does have its own guidelines but if you’re running an ad to an undefined audience, you’re going to most likely be upset with your result. Pretty intuitive on most of these platforms how does that set up and how to target, but if you don’t know how or you don’t take the time to do that and then double check your targeting, you know you’re missing the whole point of your ad campaign and basically throwing away marketing dollars. So, just to give a couple quick examples we had somebody who said hey we come in and do not want to have the ads that I’ve run tell me why it didn’t work and what I can do better they had spent several hundred dollars trying to grow their reach and their audience on Facebook and when I looked at the ad there was a picture of a roof. Now, if you knew the business that was their roof but Facebook it automatically grabbed their header image and cropped it for the ads they didn’t pay attention to that, they didn’t pay attention to their target audience. So, they ended up running an ad for I think to spend with several hundred dollars over 60days and it was just a random picture of a roof they were a Health and wellness industry. And they didn’t have it you know any kind of targeting done whatsoever. So, clearly you know making changes on that was an easy and quick fix and we could redirect them and show them and another example I had as the lady who does both online events and in-person events and she had this huge online event that she was trying to promote and she couldn’t figure out why she couldn’t get any traction on it and she you know we talked to the cell over the phone with her and talked through like did you do this? Did you do this? And you know she yes I did the checked the box, checked the box, checked the box and I said OK Would you mind if I just go in and look I won’t make any changes just let me take a peep behind the curtain. So, I got access to your account I looked and it turned out she’s running this online event to a 50mile radius of a city where she had done her life event. So, she was dumping all of this money thinking it’s going out across the Internet and it’s just going to this one particular group that had just seen her live and in person. So, it used almost her entire marketing campaign budget; I mean the spend was almost gone. It was really it was such a simple thing that we are in there you move quickly sometimes and it can really get just missed.
Amy: So let’s jump right into talking about the specific platform that that we’re going to talk about today and recently. I’ve read a poll that from Hoot suit they pull a bunch of advertisers last year and they said that they’ve been ROI from networks in the order for at least the most and so that would be Pinterest being the least, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and then Facebook being the boldest with actually 95.8% of the whole entire Pie. So, we’re going to chat but the networks that we’re going to talk about today in that same order so we’re going to jump right into Pinterest and start there. What are the paid advertising options within Pinterest?
LeeAnn: Sure, so when you’re using paid ads and Pinterest, they’re called promoted pins and you can run basically three separate ad types. There’s an ad type for awareness one for engagement and one for traffic when it comes to targeting. So, each channel does a little bit differently Pinterest can target through their they have 420 pre-built interests that includes keywords and business data which allows you to target your existing customers, so you can look at them that pre-built and pick you can also choose pinners who have visited your website so if you have that tracking code in place, then nothing really great way to target people who have already raised their hand and shown some interest in you. And you can also create a look like audience that looks and acts similar to your existing audience so it can be done with your email list for example, you can go out there and see what pinners are out there that match your email list and target those people. Now, you can also choose location, language, what type of device and gender and as you know Pinterest is very visual, so when you’re posting ads to Pinterest, you want to make sure that you’re posting organic content that matches your promotion because even though the goal is to take the action that on you were promoted and a lot of smart social media users will go and check out your profile and a look to see what other content on your page. So, if it isn’t clear that you’re just running an ad on that platform for ad purposes then they’re going to want to see content that matches organically.
Amy: Well thanks that was thought up at the information you left me with no question that. you could cover that would really well and it just a reminder we could talk way more about that just in these other programs but we are trying to keep that in precise information that’s helpful for people so that you know this Podcast are about 30minutes long. So let’s just jump right into it and then talk about how to run ads on LinkedIn.
LeeAnn: Sure! traditionally, LinkedIn has been good for B2B and job-related ads but I’m really starting to see a trend towards more lead generation, promoted content, and business growth in the B2C market as well. It is becoming more social not just casual that people are definitely becoming more social there. So, that and they have a few different types of display ads which is you know you can share your content with a targeted audience, you have sponsored and Mail which is you know LinkedIn version of email our messaging within their platform. You can also do sponsored content so you can have your content appear in the LinkedIn timelines of your target audience you know and their text and tabs and dynamic ads. So, the text ads can appear in the right-hand column and dynamic ads will appear in that column as well but they’ll and incorporate display ads you know graphic as well. The first targeting it’s really good for Employees and Company specific targeting, it’s pretty extensive. So, you have to know what you’re doing there as well. LinkedIn is great because if you show an interest in writing out there they’re very good about sending you a promotional credit that you can apply to your account and not to one time think so each time it’s in that you can apply that to your account. Now with that said, we’ve been in there a minimum bit so it can be quite a bit more expensive than the other app platform, so it’s very important to be clear on your objective and your plan when you’re running a campaign and I would suggest LinkedIn is more of a long term campaign you want to let it run for quite a while, it’s not something that I would suggest just hopping in and running an ad and then shutting it off.
Amy: Well because if anyone like myself maybe I go on Facebook every day or Instagram every day but I don’t go on LinkedIn every day. So, you know you want to make sure you’re running your campaign long enough and I’ve heard that for the duration that people go into those accounts.
LeeAnn: Absolutely!
Amy: So let’s jump right into Twitter where breathing through you’re really giving us a lot of information, Thank you.
LeeAnn: Twitter has three different out types that got promoted tweets you can have a promoted account, or you can promote a trend and so, they have a set up where you choose what your goal is and that goal can be you know to get website clicks or conversion, that can be engagement so people are liking or retweeting commenting on a tweet it can be to build your followers it’s pretty self-explanatory can be for lead generation so if you want to grow your list you can be something that I’m seeing a lot of right now which is app installs and you’ll see this is your scrolling to your Twitter feed, it will have suggested apps for you to install those are paid promotions. There are other goals there as well. So with Twitter, your audience really can be targeted at a high level for locations and that code and then once you choose that you can drill down more specifically into keywords that you know like interests and behaviors. Now, that’s a lot of information, so if I were going to suggest something, I would suggest promoting a Twitter card rather than a single tweet, a Twitter card doesn’t age as much and generally you know get more attention and engagement, if they’re asking what’s a Twitter card? Basically in a tweet that will be in your timeline but it has an image that’s attached to it and it will say you know have bold there and it stands out in your timeline not to say that it’s sponsored. But when I say tweet age I mean people are tweeting constantly So you’re getting pushed down and down and down further and if we need a Twitter card that kind of hangs around at the top.
Amy: That’s cool but I don’t use Twitter that all that much personally I know you that manage clients but if you’re not on Twitter a lot, you just have to get lost in the conversation and that’s but I like that they are to have a Twitter card so that your conversation doesn’t get lost or your ad doesn’t get lost.
LeeAnn: Well and we had a client that we worked with that is a Politician and we were able to use promoted you know we promoted Twitter card on his behalf, we were also able to can double down and use trend that was trending in the same time and match what we were doing to really get some big movement, a momentum on his account; that was really fun advertising campaign to be a part of. And I will say one little tip likely can if you show an interest and Twitter ad and advertising on that platform sometimes they’ll send you promotions as well I don’t recall if they will let you continue if it’s a one-time deal or if you can continue to add credit to your account as they provide them but I know that they send those out so if that’s something you’re interested in either let your advertiser know or watch for that you know.
Amy: That’s good information. Let’s talk about the big monsters Facebook and Instagram.
LeeAnn: It’s easy to kind of go through that though and quickly because like Amy mentioned, from the Hoot Suite poll that they did you know 95% of that pie was taken by Facebook and Instagram. Initially Facebook and Instagram ads were only can that and we’re starting to see that Instagram will now allow you to run ads independent of Facebook which I think is really cool and people should definitely take advantage of. But the reason that I think Facebook and Instagram have such a huge part of the pie is 1 in 5 of all mobile minutes are spent on Instagram or Facebook. Yet that’s like I’m not positive I think that’s like 50% of your mobile time so listen if you if you add an audience that work that adds an additional 6% of time an Audience Network is that little an interest in the issue and you looked at them on Amazon and now you see them all over the internet. So Instagram and Facebook allows you to do that and that the reverse sort of the sort of the ad to you but then you start to see it everywhere there’s lots and lots of different types Facebook is similar to Google in that they are always evolving and changing and trying to serve the best users there and possible. So, there is their campaign to build their audience so that can be a like campaign there can be campaigns to get as many as possible on a post or an ad they know that would be impression using that same poster and you can go for engagement if you want somebody to like it share it heard it on Instagram comment, there’s a lead generation that doesn’t even require for you to have a leaning peach set up. You can do it all right within Facebook and I will say Facebook really encourages you to keep that user experience in a lot of their types within face but because they see people trust Facebook, they’re not certain if they’re scrolling in their feed if they want to be taken off somewhere else so if you can make this all happen right within Facebook and then get back to their scrolling, they’re going to do that and they’re going to trust you even more. They’re definitely you know sales than other ad types where we do want to take them offline a bit mean we can do sales we done that we’ve integrated sales right within Facebook as well so ad type you can do text you can do photos, videos, several photos there’s a new or at type it’s called Canvas it’s a full screen I’m not sure if anybody has seen those but those are really cool that can be a photo or video as well. And so, on Facebook you can target your audience by demographics, location, interest to me. And you choose who you think your audience will be and it auto populate and one of the really cool features is once you start to type in a few of the interest behaviors that you’ve identified then Facebook will start to suggest similar audiences so they’ll be a little dropdown that says suggested audiences and it will give you similar groups or people that match what you’ve already identified and it also tells you how many on reach so you get to see all of that right up front. Another cool feature that I see that not used enough and we really try to encourage all of our clients to use, if you can actually target your e-mail audience you can import your e-mail into your Ad Manager and then you can run ads to your existing lists so you’re now marketing to your warm audience which I think is a huge miss if you’re not doing and that’s an easy thing to do when you’re setting up to do that so you know he’s encouraged that. Like I mentioned before and Instagram initially was only integrated with the ad now obviously there’s a magic I don’t work with Instagram like the like can be and but now you can separately by advertising on Instagram if you make your profile a business profile. So, you can still promote together, but you can also go over and promote independently on Instagram. The cool thing about that is Instagram will suggest to you which post they’re performing best Like which ones are trending and what tell you an estimated reach so you can do that right there. There’s a whole other type of advertising on Instagram that includes paid brand representatives, who will promote your product or service on your behalf and that we could spend an entire Podcast talking about that maybe that will be one of our upcoming discussions. But you know at a high level if they have a huge following then they can reach out to more people quicker than if you run a paid ad sometimes so this is called Key influencer marketing and it takes a lot of legwork and requires building good relationships with your influencers that can range from just paying them, to sending them swag, giving and discounts and all kinds of things.
Amy: And so let’s quickly jump in to talking a little bit about some of the tools maybe that we use to monitor and maximize our campaigns and then we’ll just wrap it up maybe give a tip or two because they think we’re approaching our 30minute mark.
LeeAnn: Sure! There are all kinds of tools to help monitor and maximize your reach and achieve your goals some of those are free some of them are paid, I don’t know that we particularly have one that I would just say stand about all the rest but if you look into and do your research your marketing professional they can definitely guide you to what you need based on what your objectives are. Like us, there are people and businesses who can run ads on your behalf; I would say it’s really very important that organic content strategy matches your promotion it’s really find it very challenging when you’re running a really great ad and then you’re seeing content on the profile that doesn’t match or no content on the profile we talked about that a little bit with Pinterest. But I think working hand in hand is really important that doesn’t mean that if you’re not ready to turn it all over that sign to somebody but I do think that you have to work with your people who are running your ad or your organic efforts so that they match up and really like we said with the organic it’s important to keep it simple and keep it social one of the things we didn’t touch on was some of the rules Facebook saw on how much copy can be on an ad and they really, really, don’t like you to put a lot of copy on your image they want to be very simple, they wanted to be visual and that would give you a big red flags every time you try to run an ad how to act on it as your ad not going to perform as well because there’s tags on it so it really is important to keep it very simple and social and try to stay on top of what those best practices are.
Amy: And I have kept that to wrap this up and it is that we are finding that video is actually a really good way to run ads not only do you there’s such a media platform love video, but that your viewers you are your target audience like that to fill you know if you can run a professional video or get a professional video recorded great but it’s not going live and then maybe boosting a live video, you know I’m talking to interested in specific to Facebook but I know Instagram lets you go live. Do some of these other platforms but I don’t believe they do. Any of the other ones that we talked about you can’t really go life, right?
LeeAnn: I don’t believe so.
Amy: I don’t believe so either. But you can always cross promote Social media platform but that you’re on Pinterest and you want to post that you went live and you want people to look at your video on Facebook and there is no nothing wrong with cross promoting that as well so but video, video, video that you know we’re seeing that as a trend for a while now and it’s just increasing more and more and it doesn’t have to be so polished and professional. You have to be professional but you know the video can be phone quality video and still allow you to boost it and reach your target audience. So, and keeping it simple and social. So following your rule I think that’s wrap it up we could share more but we’re trying to keep it short and sweet and helpful to you know if it’s any of our listeners need our help or advice please reach out to us 2033075107. Visit us on our social media platform and LeeAnn thank you for your time today theirs and your knowledge that’s very helpful and do we have a topic yet picked for our next episode?
LeeAnn: I don’t think that we have one yet but I know we have some really great information.
Thanks again for listening to enter the Web chat you can find us on social media or by visiting our website www.infinitewebdesigns.com. So stay tuned for a future power casting discussion.
Welcome back to Infinite Web Chat! Last time we talked PPC (Pay Per Click Marketing).
On Episode 3 we are talking all things Social Media Marketing. Click to listen above or you can read the transcript below. You can also subscribe on iTunes »
Here are Some of the Highlights:
According to Neil Patel, “Social media marketing as the process of creating content that is tailored to the context of each individual social media platform, in order to drive user engagement and sharing.”
BE SOCIAL! Connect with your followers. Follow back. Follow similar brands and be sure to like, comment and share.
Balance is key. If you post too infrequently, people will forget you. If you post too often, you will overcrowd their feed and they will unfollow you.
Facebook has more active users than China has people. (Approx 1.39 Billion)
Content is collaborative. If you are working with an agency, be sure to share enough of your business expertise so they can adopt your voice and provide value-added content.
Welcome and thanks for tuning in to another episode of Infinite Web chat with your host and web marketing specialist Amy DeLardi and LeeAnn Holmberg.
LeeAnn Holmberg: Hi and welcome to Episode3 this is Amy DeLardi and LeeAnn Holmberg and last week in Episode2 we talked about Google Paid Advertising. In this week’s episode where we’re going to be chatting about social media, Amy you want to say Hi to everyone?
Amy DeLardi: Hi everybody good to talk to you again. so they’re with me because I might be a little frazzled because I think getting on this podcast I was technologically challenged today and I’m sure most of our listeners can relate to that at some point in time so hoping that I don’t seem too frazzled again we’re going to talk about now I think social media because there’s quite a bit to talk about there and we’re trying to keep our segment to 30minutes indigestible information. So, let’s get into talking about our topic today and LeeAnn you want to get started?
LeeAnn Holmberg: Sure! Today we’re going to talk about social media like Amy mentioned last week we covered Google advertising and search engine marketing and we thought it would be nice to have talk to high level. Levels of social media to be surprised if we see all levels of social media experience our clients come to us from clients that don’t use social media at all to people that know how to use it personally but not know how to apply it to their business; to those that do have a good following and know what they want, but don’t know how to increase and grow and beyond. So, this week, we kind of want to give a high level overview of some of the major social media platforms give a few tips for posting to each gosh there’s so many I mean. We compete in a list that there’s over 200 Social Media networks and it’s growing. So, we’re going to pick some of the top players that we all known are familiar with at our agency research just picking platforms that you can keep up with rather than signing up for all of them and managing none of them. So, if you’re just getting started or were you’re feeling overwhelmed, we suggest that you look at what best suits your business and honestly look at what speaks to you on what you’re willing to keep up with in your business; or you know in our case if you want to have so many manage your social media networks on your behalf what you’re willing and want to collaborate with and where you want to grow to.
Amy DeLardi: So let’s just give a brief definition of what social media marketing is and what it means because they think that term is thrown around quite often these days and it you know, if people aren’t sure if it paid if it’s organic and you know why don’t we give a little definition about social media marketing before we get into some of the mean potato fare
LeeAnn Holmberg: You’ve got and I am going to borrow a definition from New York to tell who is the co-founder of crazy egg Hello bar and his natural X. He also helped companies the likes of Amazon, G.M. and Viacom N.B.C. grow their revenue so he can to social media marketing as a process of creating content that is tailored to the contact and each individual social media platform in order to drive user engagement and sharing. Notice I didn’t say selling in there at all.
Amy DeLardi: That’s right so therefore that weaves right into what we should talk about first which is content and what are we sharing and how are we going to be engaging with our audience and so I have a few that I can name in and then you can name some as well but you know I like one personally when I’m looking at other people social media, I like it when I see tips or tricks industry related you know whether it’s hair or even you know network marketing, I love when other network marketing companies post tips and tricks. I like to see what the trending You know people are talking about and have to say about trending topics as well and I certainly love inspirational posts so just something to me a little pick me up for my day or if I’m having a frustrated technologically challenge day notice a little inspiration or a sense of humor you know something funny so it’s not always business related. Lee and you have other ideas for content?
LeeAnn Holmberg: Sure! I always like to ask questions so when I’m posting questions, I try to think about how can I get customer input? You know when they’re in something social or it’s an aspect of my business that you know our client’s business that we’d like to see then develop more or optimize so we can ask questions and we can ask what their pain points are what they’re struggling with that then we can learn how to help them or how to give them the right information. You can also ask them to share you know and I mean we say share in social media a lot of times we mean like forward something on that we can ask them to share their personal experiences so we have a client that we work with that does events and a lot of times, we ask their customers to post about their event you know and the specific picture at the event and or their experience of the event. So, that’s a good fun way to get some personal interaction going. Another popular thing that we like to do to increase engagement and increase phone use to run contacts we can ask people to engage, we can ask them to grow or can follow our social media account and then we can give him you know give them incentives like you being something back and then there’s always kind of right in line with what you said the tips and tricks the value added content giving the customer something that will show off your expertise, your knowledge so that when they do need you you’re going to be the person they room yeah I remember I saw that company online let me go back and look and you’ll stay that way a lot more and if you are pushing that sale when it’s time to be social.
Amy DeLardi: Yeah I like to use a rule of some 70/30. I don’t know if you feel the same way but you know 70% of posts should be the tips and tricks there are you know something inspirational or a little humor, information based versus just selling and if you really have to you know push a product or service 30% of the time you should be posting about that, so I don’t know if you agree with that or not you know your rule of thumb is?
LeeAnn Holmberg: I think it is easy, I’m in that same area you know I kind of and closer to the 80/20 rule which you know we talk about that in our business a lot but yeah, I think that you definitely can and I think that when we’re talking about all those above pieces of content and it a lot of that will do that for you. So, you can add a call to action and some of those I think if you pepper in that sales piece and war were right there and people will then take action when you when they’re ready; right you know whether that’s purchased something or consult with you or make an appointment you know book a consultation whatever we need them to do.
Amy DeLardi: Well and it’s not just about posting, it’s you know you don’t just schedule something or post something and then forget it and not ever check back because you know you want to you want to be actually social on it and the more authentic you can be, I think the more successful you are with social media marketing and so, being social mean three spawning to comments if people post comments good or bad you know just don’t take the accolades and hope that the negative goes away have to respond either way. And again you know be human don’t sound like it’s a canned response and it doesn’t have to be so polished and professional I mean you look for spelling errors and make sure things are grammatically correct but you can have more of that first person voice you know and interact with customers and share their stuff on your social media you know I always say do you want to other those you want done to you so if you want followers, are following people if you want more comments have you know start commenting on other people’s social media as well and be a participant in what you want.
LeeAnn Holmberg: I couldn’t agree more and just two quick things that I would point out that one of the health and wellness pages that I follow and I think they do that I really enjoy is, that when somebody on Facebook will leave in a review they share that their paint and name think the customer interact Lee for their review and then they put it right there in their public feed so that’s a part of their social media interaction is when somebody comes along and says hey we think you’re doing a good job or even if you’re not in no interest they still share it and no address whatever the issue is in it and I’ve seen that because it makes a very transparent and it shows how they like to engage with their customers and the second thing is, when I see when clients share, customer share your content or other businesses share your content if you will go back into where they have shared that and if their privacy settings allow like and comment even something as. And push to stay and pay thanks for sharing that goes such a long way it shows that as a business you are paying attention and if they’re valued due to that you appreciate and taking the time to do that even if that’s not their intention, a lot of times when I see people sharing our innocence you’d think inspirational quotes or some other content but taking it time that will make them remember you when they need your service.
Amy DeLardi: Well it’s interesting enough my daughter does a horse riding at a farm and the farm owners posted something on their social media about summer camp coming up and I wanted to share that post when I went to share it, it didn’t have to share a button on it so I wrote in the comment you know can you change your privacy settings so that I can share this on your behalf and they ended up changing the privacy settings so that I can share it, and then I when I did go to share that post in a Mom group local to the town where I live, another Mom said hey thanks for sharing, very helpful information. So, that’s just a first-hand experience personally you know it’s not even business related it is on every fevers and but from my end it was just me you know wanting to share that information and get it out to other Moms who are looking to fill their summer activities for their kids. So, I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with posting a comment hey can you expose says or open up the privacy settings so that I can share this on your behalf.
LeeAnn Holmberg: I agree to that.
Amy DeLardi: So frequency, how you know how much is too much when how you know I have this asked this question out all the time how much should I be posting and I know different platforms are going to have different you know basic rules of some sorts. Let’s talk a little bit about frequency of posting.
LeeAnn Holmberg: Sure and you’re right on target I mean every platform has its own. Kind of standard that balance here is the key is Wow And if you post too infrequently, people are going to forget you know you post too often you’re going to overcrowd their feet and unfollow you and we’ve experienced this with clients on both ends of the spectrum and there really is a good balance to it and you don’t want to shove it all down their throat or you know especially the sales piece of it because they’ll just walk away if you’re if they’re having to scroll past multiple posts from you, they’ll be done but if they don’t see you enough choose have your information stick and they’ll just forget that you’re there, you know not think oh I wish you know who was that person he won’t recall who you are.
Amy DeLardi: And let’s talk about hashtags and sometimes the fun sometimes the dreaded hashtag.
LeeAnn Holmberg: Hashtags are very common practice now, and they’re used to add net information must also show media channels. We have seen that are out it which would be just the stuff over use all the time and we try to encourage people and show them how to use and balanced fashion as well you know just enough.
Amy DeLardi: So that’s perfect and we’ll probably get into a little bit more hashtags specific tips when we talk about the different social media platforms that we’re going to discuss today like you said there’s well over 200. So, we’re just going to give some highlights on the top popular ones let’s start with Twitter. You know Twitter has tweets that are restricted to 140 characters, I think most people know that already is that it does character they include hashtags on the handles still?
LeeAnn Holmberg: Yes
Amy DeLardi: And so take that into consideration when you’re when you’re crafting your tweet 140 characters again that’s why people use that Lee or small links if you’re linking somewhere so that that is also. Not taking up 140 characters as well. What else? Let’s talk at all how many times a day should we maybe be posting to Twitter or what do other people do?
LeeAnn Holmberg: That’s kind of a greatly be debated one which Twitter you know one thing I’ll say about Twitter is it’s really a great resource to see what trends you know what people are talking about when you go to what’s trending in your Twitter feed, if you’re you know on your computer you can see you know the far left hand side if you’re on your mobile there’s a tab at the bottom that it tells you kind of what everybody is talking about and that can be a good source for you, if you are crafting a post for that day so that you can be relevant and be on top of whatever’s happening. As far as posting it really is you know there are things that that say post once a day to Twitter all the way to 108 really is Twitter has a very short shelf life the rule of thumb I would give it be between about 3-30times a day I know that sounds like a lot there are a ton of tools where you can preach queue up content and would not suggest sending 30tweets wants or retweeting 30tweets want to fill your quota for the day and needs to be spaced out when I say it has a short shelf life because there’s so many other users tweeting and it gets lost in people’s stream, so you want to balance that out.
Amy DeLardi: So do we have any tips or a hashtag tips for Twitter?
LeeAnn Holmberg: You bet so Twitter does use hashtag as we mentioned before, it goes into your 140 characters so we would suggest to use them but not overuse them one of the tips that I have is to take the time to go back like we talked about earlier take the time to go back and like which is a little heart if you’re looking in there through Twitter stream like things that people have where they’ve mentioned you know or like James. You find relevant or reach retrieve them or if somebody has tweeted at you or mention you and a comment Be sure to respond again people will remember you know you start to develop a Twitter tried of people who will read on your behalf or like or help grow your reach when it becomes a recent reciprocal thing.
Amy DeLardi: Perfect! So, that’s good we’re going to wrap up Twitter because we have some other platforms and I want to take too long we can always dive in deeper So if we have our listeners have questions specific you know you can always post comments on our blog or reach out to us on social media and ask questions we would be happy more than happy to say answer them so let’s move right into Linked In which has over four hundred million users people are there to see what new in their industry or who is hiring it’s a nice repository of a resume for yourself also following other trends that are maybe work related and you know staying up to speed with that so how many times a day would you suggest posting on LinkedIn?
LeeAnn Holmberg: LinkedIn is definitely more business driven. I have started to see a trend where it’s not I guess it’s easy up a little bit but not a lot you know still very much business related. So, on LinkedIn you just need to post a couple times a week had to very modest I would say once a day. This isn’t something where you really want to steal your feed this is more about connecting with like-minded businesses like minded business professionals and growing your business network
Amy DeLardi: So the time that you spend on LinkedIn is not as much posting as it is perusing or taking the time to keep your profile. Well updated and fresh correct?
LeeAnn Holmberg: Absolutely! Hashtags are not used on LinkedIn. If you use them and they don’t and that it doesn’t grab there so they’re kind of filler space and it can be somewhat annoying there, but yeah it really is about connecting to keeping your profile up to date. it’s like mine portfolio so if you have completed something project or you know in our realm of complete websites and things like that we can put them there and also it’s about helping grow your network and you know help grow you so there’s a really simple way link and if I give gave one to peer it would be take a few minutes you know each week set aside some time go on there, see who you can connect with and then there’s a place where you can endorse your connections so you’ll get a notification that says you know you’re now connected with so and so go into their profile, take a look and under their endorsement and endorsement for a few skills, usually don’t come back in unison and ask those endorsements not what that does certainly can as it tells us you should be at the top so they start suggesting you more and so I would really doesn’t take a lot of time or effort or energy and kind of solidifies your connection with that new person and it will help both of you in the long run.
Amy DeLardi: So moving on from LinkedIn those are all great tips of thank you for your value out there as well but I ask you this we’re going to talk about Pinterest, how many users are on Pinterest?
LeeAnn Holmberg: There are over 100m users and 85% of these users are female.
Amy DeLardi: Great, I didn’t know.
LeeAnn Holmberg: You know it that way Pinterest does it it’s kind of like a digital scrapbook or either one but yeah. They go down the rabbit hole and it a lot of times for me and my humor break because I’ll start looking at when the humor is post and then just. You know even though we say that we’ve actually had experience with a client who had a really strong male audience on an interest so please don’t rule that out even though we know we are talking about the bulk of their users being female, that doesn’t mean that there’s not in our automotive part company that we were working with and they had a great audience on Pinterest. So, there is definitely a male base who is there and that you can be targeted that most of most of them are female and there’s tons of great information on there.
Amy DeLardi: Are we using hash tags on Pinterest?
LeeAnn Holmberg: You know what Pinterest did not use to use hashtags and they now do they’re using them for first search purposes and added them on and not something that it’s just recently changed with them. So, you can again I would suggest not overfilling your feed pick a couple relevant hashtags on our team when we’re using a lot of times will use them for the names of our board which helps with the search as well and it’s hard how many times the two pin per day you know that the me sweet spot is around three times a day you can pin up to 30times a day I would suggest if you’re pinning that much that you have fantastic content so that you’re not making people walk away you know if you’re in an industry or in a business now that really is visually driven and you can handle that capacity and I think that’s great but typically what I’m seeing is around 3-5-7.
Amy DeLardi: I have it have that I’m going to share and then I’ll open it up for you to show. Sarah need to say you have but sometimes I’ll see people that you know they’re more used to using Pinterest for personal and like shopping around and looking at stuff not shopping as in buying but you know just kind of poking around and getting inspired or whatever but when you’re using it for this purposes or you know trying to trying to build a following, you really shouldn’t just code something to Pinterest that dead end people meaning, if I’m on I have a picture on my phone and I want to pan it if I want people to you know to engage with that photo, I was going to want to post it to my Website maybe attach an article or cement more information about it and then Pin. I don’t know if I’m making sense about the way that I’m that I’m explaining it but oftentimes I will find that, you know people knew be posting for business to Pinterest they will just think that they just pin a be a no or a post a picture and it really needs to be a little bit more thought out so that you’re leading your traffic back to your website or that people can learn a little bit more about you and then just looking at the picture that you posted
LeeAnn Holmberg: I think that’s great and to give just the personal side of that you know when I’m online looking at things to shop for myself I find like an article of clothing and if I really like and I think I want to go shopping then I click on the picture and see it’s just a picture and then it’s a dead end just like you said. It’s somewhat frustrating because I work online I know some tips to get around that but that is it is somebody looking to shop or do business with you and they can’t get to you and they get stopped at your picture, most likely they’re going to move on to the next similar picture or similar thing if they if you know A clear cut way to get to you get more information so that either information in the post or clicking to your website making the mentioned
Amy DeLardi: Do you have any other tips?
LeeAnn Holmberg: Yeah so one of the ways and I find painting is a lot easier is that almost all browsers have an at pinning extension a browser button that you can add to your website browser so that it’s right there in the bar at the top and so when you are on your website you continue actually from your website to sending We do a lot we can just click on an image and then it automatically directs them right back to our URL. So, whatever URL, if it’s our business specifically, it’s one of our clients, if we tend from the web page then it would sway me mention that dead end.
Amy DeLardi: I also want to make mention that when people are using Pinterest or you’re choosing to use Pinterest at the platform to reach your target audience, it really is your target audience is it expecting what you’re posting to be more visual based versus copy heavy and lengthy post. So, we didn’t say that when we first started talking about Pinterest but I think it’s important to know that and rule Pinterest out if that’s not really what is going to work for your business and your target audience that you’re looking to attract.
LeeAnn Holmberg: Yes, I agree
Amy DeLardi: So, let’s move on to Facebook. Have I think that most IT today that most users
LeeAnn Holmberg: Well I’m. Not going to guarantee that but they have more active unit users and China has people they have approximately 1.39b users and growing. So, I believe
Amy DeLardi: And that’s more friendly to multimedia right? so it’s images that can be just copy, it could be links, it could be videos, can post full photo albums, so some of these other platforms are a little more limiting you know Facebook is a little bit more all inclusive of a lot of different media, right?
LeeAnn Holmberg: Absolutely! Yes and it continues to grow. So, they’re always tweaking when that looks like. Now, you can you can go life on your Facebook Messenger. There are a lot you can go live on your Facebook page, so there are lots of different opportunities and they like to continue to change.
Amy DeLardi: Yes they do which is why we love our job. People hire others they get so frustrated with trying to keep up with the trends. But you know having said that they make it a little more challenging for professionals to do that and it has to be more of a collaborative thing which goal will talk about that a little bit but how many times would you say that people should target a post a day on Facebook?
LeeAnn Holmberg: You know again near and you can look online and see all kinds of recommendation we really suggest that you’re posting 1-2 times a day and not a whole lot more than mostly because what we talked about the beginning of the call it calving some balance and not overselling people’s feeds you users typically won’t go in and scroll to Facebook and certain intervals during the day and they don’t need to be over inundated with just your stuff but having it in there for them to see, is really important
Amy DeLardi: Nothing frustrates me more than when they triple or you know quadruple posts like all in a row it makes me feel like I’m on their profile or their page and I accidentally clicked into it and I see all of these multiple posts at once and then I get frustrated and often I was well unfollow though you know we all want to do that it actually if you’re trying to build your following
LeeAnn Holmberg: Absolutely! And I think that’s what we see a lot of people do and we have a I have had experience with clients who insist upon and are frustrated when people are walking away or not responding the way the thing anticipated or if they’re doing hard sales. So, it really is important to keep it balanced and not overdo it so speaking of overdoing it what I did talk about. Things started there was hashtags stepping all over the place especially on Facebook so really and I you know I still struggle with clients now who want to put as many as possible in there Poston have to say listen you’ve got to rein back in like this again a big turnoff on Facebook people want content Facebook will being you they won’t show you in the street as much using relevant hashtags, consistent hashtags brand related you know what we help our clients develop what that is. But yes you can use them but really it’s important not to overuse them and a lot of times this is where I’ll refer over to what I said back to Twitter and I look and see what’s trending for the day what’s going on and if there’s something that’s relevant to a business and that’s great but I don’t try to force something to work that want so, yes you can use them please, please, be judicious I mean one other tip that I would have it’s really, really, important about getting your business page seen in Facebook there are a ton of tools that will let you prescheduled your content and if this is kind of a pain point and takes a little bit of extra work that really it’s no important that you if you’re going to prescheduled for Facebook that you do it within their platform and their tools for you to do that, where you can use schedule at her future date for your business page not for your personal pose that Facebook reward to you for that and they actually will bill you if you use another platform like Hoot Suite or buffer to send out content.
Amy DeLardi: What we learned that a couple years ago with some of our clients we were using Hoot Suite and it wasn’t even a really a well-known talked about thing at that point in time, we just happened upon it and got lucky to realize that our post that we scheduled and Hoot Suite were actually getting less reach than the ones that we would post right with and Facebook. So, it was happy fighting and then we just sort of went with it and just started scheduling right with and Facebook but that was the early on before people even really knew that Facebook doesn’t look fondly upon third party software products like Hoot Suite and others.
LeeAnn Holmberg: Yes and they do they have rules and algorithms and there are a lot of different things that we have to follow and like Google are ever changing that the impact how much you’re seeing you know not engagement and you doing things the Facebook way and if you continue to push that or not follow that and then you will start to see a merry clear and decline in your reach and so that’s something we want our entire team we all try to stay top of and try to share with each other as we see new things coming up.
Amy DeLardi: So last but not least we’ll talk about Instagram, share a few tips and tricks about that.
LeeAnn Holmberg: Instagram has actually the highest engagement rate if you have been on Instagram you know why, I have to do is tap-tap scroll tap-tap and when you’re scrolling you’re looking at all these images and tap-tap into liking the image takes a couple extra seconds if you want to comment in a very visually engaging. It really is and always has been about pictures. They have just recently shorter videos that you can include but it’s a very visual platform.
Amy DeLardi: How many times a day should we be posting on Instagram?
LeeAnn Holmberg: So we would suggest posting about once a day and ceramic and no more than three times a day and when you’re posting and like Facebook we definitely don’t want you to post three times in a row because that would just say people scroll right on past off three.
Amy DeLardi: When I first started using Instagram I have two children teenagers and. I would they followed me and I followed them that was one of the rules for them having an Instagram account and they were mortified when I post more than once a day and they were like breaking the cult rules, but it was for all so I study and I always say well they must know you’re talking to other people I’m like well you’re really not supposed to post more than once and it’s funny somebody Parents corrected me and they were a friend of mine and they were like oh that’s just the kids.
LeeAnn Holmberg: Yes it is apparent I mean it’s ok to want to post if you’re having you know some day you want to share your awesome day I mean. And it it’s not as much for me and our sharing my experiences so I can go back and reflect on those later as it is, sharing with everybody else but you do have to be curious and remember everybody else or say your account private and you can just put twenty at the same shot.
Amy DeLardi: Well you know I love to though now that they have those multiple you can upload multiple pictures Yes So you know aren’t able off and then people can scroll through them so you know am I right if you say no I mean
LeeAnn Holmberg: I love do not and other really cool trick. And has you know we hear about celebrities like making up and breaking up and leaving show to racing each other from the time lines and things like that there’s an Archive button now so, I’m not in the vein of making up or breaking up but I had a post on my Instagram that was supporting another business who was having event and I always thought about being a shot to leave I know this is well and done and not really relevant to my pain and then when that archive came out I thought man this is create I can archive it, I can see that it still happened it’s still there that I can move on.
Amy DeLardi: How recent is that?
LeeAnn Holmberg: You know and it’s in the last 90days OK sorry approach No that’s OK If I’m if I’m wrong on that you know you guys can comment and then tell me that’s totally fine it’s in the last 90days because I and I can archive alerts and I mean this is fantastic.
Amy DeLardi: One of things that I love about Instagram is that I don’t think you can have too many hashtags in my world that you saved and I have fun with them too and as I did make them up so and it makes my mates my friends left and do you have any comment related comments about hashtags on it to Instagram
LeeAnn Holmberg: If you are hashtag lover this is your platform you can hashtag it up. Yes more hashtags is totally fine, the one thing I would say on this is that, it’s really important that they’re relevant. So, if you are out on a sending that same you are out hiking which is something we like to do a lot on the weekends so if you’re out hiking. You can put all kinds of relevant hashtags but if it’s ascending and I’m hiking and I put Sunday brunch it’s not relevant and Instagram actually started doing this new very. Quiet process of shadow blocking and what shadow boxing is It is people who are pushing on Instagram and they are using trending hashtags that are not relevant to their image so instrument am well shadow blocked them which means they will prevent the number of people who actually get to see your posts you don’t like it when you abuse the system this is a very, very, new trend that we’re seeing them do and there’s actually tool not there that you can check to see if you’re being shadow blocked. So, let’s say you post something and you’re getting a ton of likes and things are looking great you’re think you’re really growing and then one day you post something and it’s 5-10minutes before anybody even hits the first like button and you’re not being reached there’s a good chance that that you’ve made a mistake intentional or not and you’re being shadow blocked and so that’s something that I’ve been researching a lot lately and lucky. we can help our clients stay away from that that would be something I’d be wary of if you’re using all the hashtags and there is not a limit on Instagram.
Amy DeLardi: Very, very, interesting information that shadow blocking and like you said it so new that it’s cool be able to share with our listeners some newer tips that they might not have heard about. One last thing I want to ask you about which hashtaging I notice that people will either put their hashtags in the post itself or they will save them and then add them to a comment below shortly thereafter they’ve posted why do they do that why do they add them to the comments versus just putting them in. I’ve tried it because I thought maybe I was missing out on something and what I’ve noticed no if you have, is that my post will get in some of the hashtags feeds and I don’t know if it’s because the timing saying but why did it why do people do that I’m missing out on something?
LeeAnn Holmberg: Sure so you know we’ve offline we’ve had this conversation before and so I went back in and did a little research to see what the current information was so yes people will sometimes in their posts like in the content of where they put their copy they will include the hashtag they’re just below the copy or sometimes they will put them in a comment right after you know they’ll make their post and then no comment with all of their hashtags at one point in time, it did matter and it was really important for you to have those hashtags in your post at the same time what we are starting to see and what I’m I was reading about now is that now really those will work if you see something that is working well for you and I would I would suggest stick to that because it is something I see it both ways so I think it really is up to you one of the things you know people are putting in the comments because they didn’t in it like a statistically how it looked to have their copy and all these hashtags under it. So, that’s how it started and now I think Instagram has to kind of relent on this one and said are right will go out and put you in the feeds. If you’re seeing that you’re not going into the hash tag and I want to just continue to keep it up in the copy and it’s typically what I try to do in most cases, I can think of one client for example that has a lot of relevant hashtags and so, a lot of times we’ll put some in a copy and then also in a comment oh yeah it’s really it’s up to you it’s your preference and you can play around with it like Amy mentioned and see which you do you see a difference and what’s working for you.
Amy DeLardi: So just to wrap things up wave we talk a lot about tips and tricks for more of that D.I.Y. or and what let’s give a tip on if you’re working with an agency and you know maybe something to look out for a tip to just better your experience with working with an agency.
LeeAnn Holmberg: If you’re working with an agency really I think it’s important to remember that you share enough of your business expertise with your agency so that they can adopt your voice and that they can provide value added content on your behalf you know content really is collaborative tool. So, what we tend to see is that our clients who get good relevant information you know sometimes that’s all upfront and one-time saying and sometimes it’s an ongoing business or business changes over time you know our throughout the year as they offer different parts of their services I’m thinking of one client in particular that we have fantastic at providing you know how their industry changes over the year every year and they provide enough information to really help us position them as experts and it’s fantastic, it’s not really something that you can just hand over and go hey here you go. I think you can find industry specific agencies so if you’re looking for something I mean definitely available to you but if you’re working with American emergency, I think it’s really important that it’s collaborative and that you work with them. And it only helps you it doesn’t mean that you have to do the job for them but that providing your know how in your knowledge will really make it such a huge difference for you.
Amy DeLardi: One of the things that we do you know behind the scenes to help manage that their voice and their collaboration and you know our work is well put together content calendar and that you know when we build it we have like a template that we start with and then we customize it for that particular client that we share that with them in Google docs so we have a really nice system and that may be a really good Podcast to retract about how to organize a country and calendar things to think about so let’s mark that down line too to talk about in one of the coming future podcast.
LeeAnn Holmberg: Yeah, that will be great.
Amy DeLardi: So speaking of future Podcast, we covered a lot this week and we covered a lot more bits and tricks for more mostly organic but there’s a whole pay to play part of Social Media Marketing and we don’t even really talk at all about that so next week right we’re going to talk about that?
LeeAnn Holmberg: Yeah, that would be great.
Amy DeLardi: OK So thank you listeners for tuning in again to Podcast 3, we will catch you next week.
LeeAnn Holmberg: Have a great week, take care. Bye.
Welcome back to Infinite Web Chat! Last week we talked SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
On Episode 2 we are talking all things PPC (Pay Per Click). Click to listen above or you can read the transcript below. You can also subscribe on iTunes »
Here are Some of the Highlights:
Pay per click marketing should be viewed is a long-term investment.
PPC can be useful for several different goals, whether you’re launching a new service and need awareness or you’re launching a new website and want to drive traffic quickly and raise awareness quickly to get people to your website to learn about your new products or services.
You must have clearly defined goals, content and a funnel for your PPC campaign.
Define your target audience, keywords and budget.
Ad campaigns must have a clear call to action.
Tracking and analytics is key to determining your ROI and adjustments that need to be made.
Following Google’s best practices will ensure you receive more [quality] traffic.
Amy DeLardi: Welcome to episode two. This is Amy and LeeAnn. Last week, episode one, we talked about organic SEO. This week we are going to talk about Google advertising and pay-per-click campaigns. LeeAnn, you with me?
LeeAnn Holmberg: Yes, I’m with you. Hi, everybody.
Amy DeLardi: Before we get into the best practices and the budget and the quality score and some of the different things that we’re prepared to talk about today, let’s just talk about when to use Google pay-per-click advertising. LeeAnn, do you want to answer that first and then I’ll give my perspective on it?
LeeAnn Holmberg: Sure. It’s important, if you’re going to use PPC, pay-per-click marketing, that you are in it for the long game. I think it is something, when we are working with clients, we recommend a minimum of six months and we would love to see them commit to at least a year before we can have a fully optimized campaign and seeing them reach the goals that we define in the very beginning.
Amy DeLardi: Yeah. Often time people think it’s a quick fix and so they really don’t have the budget for it, if they’re a smaller business. They don’t understand that some keywords can be very competitive, which translates to very pricey, so they don’t have a budget to compete over a long period of time. We could get more into that in a little bit. Last week, again, we talked about organic SEO. I prefer that method of attracting leads and traffic to your website, but sometimes you need a more immediate gratification, whether you’re launching a new service and you need awareness to it or you’re launching a new website and you really want to drive traffic quickly and raise awareness quickly and get people to your website to learn about your new products or services.
That’s when I find that Google pay-per-click or PPC is a good alternative solution to driving more of that quick traffic and leads, especially if you have a certain conversion or a certain goal that you’re trying to hit. Often times I like to consult people to run that in tandem with organic SEO strategies. Again, talked about that in episode one. Have a listen if haven’t to that. Again, I think that Google pay-per-click has a use definitely.
It’s more of that immediate gratification or a tougher arena to play in or to get organic ranking in, but it also is competitive and it can get costly. Let’s get into best practices. You’ve decided that you really need to pay to play and you really need to get awareness to a product or service quickly and you’ve decided that you’re going to use Google pay-per-click as a strategy to do so. Where do you start?
LeeAnn Holmberg: Sure. I would suggest the very first thing is something you’ve already touched on, and that’s having a very clearly defined goal. If you’re going to run a campaign, it really needs to be focused on one specific goal. If you have more than one, then we would suggest, obviously, more than one campaign. It’s so important because we want the end user to have one experience and we need to keep them on track to do what we want them to do. We don’t want to muddy the water.
Your goal, it can be to drive traffic. Like Amy said, if you need that immediate, get people to your page, if we are looking for them to make a purchase, if it is to make a phone call or if it’s lead generation: we want their name and their email, but we have to pick one. If you give them too many options, then they’re going to be all over the place and they’re not going to stay on track. They’re going to go down a rabbit hole and you’ll lose them. That’s lost money for you and that’s not helpful.
We need that clear, defined goal. Then next, who do we want to be looking at these ads? We need to define who that target audience is. Part of that is working with our clients and listening to who their audience is. Then part of it is doing some research based on that so that we can help guide and direct them. One of the reasons that we suggest running these ads for a long time is we also get data back once the ads have been running.
Once that information starts to roll in, we may think that your audience is this group of people, but really we can narrow that focus down based on some of the data that we start to get back after your ads have been running for a good period of time. When we are starting out, it’s the same as the organic SEO that we were talking about last week; we want to have very clearly defined keywords. We’ll help you with that.
We’ll take the keywords that, again, you think and then we’ll run them through some tools so we can get some numbers based on searches, tweak that, and then really come up with a clear list of what those are to help design a landing page. That landing page will be based on what your goal is. We know that you probably have a website and it’s beautiful and there’s probably lots of amazing things that you’re offering, but in order to reach this clearly defined goal, we want a clearly defined landing page.
It almost puts blinders on the user. It keeps them flowing and looking at exactly what we want them to look at. If our goal is lead generation, we need them to fill out a form that will get them a free downloadable and then stick them into a long-term email campaign to sell them, then that’s what we want them to do. We don’t want to say, “Do that or call us.” We want to keep them flowing and moving to our one defined goal.
Amy DeLardi: And something that is trackable, too, so that you know that your investment is working.
LeeAnn Holmberg: Absolutely.
Amy DeLardi: You definitely want that goal to be trackable.
LeeAnn Holmberg: Yeah. There are several ways that we do that. We can do that behind the scenes with the tools that we’re using, and we can do it with the type of form that we’re using on your website. Also, going to what we were saying, keeping them right there on that page and not letting them wander around. If they go to your website, if we just send them to the contact form on your website, for example, then they might see who we are, about us or what we do or what other clients are saying, and then they start to wander off, and then we lose them doing that.
If we include all of that information in a clearly defined landing page and we keep them right there and we don’t give them opportunities to wander, then we keep them where we ant them and we don’t lose them in our website. Now, of course once we have them reaching that first goal, then we can introduce them to the website and show them all of the other pieces that go along.
Amy DeLardi: Right.
LeeAnn Holmberg: We want to be able to track from A to Z exactly how these ads are doing, and that’s one important way to do that. One of the things that we specialize in is writing campaign ads. When we’re writing those ads that’s going to lead the traffic to those landing pages to reach our goal, we want to be sure that we’re using the keyword that we’ve targeted, want a very clear call to action, so not only do we want them to take a clear action on that landing page; we’ve got to give them a clear reason to go to the landing page.
There’s lots of ads out there, so it’s really important to be creative and stand out. If you are a regular user of Google or Bing, which I think most people are, sometimes it can get really easy to glaze over those ads that are at the top or on the right hand side. We need a reason to not do that. We work really hard with our clients to make sure that we stand out in those ad spots so that it will jump out and really show expertise, creativity, and a reason to click on us, on that ad there rather than scrolling on down into the organic.
Amy DeLardi: Oh, go ahead.
LeeAnn Holmberg: I was just going to say, all the stuff we just discussed, all of that factors into something that Google really values when it comes to Google ads, and that’s a quality score. I know we’re going to dive into that more in just a little bit, but all of those best practices play a part of that, so I think that’s really important: that they’re all on target so that Google sees that we’re playing by their rules.
Amy DeLardi: Yeah. The landing page a lot of people dismiss. I have found that clients dismiss the value of a landing page and they don’t understand how seriously Google takes that. Sometimes Google will shut your ad down as a result of that. I think we’re going to get into that a little bit more with talking about the quality score. You know what I get asked all the time? I’m sure you do as well.
Is “Well, how much money do I have to spend?” That’s such a hard question to answer because it’s nice that Google has allowed anyone to pay to play, but sometimes … That’s a hard question to ask, most often, because each keyword that you’re looking to play and get ranking for is different, so there’s no one size fits all or one budget fits all. Do you want to talk a little bit more about how to determine your budget?
LeeAnn Holmberg: Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the things you’ll find consistent through most of the things we discuss is that it is a long-term game. We have seen the best results out of long-term consistency. I think we mentioned even last week that there are people out there that will guarantee, “If you spend X with us, we’ll get you Y.” We’re just not the people for that. We will work very diligently and we’ll use your money like it’s our own, so we’re very, very ware of that, but if we haven’t run ads at all before, with you before, then we’ve got to get a little bit of data.
The places where I typically tend to start when we’re talking about the factors of your budget: “Let’s look at your overall marketing budget. What is your marketing budget for the year? How much of that are you willing to set aside just for this?” If we’re suggesting at least six months to 12 months, obviously we want that to continue on. It’s not something that you just get to the end of the 12 months and we just shut it off. How much of your budget are we willing to commit to that?
Then “What industry are you in?” and “What keywords are we targeting?” Because the higher your competition is in your industry and for the keywords that we’re choosing, then the higher your budget is going to be. Health and wellness is a highly competitive industry. If you have a very low spend per day, for example if you have 25 or $50 a day, which is a lot of money … I’m not saying in any way that it’s not. That’s a lot. That could be two or three clicks a day, depending on the keyword you choose. Is that worth it?
Those are things that we look at and evaluate together. If we’re targeting one keyword, just a very small group of keywords and we can only get a couple clicks per day, we don’t want to just take your money and spend it. We’ll tell you Google will do that. That’s how Google has opened it up and allowed for everybody to play because there’s so many people that are in there that play and aren’t necessarily doing it in the most optimized fashion. We want to make sure that we’re using your money wisely and you are too.
Amy DeLardi: Right.
LeeAnn Holmberg: There’s keyword tools that can help guide you to determine each. Like I mentioned, if your keyword is highly competitive, then we can back into what the estimated spend would be so we can plug that in. Of course, those tools give us what it would look like if your account, entire campaign is fully optimized. That will give us kind of a benchmark to work with. I know that that’s not necessarily what our clients want to hear.
A lot of them want us to say, “We suggest you spend $500 or $1,000.” If we do that, then we try to give those numbers and say, “If you use these keywords and you spend $500, this is what we’re estimating.” However, that includes doing all the things we just talked about, all those best practices above. If we don’t follow those, then we end up with leaks and then the marketing dollars kind of fall away, and we definitely don’t want to see that.
Amy DeLardi: Right. I know that Google has settings where you can run a daily budget or a monthly budget or you can also let Google decide how to spend that budget and when to display and all of that. It sort of has a little bit of a wizard, built-in brain aspect to this. Can you talk a little bit … I don’t want to take up too much time. … a little bit about that and what you feel is the best use of that, of those settings?
LeeAnn Holmberg: Sure. As far as the spend, the daily spend or the campaign-wide spend, it’s really important that you pay attention because if you have the wrong information there and you set your campaign budget as the daily budget, then you’re in big trouble. We’re going to talk about managing and monitoring your campaign too. Yeah, that’s important to set that, double-check it. It really is kind of setting that cap on your account. Like you mentioned, Google, they do have an option to run ads and optimize based on their algorithms.
That’s what I use. Even as a professional that runs these ads, typically I don’t stray from that. I feel like they have so many eyes and people working on this and algorithms that are running that they really know what they’re doing and are going to spend it in the best way possible. Now, I may see that at 4:00 A.M. it’s not a good use of time based on some results that we see, so we may adjust over time, but typically I will use that and I would suggest using that because this is their game, they know what they’re doing.
I don’t think that going in and trying to set all that up upfront is really a smart use of your time. Also, if you do that, then you don’t really let Google tell you the information. If you narrow the scope up front, we don’t get to see that big picture. I like to let Google run it. Then we can evaluate overtime and decide if we need to make some tweaks. There is an option to run ads advanced, so if you want to blow through your budget as quickly as you can, you can do that. That may mean in the first three hours of the day, then your ads are done.
It works off of your timezone, so it starts where you start. If you’re in the Eastern Timezone, it will start at your time there. There are use and reason for that, but typically what we want the ads to do is run over time and see how they perform. Then, like I said, we can narrow down a focus. If they’re performing the best over lunch or just after lunch, then we can really hone in on that. Especially if you have a smaller budget that you’re working with, then we can start to target that. I wouldn’t narrow that focus without data first.
Amy DeLardi: Okay. A little while ago we talked a little bit about quality score. Let’s describe or explain what quality score is and then talk about some factors that play into that score.
LeeAnn Holmberg: Sure. Quality score, it’s something that you’ll find. It’s a measure of how your campaign is doing, how your ads are set up, how your landing page is set up, how the overall campaign and your entire account is. There are lots of factors that go into that. It’s kind of Google is grading you. They’re saying, “Hey, you’re doing well. Hey, you’re not.” It’s really important because the better your quality score is, the higher on the page you are. When it comes to ads, that’s extremely important.
We want to be in the top ads or in the top two to three places. If you are below the fold or below where people have to scroll, your chances of being seen get significant diminished, so we want to make sure that our quality score is good, Google sees that we’re following their rules and we’re doing what we’re supposed to do. There’s three main factors, really, that determine it. There’s lots of factors, but three of the big ones that we see are the ad relevance to your target keywords.
Before, I mentioned that the ad copy needs to include those target keywords, your expected click-through rate, which is a part of what Google thinks you’re going to get based on all of the factors that go into the campaign, and then the landing page experience. Amy touched on this earlier. She said clients will want to overlook this and they’ll just say, “We’ll just send them to my webpage,” or “Just send them to this specific page on my website.”
That right there will automatically cause an issue with Google because they want to see that narrow focus. They want to see the content on the page matches what the ads are, what the keywords are and that it’s a good experience, that you’re not making false claims, that you’re not making outrageous claims, that it’s relevant information, that there are good images and it’s clear where you want them to take action, whatever that action or that goal is.
Amy DeLardi: I think also, too, we’ve recently seen this with some clients who came to us that were running ads unbeknownst to us and they weren’t working. They didn’t have a landing page, so they were pointing them to the website. Google gave them a bad grade or quality score because the site speed wasn’t loading. That’s another factor that they look at. When you have a landing page, it’s reduced images, faster loading time, again putting the blinders on. You don’t have a navigation, really, to all the other parts of your website. It’s just a faster avenue to the call to action that you want them to do. I know that I’ve recently seen that site speed is one of the factors that goes into your quality score as well.
LeeAnn Holmberg: Absolutely.
Amy DeLardi: So keep that in mind.
LeeAnn Holmberg: Yeah.
Amy DeLardi: Okay. We wanted to keep these chats to a digestible timeframe. I’d love to wrap up and talk about monitoring and measuring as the last topic. I think we’ve given our listeners some quite valuable information. Let’s talk about that before we close.
LeeAnn Holmberg: Sure. AdWords provides some really great tools to monitor and measure your campaign performance. This, in conjunction with Google Analytics, will really give you a good overview of how your campaigns are doing. Again, after you have a good amount of data, you can make some tweaks and edits. Now, when you make those tweaks and edits, again, we suggest you give that some time so we can see that performance and then continue on.
Some really important factors to look at are cost per conversion, click-through rates, the cost per click, and your conversion rates. As we talk about all this stuff, AdWords is really a time-sensitive or, I’m sorry, time-intensive endeavor. It’s also time sensitive. When you’re in there, you need to be making good adjustments and smart adjustments because we’re spending your money every day, so we suggest that you monitor as much as possible and set a schedule.
On our team, we set a schedule to go in and monitor … For smaller accounts with less than five campaigns, we suggest that you’re in there three to four times a week and then scale from there. Of course, all of that’s dependent on how competitive your campaigns or your industry is. Then you’ll scale up from there. It takes a lot of time and there are a lot of good tools, but it can be really overwhelming if you’re trying to run this and run your business, so we’re here to help.
Amy DeLardi: A lot of people will come to me and they’ll have tried it on their own, they’ll call Google. Google is a great resource to help you, but they only help you to a certain point and then they expect that you either manage it yourself or hire a professional. I think that hiring a professional actually will save you time and save you money because they know the ins and outs of how to set up a campaign, use the best practices, and read the data so that we can make adjustments and we know how to measure the return on investment and understanding how to read that quality score and whatnot.
I think we’ve shared enough information. We can keep going and talking about this topic. If we haven’t hit on a specific area that you, as a listener, is interested in learning more about, you know where to find us:infinitewebdesigns.com. Our number is 203-307-5107. We are on social media. Hopefully, we gave you enough information to either help you along or know that we can be a resource to you. With that said, next week’s topic or chat is going to be on social media advertising. LeeAnn, are we going to talk about organic and paid or just paid social media advertising?
LeeAnn Holmberg: We can talk about a little bit of the differences between the two. Then I think we can probably spend a good amount of time covering the paid and then circle back around in another episode and discuss organic and all that goes into all of that.
Amy DeLardi: So stay tuned for our next week’s episode. Thanks for listening today.
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Welcome to Infinite Web Chat! On Episode 1 we are talking all things SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Click above to listen or you can read the transcript below. You can also subscribe on iTunes »
Here are Some of the Highlights:
SEO is search engine optimization, and it’s the practice of increasing quality and quantity of traffic to your website through organic search engine.
Keyword research is KEY!
Search engines are expecting blog content to be fresh, relevant and longer – 1000 keywords is standard and 2000 or more is expected in highly competitive markets.
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Next week we will be talking about PPC (Pay Per Click) marketing.
Amy DeLardi: Hi, I’m Amy DeLardi with Infinite Web Designs, and I have LeeAnn my SEO and social media specialist here with me today. Today’s topic is SEO, and we’re going to share a little bit about our knowledge of search engine optimization, and some of the tips and tricks that we use, or we know that are important to use. LeeAnn why don’t you say hi, and we’ll get started.
LeeAnn Holmberg: Hey there, nice to visit with you today, and I’m excited to talk about SEO, and see what all we can share.
Amy DeLardi: Great. You want to explain what SEO stands for, and a little bit about that before we start.
LeeAnn Holmberg: You bet. SEO is search engine optimization, and it’s the practice of increasing quality and quantity of traffic to your website through organic search engine. We start by targeting keywords that, and then researching those keywords. Which is really the foundation, the most important part is not necessarily what keywords you think that your audience is looking for. But taking that list and then really refining it and seeing what people are actually searching. Then going about optimizing your website, so that search engine pull your information when users are out there looking.
Amy DeLardi: That’s a great point, LeeAnn, and we get that all the time, right? When we’re working with clients, and they’ll send us a list of keywords, which we encourage, and we ask them to do so, because they know their business better than we do. But often times the keywords that they send us, and the keywords that we do a little bit of research on have low search volume. You want to talk a little bit about that research, and what the low search volume means, and explain the difference between low search volume and high search volume.
LeeAnn Holmberg: Sure. We use tools online, and some of them are free, some of them are pay. But we go out and once a client gives us a list of what they think their keywords are we take that, we have an internal discussion, kind of like what we’re doing right now, what we think we should add to that list. Then use those tools to see numbers, how many people are actually searching for a keyword, or a keyword phrase. We start to hone in on the list of keywords that are getting the higher search results. Because if your website is optimized and optimized well for a keyword, or keyword phrase that doesn’t have high search volume, then it doesn’t do you a lot of good. A lot of times we run into clients you want this extensive list of keywords, or they want to really focus on this one thing, and don’t understand that that’s not really what the end user is out there searching. We try to educate them, and try to get them to focus on using keywords and keyword strings that are highly searched, and then we can optimize your website for that, so that it matches what people, end users are actually going out and typing in their search engines. Whether it’s on their computer, their phone, or their tablet.
Amy DeLardi: Great. Let’s talk a little bit about once we have that list, and we run that by our clients, and they sign off on it we may have to go back and forth a few times, which is a normal process. But once we have that list we use it as a roadmap for ourselves internally, as a team. When we’re applying the strategies to the website, but also for tracking measures, which we can talk a little bit about later. But let’s start talking about some of the different strategies that we can highlight. Because the search engines, mostly we target for Google, the most popular ones Google, and Bing, and Yahoo. But they have probably hundreds, wouldn’t you say LeeAnn different what’s the word I’m looking for? Not validations, but they have different things that they rank you on. Whether it’s the how long you’ve owned your domain name, how many hits you get to your website, so there’s a lot of different factors. That’s the word I’m looking for, a lot of different factors that they look for when they rank you. But content is the king factor, and if you don’t have the right content, or the right amount of keyword rich content on your website that can really hurt you, and that’s one of the biggest factors. Putting that aside, let’s talk about a few other different factors that help with the ranking of your website for your keywords.
LeeAnn Holmberg: Sure. I guess my SEO and marketing age will show a little bit, but there used to be like tips and tricks around making Google work for you. You used to be able to stuff all these keywords, or jam a keyword into, like Amy mentioned your domain, your URL, and that would automatically work. Google has definitely grown, it’s smarter, and their goal is to make the user experience the best experience possible. As they’ve grown with that they look at what you’re saying. Are you redundant? If you get too repetitive, then you’ll get dinged on that, so we want to make sure that we’re giving good high value content. Also, make sure that your images match what we’re saying. That includes adding an ALT tag, adding … We go through we had heading tags, which Google reads first. They go through this checklist, and that’s one of the things they look for, is do you have keyword rich headings, that’s a large bold areas on their website. Like titles, and things like that. Do you have a good meta description?
There are plugins if you’re using a WordPress platform, or a lot of the done for you websites will allow you to type in your own meta description. Does it match the content of your website, the quality of your website? It gives Google a good snippet of here’s the information, sometimes you’ll look when you’re doing a Google search, and you’ll see people will leave it as just the first few lines of that page, and that’s not an optimized website, or not an optimized page the way that we would suggest. We would suggest really honing in and saying this is the overall view, picking those keywords, and focusing on that. In that meta description adding content, adding a blog, connecting social media networks, making sure that your name, address, and phone number is consistent on your website as it is when you’re listed in Google on the business pages.
Amy DeLardi: Let me stop you right there, LeeAnn, because that is an exciting piece of something that we’re working on with the name, address, and phone number. Which is the Infinite Web Directory Solutions, which we’re having a lot of fun with. Let’s talk a little bit about that because that ties into the back linking, and the consistency that you were just speaking of. Let’s introduce Infinite Web Directory Solutions, or IWDS for short, and take a couple minutes to explain that. Then we’ll get back in to some of the other things. I heard you mention blog, and I want to talk a little bit about blogging, and how that helps with SEO.
LeeAnn Holmberg: You bet.
Amy DeLardi: Do you want to explain IWDS, or do you want me to? How do you want to do that?
LeeAnn Holmberg: Sure. I’ll jump in and just say that I think Infinite Web Directory Solutions is one of the bigger trends that we’re seeing SEO move towards. Google and Bing don’t just want to see your website be fully optimized, now they are holding you to a higher standard, and they want to see you be consistent across all of the internet. That means like I mentioned before social media, that your name, address, and phone number, and the information that you supply on your social media platform match and are linked to your website. But also we have all of these smaller online business directories. While we talk about Google, and that’s kind of an all encompassing thing, when we talk about search engines Google, Bing, Yahoo, like Amy mentioned.
There’s a ton of other ones. There are all these local directories, like Yelp, Foursquare, there are industry specific, if it’s restaurants, or medical, legal. Google is now holding you to the standard that they want to see your information not only listed on those places, but listed and optimized with consistent information, so we have a tool for those of you that have tried to do any of this, you might know. You can spend hours, and hour, and hours, it’s a rabbit hole, on one directory trying to get everything consistent, images, pictures, everything verified. And then not have their marketing team call you, and beat you down trying to get you to run ads specifically on their platform.
Amy DeLardi: Which we had. I didn’t even tell you about this. Sorry to interrupt, LeeAnn, but we had this yesterday, and Yoana did a call with somebody from Yelp, and they were, and what they were selling us sounded great, right. But they wanted us to increase from our organic Yelp directory listing, which is free to a paid version. Although all the bells and whistles sounded wonderful, and they probably worked exactly the way that they were selling it to us, it really wasn’t affordable for Infinite Web Designs to invest in that. That was the minimum investment of 400 dollars a month, up to 700 and something dollars a month.
Our directory solution in comparison you’re getting into 50 plus, maybe sometimes up to 150 different directories, some of which I’ve never even heard of. But at least you’re getting your information out there, but I did a comparison, and I’m thinking okay for 300 dollars a month you can get into all of these different directories through IWDS, and that pricing may change, so get in now if you’re listening. But the Yelp it was even more expensive than our monthly service, and that’s just one directory. I can’t agree more with what you were just talking about with the pricing, and how just one service with one of these directories can be more expensive than what we’re charging to get into multiple directories. And doing it for you, so it’s saving you time and money, right. That’s the best thing.
LeeAnn Holmberg: Absolutely. We will gather all that data for you, and then we submit that out to, like Amy said there’s 50 plus standard local directories, and then we have over 200 data aggregators that then cycle that out to the internet. To then say hey, not only do we have our information out there, like we’re putting all of our ducks in a row, we’re getting it all consistent on your behalf. Then Google and Bing will perk up and go hey, they’re listening, they’re paying attention, we’re seeing this data that’s consistent. Now not only will you have the work that’s done on your website, you have it across the internet, and they will start to reward you for that, which will bring … The goal is to have your listings be high. Ideally get up in that first few spots before you have to hit scroll, and people clearly will look away.
Kudos to Yelp and the other teams for their marketing efforts, that as soon as you start to optimize on their platform that triggers their marketing team. There’s not a ding in that. However if your ultimate goal is to increase your visibility online putting your dollars across the board, and getting you consistent is going to get you further than doing it on one platform. We have this tool, we can do this on your behalf. Amy, actually visited with a group last week and was highlighting this tool to them, and I don’t know Amy if we still have any kind of specials, or anything going on. But we would be happy to run a baseline to tell you where you are now. Give you a look at where your website ranks not only on the search engines, but across all of those directories.
Amy DeLardi: Yeah, so the special …
LeeAnn Holmberg: And then …
Amy DeLardi: Oh, I’m sorry. Did I cut you off? I was so excited to share the special.
LeeAnn Holmberg: No, please go right ahead.
Amy DeLardi: The specials that we are running is to waive the setup fee. The setup fee is 150 dollars, so you’re saving 150 dollars just in the first month by us waiving the setup fee, which I’m excited to be able to do. The best way to get your free report, and to open the discussion would be to call us at 203-307-5107, again that’s 203-307-5107. The service that you’re going to reference is IWDS, and you can just mention that you listened to the podcast, or you met with us, and you were talking with us, and you want to learn a little bit more, and get your free report. The last thing that we’ll talk about is the reporting piece of this, because every month our clients that retain us they will get a monthly report, and in that report they will see how we are tracking the increased visibility, and the percentage of visibility. If you start out at, what do we see most people start out at? Anywhere from a very low 12 percent, sometimes people start out at 30 percent, some people I’ve seen start out a little bit higher 50s, 60 percent visibility across the internet, but the ultimate goal to get to 100.
That’s just by saturating the internet with your name, your address, your phone number, your web address. Again the best way to do that is to get into a bunch of different directories. I like to say if you can’t beat them, join them. The directories typically if they get a lot of traffic they will show higher in the search engines than your organic listing. There’s that if you can’t beat them, join them, so now you have multiple marketing factors working in your favor, and multiple listings. Whether it is a directory, or your organic listing you have those multiple listings working in your favor, and really trying to reach your target audience, and drive traffic to your phones, or your website. That in summary is IWDS, and I love how it pairs nicely with SEO, and our monthly SEO services.
LeeAnn I didn’t even tell you this, but one of our clients is a landscape design and architect, and we turned their directory solutions on, I think in January maybe. Maybe in the Fall of last year knowing that their busy season was coming up, and I just ran into them, and I asked them for a testimonial actually. Because I ran into them and they were like, “Whatever you’re doing our phones are ringing off the hook, it’s crazy busy, we almost think that you should shut it off, because we’re too busy.” I was happy to hear that, I laughed, of course I’m not going to shut that off. Because you can always manage volume of work in a different way, but I just think that’s a great testimonial to how this is working, and how Infinite Web Designs gets our own leads, and stuff. I’ve seen a definite increase in the amount of leads that I’m getting from our website, and across the internet. I think those are two real good testaments to how the Infinite Web Directory Solutions is working for our clients.
With that said we could go back to talking a little bit more about SEO, and I want to talk about blogging. Believe it or not I just has a client say to me the other day, “What is blogging?” A lot of people still, or maybe not a lot, but some people still don’t even know what blogging is. I’m not going to go into the description of it. But it is a strategy really to get more content on your website, and to be able to share authentically through your own voice on your website, and to be able to talk about your products or services in a more authentic not so sales-y, or I don’t want to say professional, but in a way that maybe you wouldn’t just write, copy. Almost in your own voice versus how you would write copy for a web page.
LeeAnn Holmberg: It builds expertise too, so it takes the stand alone content that is on your webpage, and then allows you to wrap more information around that. Or focus or highlight on one particular aspect of your business that you might not necessarily.
Amy DeLardi: Going back a few years ago a great blog post was like 250 keywords, but now that blogging has become a little bit more of a strategy to get keyword rich content on your site, and outdo your competition so to speak. How many words now are they, Google, or the search engines, how many words now is an average blog post that’s good for SEO?
LeeAnn Holmberg: Sure. Yeah, it definitely has evolved, and now I would suggest that you regularly aim for about 1,000 words, again you don’t want to get redundant or stuff with a lot of keywords. But if you’re giving good valuable information, that would be the goal, around 1,000 keywords. Now, if you’re just shy of that, or just over that it’s not hard and fast rule, just kind of a guideline. With that said, if you’re in a highly competitive market finance, gosh Amy can you think of …?
Amy DeLardi: The healthcare industry is highly competitive.
LeeAnn Holmberg: Healthcare.
Amy DeLardi: Yeah.
LeeAnn Holmberg: Yeah, there are lots of different … If you’re in an area that is highly competitive then I would shoot for more than that. More along the lines of an ideal length of 2,000 keywords. I know that that’s a lot, that’s a stretch. If that’s not something that you are comfortable with you can find a great copywriter. Our team always has suggestions for things like that. There are a million places online where you can find good copywriting skills, people who are familiar with SEO, and can apply that to the work that they’re doing when they’re providing you content. A lot of times when people throw blog posts over the fence to us we take that.
I’m thinking of one client in particular they send me a few blog posts a month, and each time I take those I have the liberty of editing it a little bit, and cleaning it up so that it is SEO friendly, so it has all of the information that it needs because their copywriter isn’t so familiar, so I can look at that, and I can add our twist to it. It is longer, and that can be a little bit daunting, but I think that it is important, because you want that valuable content. Then adding images that are appropriate, and all of the things that we discussed earlier. The adding an ALT tag to your image, so that Google can search it, and inducts it better, adding the meta description, so that you have an overall view of what the blog is rather than just pulling those first few lines of the content.
Amy DeLardi: Also, one other thing if you’re doing a video, or audio like we’re doing.
LeeAnn Holmberg: Sure.
Amy DeLardi: You want to, the search engines don’t know, they can’t listen to the audio piece of it, so even giving a transcription, or something that can give a hint to the search engines as to what that audio or video content is is extremely helpful.
LeeAnn Holmberg: Yeah, absolutely. There are transcription services too. It’s there. We have a whole host of tools that we can provide that offer quick and easy turnaround times, so that you’re not waiting, it’s not overly … It shouldn’t be an overly complicated process, it should be you regularly adding content to the website, which leads right into the next thing. Adding those external links, back linking, and linking to other websites to help grow you reach. For me, I will say one of the biggest mistakes I see being made, and one of the things I always look for is when you’re adding those links within your website to external sites, always do it as a pop up. That’s one, if I can offer one tip on your blog, even on your website period if you’re going to send them somewhere else don’t do it within, don’t make them leave your website.
Amy DeLardi: Oh open up a new …
LeeAnn Holmberg: Yes.
Amy DeLardi: Yeah. Open up in a new window, I know. That’s one of my pet peeves.
LeeAnn Holmberg: Yeah.
Amy DeLardi: In closing I just want to ask you what do you think is, I know I have what I think is the biggest miSEOnception of SEO, and I want to see if it’s the same as mine. Do you have a …?
LeeAnn Holmberg: I’m going to give two.
Amy DeLardi: Okay. Go ahead. You’ll probably steal mine in the process.
LeeAnn Holmberg: One, would be that it is a one and done. That you can go and just do this one time, and leave your website static, as is. You really need to be adding valuable content, and doing a lot of the other things that we talked about, making sure that you’re consistent, not just on your website, but across the internet.
Amy DeLardi: I know …
LeeAnn Holmberg: And two …
Amy DeLardi: Hold on one sec. I know to that point I always, when I’m talking to clients, I always say to them doing that one and done is kind of like going on a crash diet before you have to go to a wedding, or an event, a special event, and you want to lose whatever, five, 10 pounds, and look fantastic. But then the rest of the 300 and whatever, 65 days out of the year you’re not eating healthy, not fueling your body, not working out. It’s not a crash diet. It’s a more of a consistent healthy fostering relationship that you have with your website, so that’s how I like to explain it.
LeeAnn Holmberg: Right. I couldn’t agree more. Just like getting ready for vacation, and then going on vacation and just let it all go.
Amy DeLardi: Right, right. You could tell we’re fitness, and try to be health nuts too.
LeeAnn Holmberg: Yeah. That’s one, and then the other one is that this is something that you can do immediately that we can do this. What’s the time frame? Can you have this done in three months? This is, again going with the health and fitness analogies, it’s a marathon, this is definitely not a sprint. This is something that is long term, it takes time. One thing that we’re pretty key on doing in our practice is running that baseline report, not only for both, if we’re just doing SEO on your website, or if we’re doing the IWDS solutions, or really anything that we do we always like to take a baseline and capture where we started, so we can start to see that. But it really does take time. If you rush it, then you’re not going to see the results, or the return on investment that you’d like to see. Did I steal yours?
Amy DeLardi: You did. But I have another one, so I have two. You already said the other one, but yeah it’s the quick process, yeah I can’t agree with you more that people are often impatient. Or they come in thinking well I have good SEO, I search my name and I come up, and that’s not really how people are searching you, because they don’t know your name. But that’s not my other one. My other one is there’s no guarantees. I will get a lot of people that will say, “Gosh, I don’t know if I can make that investment. If I was guaranteed, and I knew that I was going to get the ranking, and the click throughs, and the leads, and I knew it was going to bring in work, then I would be bale to invest in it.” Unfortunately there are businesses out there that will guarantee ranking, and the only way to really guarantee ranking is through the paid advertising, whether it be Google, AdWords or what not. Where you’re paying to play. But that’s a whole other podcast that I would love to have another discussion with you in the near future.
In close, I want to just thank our listeners and our audience for their time today, and we’re trying to keep these within like 30 minutes, so that it’s digestible information. We’re going to be posting this to our blog, which is located on infinitewebdesigns.com, do you can listen in over and over again to get all of this juicy, helpful information. You can also find us on social media, so on our Facebook, or we’re on Pinterest, and Twitter, so you can find us there. Again, stay tuned for future podcasts, and discussions. I think the next discussion that we should roll right into, LeeAnn, would be the paid versus, you know paying to play advertising and the organic. Because I think that that needs to be a little bit more demystified for some people.
LeeAnn Holmberg: Okay.
Amy DeLardi: Thanks again, and thank you, LeeAnn for your time, and for doing this with us. I don’t know if you want to say any last few words.
LeeAnn Holmberg: Yes, I enjoyed chatting. Hope, we are having these kinds of conversations internally all the time. If there’s a topic or subject that you would like for us to give our thoughts on, then hit us up on any of the social media platforms that Amy mentioned, or she gave our phone number earlier, give us a call. We’d love to talk about whatever is interesting for you too.
Looking for a unique branded digital marketing strategy?
Digital marketing has come on fast and strong over the past few years.
While most companies have strategies they execute over a variety of platforms such as websites, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, newsletters, online advertising and a host of others, they are often left wondering about the effectiveness of their efforts.
With 16+ years of experience, 200+ websites launched, and clients from a wide range of industries,
Infinite Web Designs provides consulting services to assist businesses in creating an effective and integrated digital marketing plan.
Looking for a unique branded digital marketing strategy?
Digital marketing has come on fast and strong over the past few years.
While most companies have strategies they execute over a variety of platforms such as websites, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, newsletters, online advertising and a host of others, they are often left wondering about the effectiveness of their efforts.
With 16+ years of experience, 200+ websites launched, and clients from a wide range of industries,
Infinite Web Designs provides consulting services to assist businesses in creating an effective and integrated digital marketing plan.
Did you know that eight out of ten people who search local business information on a mobile device end up making a visit, a call or a sale? So what happens if the information they find is incomplete, inconsistent or even incorrect? At best consumers are annoyed. At worst they lose trust in the brand. In fact, 71 percent of consumers say they lost trust in a business after finding inconsistent location data online. Businesses spend so much effort building their digital brand presence, but they often neglect an important area that has the potential to bring big returns – online directories.
Having a consistent listing in online outlets can make a positive difference. It not only creates consumer trust and improves visibility but also tells search engines that your B2B or B2C business is legitimate, resulting in improved search engine rankings. How’s that for big returns?
At Infinite Web Designs we pride ourselves on helping our clients maximize their online presence. That’s why we’re introducing Infinite Web Directory Solutions (IWDS) – a valuable management tool that brings together all the information about a business, from physical location to service areas, into one cohesive digital footprint.
Imagine the visibility that comes with being listed consistently in 50+ online outlets. Imagine the kind of presence and authority that consistency creates with search engines, which in turn increases visibility even more. And imagine the target customers you could reach with that kind of visibility.
With IWDS you don’t have to worry about which directories you’re listed in, which service data is listed in which directory or how your name, address and phone number are listed. That is all managed for you. We take care of your online presence so you can focus on what you do best.
How specifically can IWDS help my digital presence?
Some of the positive effects of local digital presence management include an increase in visibility across all search engines, an increase in website traffic and quality back links to your website.
So what exactly does IWDS do?
We make sure your business citations are listed in the most important high-traffic directories, social networks and data aggregators. We review, correct and optimize the listings and provide you with real-time progress reports and updates.
What about industry specific directories?
In addition to well-known directories like Google, Bing, Yelp, etc. we also have access to several industry-specific directories for professions including:
– Lawyers
– Doctors
– Home services
– Financial services
– Restaurants
– Travel
– Health and wellness
The Infinite Web Directory Service includes:
– Baseline reporting
– 3 major search engine submissions
– Directory submissions to 50+ online directories
– 300+ data aggregators
– Local presence management
– Listing management
– Reputation management
– Monthly updating
– Directory updates
– Optional vertical directories
What does a baseline report tell me?
A baseline report includes both a visibility score, which displays the average score for your initial local page (determined by your average visibility and optimization in Google+ Local, Yahoo Local and Bing Places) and a directory score (derived by dividing the number of directories in which you were found by the number checked.) These scores serve as the starting point with which to monitor your results.
How long does it take before I see results?
You will typically see positive results within 30 days.
Find out what IWDS can do for your business. Give us a call today or fill out the form below to receive your free baseline report.
You’re launching your new business and you need a website. With so many “low cost” website builders to choose from, a DIY solution seems like the perfect place to save money, right? It’s easy to get dazzled by $19.99/month plans and drag-and-drop website creation, but what you don’t see are …
Does your multi-location business have a separate Facebook page for each physical location? Well, maybe you should! With Facebook Locations, a page management feature offered by Facebook for business, it’s easy to manage multiple pages in one place. Plus, there are so many advantages to having a separate page for …
Welcome back to Infinite Web Chat! Last time we talked organic Social Media Marketing. On Episode 4 we are talking all things Paid Social Media Marketing. Click to listen above or you can read the transcript below. You can also subscribe on iTunes » Here are Some of the Highlights: According …
Welcome back to Infinite Web Chat! Last time we talked PPC (Pay Per Click Marketing). On Episode 3 we are talking all things Social Media Marketing. Click to listen above or you can read the transcript below. You can also subscribe on iTunes » Here are Some of the Highlights: According …
Welcome back to Infinite Web Chat! Last week we talked SEO (Search Engine Optimization). On Episode 2 we are talking all things PPC (Pay Per Click). Click to listen above or you can read the transcript below. You can also subscribe on iTunes » Here are Some of the Highlights: Pay …
HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY! Please take a look at a few of the digital designs we created for our clients to use for social media marketing, email marketing & more! Let us create beautiful, branded digital marketing images for your business! Sign up for our holiday branded marketing package! Purchase Our Holiday Image Package & Receive Branded Images for …
Welcome to Infinite Web Chat! On Episode 1 we are talking all things SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Click above to listen or you can read the transcript below. You can also subscribe on iTunes » Here are Some of the Highlights: SEO is search engine optimization, and it’s the practice of …
HAPPY HALLOWEEN! Check out a few of the branded digital designs we created for our clients to use for social media marketing, email marketing & more! Let us create beautiful, branded digital marketing images for your business! Sign up for our holiday branded marketing package! Purchase Our Holiday Image Package & Receive Branded Marketing Images for …
HAPPY LABOR DAY! Please take a look at a few of the digital designs we created for our clients to use for social media marketing, email marketing & more! Let us create beautiful, branded digital marketing images for your business! Sign up for our holiday branded marketing package! Purchase Our Holiday Image Package & Receive Branded Images for the …
Did you know that eight out of ten people who search local business information on a mobile device end up making a visit, a call or a sale? So what happens if the information they find is incomplete, inconsistent or even incorrect? At best consumers are annoyed. At worst they …
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