Why Your Small Business Needs to Run Google Ads: 10 Reasons

Google is the most popular search engine, and it doesn’t look like that is changing anytime soon. With over 8.5 billion searches daily, Google is the best place for small businesses to get noticed. While advertising may seem complicated, and it certainly can be, Google makes it relatively easy for anyone to set up a Google Ad account and begin running promotions immediately. Here are 10 reasons why your small business needs to run Google ads:

Expand Your Customer Reach

As we’ve already mentioned, Google has an enormous reach. The search engine has become so widely used that Merriam Webster Dictionary made it an official verb; “googled; googling” meaning to search something on Google. If that doesn’t tell you how popular Google is, we’re not sure what will. 

The users that made this possible were just people looking for an answer to their question. And many times, the answer can be your product or service. In order to get in front of these people, you need to ensure your business appears at the top of the results page for related searches. Google Ads are automatically placed at the top of page one and you can manually set which keyword terms and phrases you want to target. 

Focus on Different Audience Segments

If you have a broad audience that you want to segment or already have an idea of your different buyer personas, you’ll want to target them differently. This may mean focusing on different keywords, playing with the ad copy, and promoting different products. Google makes it easy to separate different audiences based on their interests and place in the research funnel.

Finetune Intent

The major advantage of using Google ads over other forms of advertising, such as paid social media, is the ability to reach different people based on their intent. For example, when you advertise on social media platforms, you can only target people based on their interests and demographics. You have no real way of telling where they are in their research journey.

With Google, you can target specific keywords and phrases to ensure you are reaching the user at exactly the right time. Let’s take a hair stylist looking for a website developer as an example. Their first search may be “how to design a website” then once they do more research it may change to “websites for hairstylists.” Eventually, their searches will become more fine tuned as they do more research and it will become “website developers for hair salons.” This is the point where website developers want to show up on the results page, as the user is ready to make a purchase.

Maintain Control Over Campaigns

There is no question about your campaign when it’s run through Google. Google gives you complete control over the promotion, including:

• Budget
• Schedule (times and days)
• Audience segments
• Website placement
• Keyword targeting

Manage Your Budget

Let’s dive into budgeting a bit more. On Google, it is not as basic as setting an overall campaign budget if you are interested in more intricate spend control. Google allows you to adjust your:

• Cost per click bid
• Daily spend
• Keyword bid
• Maximum bids

With this level of spend control, you can rest assured that you will not exceed your desired budget.

User-Friendly Dashboard

Some advertisement dashboards make it nearly impossible to understand why a promotion isn’t succeeding with complicated analytics and no assessment. Google Ads take the guesswork out of analytics and shows exactly which ads are performing the best alongside the top key performance indicators (KPIs). With their easy-to-use platform, you can easily view:

• Impressions
• Clicks
• Keyword bids
• Cost per click

Improve Google Ranking

Search engine optimization (SEO) is still a valuable tool used among most, if not all, major sites. However, a sustainable SEO strategy requires patience and consistent practice. Most companies want results now and don’t want to invest the labor and time into SEO. Google Ads push you to the top of the results page immediately without all of the extra hassle of SEO. So if you are looking for a quick way to get noticed, Google Ads is your best bet. 

Build Brand Awareness

Most people think of conversions when they hear Google Ads. And while many businesses do run them for driving traffic to their site, it is also extremely effective for brand awareness. A study found that marketers prioritize brand awareness campaigns, making these promotions extremely useful. Whether a business is just starting and trying to establish their brand or introducing a new product, brand awareness is essential for gaining trust. Most users won’t make a purchase unless they are familiar with a company, making brand awareness an important first step for every marketer.

Improve Conversion Rates

Google Ads uses complex algorithms to determine which ads are running best at which times to maximize conversions. This takes all of the guesswork out for marketers trying to optimize their campaign performance. Google Ads will even make edit suggestions on click bids and ad copies to improve conversions.

Maximize ROI

Google has established different forms of bidding to ensure every business can maximize their ROI. Depending on the campaign type, businesses may be interested in:

• Cost-per-click (CPC) bidding is recommended for generating website traffic.
• Cost-per-thousand (CPM) bidding is recommended for brand awareness campaigns.
• Cost-per-action (CPA) bidding is recommended for specific conversions, such as product purchases or email sign-ups.

Now that you understand the benefits of running Google Ads, talk with your team about how you could best utilize them.

8 Reasons Why You Need a Blog

Keeping an updated website is not all it takes to keep users engaged with your business. Having an active blog can do wonders for your traffic, brand awareness and customer engagement! Here are 8 reasons why your business should start a blog:

1. Improve Your SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) enables your business to appear at the top of the results page on search engines, such as Google and Bing. How? By scraping your website for keywords and content relevant to the user’s search query. A blog enables you to saturate your website with relevant keywords and phrases to ensure your website appears at the top of the results page.

In return, you drive more organic traffic to your website at zero cost! A study found that websites that maintain blogs have 434% more indexed pages than their competitors. Indexed pages refer to web pages that search engines scrape when looking for content relevant to a search query. Therefore, the more indexed pages you have for a specific keyword, the more likely you are to appear on the first page! And let’s face it, if you aren’t on the first page of Google, you aren’t getting noticed.

2. Expand Brand Awareness

By covering topics related to your brand or products you can grab the attention of users that wouldn’t typically navigate to your site. For example, if a user is researching a specific car part they could stumble upon an article that discusses the importance of the part published by an auto shop. This shop now has the potential to convert this user, who initially was only interested in reading about the product. 

3. Establish Trust with Current and Potential Customers

Through building your blog and consistent content marketing, businesses can showcase their values to current and potential customers to establish trust. Companies that cover relevant keywords give users a chance to familiarize themselves with the brand and their products. In addition to educating the audience, blogs make a business look more developed and professional. 

4. Keep Your Audience Updated

Businesses are constantly evolving, expanding their product ranges, and reaching out to new markets. Without a blog, it can be difficult to keep the audience up to date with all of the changes. By writing both short and long form blogs, companies can ensure they appeal to all types of information consumers.

5. Build Internal Linking

Internal linking is an effective SEO strategy where businesses can backlink different products, pages, references, and even other articles in their blog posts. The more relevant links that you include in your blog posts, the better your SEO. Internal linking also helps users navigate to other relevant pages on your site, which then gives better engagement rates!

6. Get Customer Feedback

Many businesses with blogs also enable a comment section under each article, allowing customers to leave feedback or engage in conversations. Not only does this leave a space open for customers to engage in a two-way conversation, but it also gives them an opportunity to ask questions. This can create a sense of community both between your customers and your business.

7. Build Your Email List

There are many different reasons why a consumer will join an email list. Some are just interested in a quick discount, while others want to keep up with a brand and their content. Companies can segment these consumers by creating a separate email list for those that want to keep up to date with your blog.

8. Get Social Exposure

Most companies with successful blogs enable social share buttons so readers can easily share the article to their Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. This is huge not just for brand awareness but for establishing trust. By a reader promoting your article, they are putting their stamp of approval on your business and showcasing it to their friends and family. This can help companies gain credibility and grow their social media presence.

Now that you understand the benefits of having a blog, make sure you develop a feasible posting schedule before initiating this endeavor. It is more important to keep a consistent posting schedule of quality content than churning out large quantities of poorly written posts.

Why You Need a Microsite

Microsites are often overlooked as marketing tools, when in fact, they hold a lot of value for companies looking to improve their online presence and client engagement. For those that don’t know, a microsite is essentially a smaller website or landing page that is dedicated to specific content. Many companies use microsites to separate their different locations or showcase a specific product. This can be great for product launches, marketing campaigns, or maintaining information in a confined location.

So why use a microsite and not just add a page to your existing website? Well, microsites have many benefits, including:

Improved Local SEO

Since a microsite is separate from your main website, it gets its own unique URL. With a concise, searchable URL, it becomes that much easier for prospective customers to find your specific product or company. This is a huge advantage when it comes to SEO, especially when you fill your microsite with keyword-rich content. 

Expert Reputation offers ReviewIQ users with a complimentary microsite that features all of their 5 star patient reviews from their monitored sites. With just a few clicks they can customize their microsite with their company:

• Banner photo
• Hours of operation
• Contact information
• Social media links

This aids the prospective patient’s purchasing decision and boosts the user’s local SEO. What is local SEO? Local SEO is how a business ranks on search engines for local searches. For example, if someone located in San Diego searches “dentist near me” Google would only populate dentists in their local area. Therefore, by adding content that mentions the business location, the microsite will improve your local SEO!

More Focused Content

Microsites feature specific content so users focus only on what the business wants them to. Whereas websites are more complicated and can bombard users with too much information, making it difficult for business owners and marketers to direct users’ attention to something specific. With Expert Reputation’s microsite, you can highlight your best reviews to capture the interest of prospective patients.

Cost Efficient

Microsites are cost efficient and do not take much to maintain, especially when compared to traditional websites. Microsites are typically only one page and contain concise content that doesn’t require much updating. They also are more often than not only run by one program.

Quick Development

Microsites are extremely easy to develop and sometimes can even be launched within a day! Unlike traditional websites, microsites are typically one-pagers and feature specific content. Expert Reputation allows you to customize and launch your website in just a few clicks!

To summarize, microsites are great tools for companies and practices looking to direct prospective customers to specific content. This can improve their SEO, engagement, and marketing effectiveness.

SEO Web Design Tricks to Help You Rank on Google

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a continual process that modern businesses need to prioritize in order to remain relevant on popular search engines. Why is this important? Well, because prospective clients start their research on search engines, like Google. It is there that they are exposed to businesses, but only if they appear on the first page. That is why you need to optimize your site to ensure you appear high on the results page.

Here are five web design tricks to help your site rank high on Google:

Create Relevant Content

The number one organic traffic driver is quality content. What is quality content? Well it can be an article or video saturated with relevant keywords that is crafted carefully for your target user. Content that matches your target audience’s intent, is written well, and is optimized, gives your site authority and relevance for online searches. This means that your content appears high on the results page for specific keywords and phrases.

To start creating quality content, curate a list of keywords and phrases relevant to your business, products, and services. For example, if you are a dentist you can make a list of different dental procedures, illnesses, and common questions your patients have. However, it is important to keep in mind that one piece of content will only likely rank for one keyword or phrase, unless the phrases are extremely similar. Therefore, you should center each piece of content around a specific keyword.

Once you have curated a list of keywords, try to place them in as many places as possible, including:

• URL
• Article title
• Article subtitle
• Image titles
• Headings/subheadings

Try to repeat the keyword or phrase as many times as you can throughout the article until it becomes too redundant. The more your keyword is mentioned throughout the article, the more authority it gains on search engines.

Update Content Regularly

Once you create a piece of quality content, it can sit on your site for a little while until it gains traction. However, you don’t want the information to become outdated or else your site loses relevance. Therefore, you should create a strict schedule where you review your content and make necessary updates. Updates can either entail ensuring the data is still accurate or even adding another section detailing newer information. 

You should also consider using the pillar/supporting article scheme when filling out your blog. This strategy entails writing a long-form article as the pillar and shorter articles that cover surrounding topics. For example, a doctor can write a pillar article covering why patients should visit their primary care physician and how often. Then they could write multiple supporting articles, each covering common procedures. This pyramid-like scheme increases the authority of the original pillar article.

Prioritize Metadata

Metadata is often overlooked simply because it is short-form information. Metadata is concise data inserted on the backend of a website that describes a piece of content, such as the title, headings, image description, etc. Let’s go over the three main types of metadata:

Title Metadata

Title metadata determines page titles at the top of the browser and the headline that appears in search engines. Because of this reason alone, title metadata is the most important metadata on a website.

Description Metadata

Description metadata is exactly what it sounds like, it is the text that describes what is on a webpage. This description often appears under the title data on the search engine results page, but not always. It needs to accurately describe the page while also enticing users to click the webpage in just two sentences.

Keyword Metadata

Keyword metadata falls at the end of the list when prioritizing SEO, only because it is rarely used for determining your search engine rankings. However, at this point you should have already curated a list of keywords, so it doesn’t hurt to add them to your site. Make sure to add a variety of keywords, keeping around 3-7 phrases each containing 1-4 keywords.

Back-link

In order to have a link-worthy site, you need other authoritative sites linking to your content. This will come naturally as you continue to create quality content and create a user-friendly site. As your search engine ranking improves, other sites will want to reference you, which in return will skyrocket your SEO!

So where do you start? Well, start by adding relevant links throughout your content. Make sure not to hyperlink the text “click here” as this is overused and not valued anymore by search engines. Instead, hyperlink keywords that add value to your article and accurately describe the destination URL.

Use Alt-Tags

Lastly, if you are showcasing an image or video, be sure to include plenty of alt-tags, also known as alternative text descriptions. This enables search engines to accurately rank your page even on text-only browsers. 

SEO best practices are always changing, which is exactly why you must actively monitor your site and determine where you can improve it, both for the user-experience and ranking.

10 Reasons Your Business Needs an Optimized Website

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is often the number one way that businesses reach their key users. It is also the most cost-effective traffic generator. Why? Because it attracts organic traffic through users that are actively searching for your product or service. This means that they are already in the funnel and looking to convert. 

So how does one go about SEO? Well, arguably the most important thing is to have a custom website, design with the latest SEO practices so search engines recognize you as a credible source when generating the results page. Without this, you risk falling behind competitors that have taken the time to carefully craft their website and content. And let’s face it, no one looks past the first page of Google. 

Here are 10 reasons your practice needs an optimized website:

1. Organic Search is Your Primary Traffic Source

Organic search and traffic makes up a major part of businesses’ online engagement and conversions. These users have already reached a critical part of the sales funnel, the research phase. In this phase, you know that they are in the market for your particular product or service and are weighing their options. And where do most online users conduct their research? Search engines. 

Digital marketers understand that Google holds the vast majority of online users compared to its competitors, Bing, Yahoo, and others. Occupying over 92% of online searches, online businesses need to focus on their Google ranking in order to get in front of prospective clients.

2. SEO Builds Trust and Credibility

Your searchability on major search engines directly correlates to your trust and credibility. If users can’t find your practice in a quick Google search, you lose major points right away. The goal of SEO is not only to create an amazing website that represents your brand, but also to improve the user experience by making your site easy to reach and navigate.

Now let’s say users are able to find you online relatively easily but your website is outdated. Again, you can immediately lose their trust just by having a slow loading time, outdated graphics, and other antiquated site elements. By keeping your website current, you establish what is known as authority in search engines, ranking you higher and getting you noticed by more searchers. Over time, your brand awareness increases and you begin establishing trust with your audience.

3. SEO Gives You a Better Understanding of Your Audience

By understanding how people are searching for and reaching your website, you gain a better understanding of your audience’s mindset. Fine tuning your SEO practices enables you to sense macro shifts in your market so you can stay ahead of the competition.

4. SEO Relies on the User Experience

Every business wants the best organic ranking. What most businesses do not realize is that your rank is directly impacted by the users’ impression, which then affects their experience. When Google scrapes websites relevant to the user’s search, it is able to use complex algorithms to determine sites’ user-friendliness in a matter of seconds. User-friendliness depends on how easy your site is to navigate, your site’s load time, relevant content and other key factors.

Based on these factors, search engines will determine if your site is page-one worthy and rank you accordingly. So you want to show that your site is relevant and provides the best user experience.

5. Local SEO Increases Traffic, Engagement, and Conversions

Mobile traffic has been dominating online searches over the past couple of years, making local SEO crucial for all businesses. In fact, local SEO focuses on a certain vicinities, such as:

• Neighborhoods
• Towns
• Cities
• Regions
• States

Local SEO narrows down users’ search results to a specific area to quicken the sales funnel and aid their purchase decision. And you know what that means – higher engagement and conversion rates! So you want to make sure you’re on that results page. Local SEO is heavily based on your online listings, reviews, and local citations. Therefore, you should focus on building your online presence. (If you are looking to generate more reviews and improve your online reputation, check out our review generation service here!)

6. SEO Best Practices are Always Changing

SEO tactics are always evolving, meaning your website may have been optimized at the time it was launched but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t since gone out of date. Because search engines are continuously improving their algorithms, you must also regularly check your website efficiency and make improvements to secure your place on the results page. Those that are reactive rather than proactive are quick to get left behind.

7. SEO is Cost-Effective

Yes, optimizing your website costs money, but it has a longer shelf life than paid promotions. When you craft content saturated with relevant content, it can sit on your website for as long as you’d like, unlike advertisements that run for as long as your budget permits. Consider SEO a business investment rather than a marketing cost, as it impacts your reputation as well as revenue.

8. SEO and Reputation Management Go Hand-in-Hand

Speaking of reputation, SEO and reputation management actually go hand-in-hand. Not only do your online reviews significantly impact your search engine ranking, your website optimization is responsible for your long-term brand equity. A high Google ranking elevates your practice’s reputation among competitors and in the minds of prospective patients.

9. SEO is Quantifiable

Although SEO doesn’t provide immediate ROI like paid media, its results are quantifiable. With proper tracking mechanisms and analytics you can see who clicked your site and how they navigated through it. You can then use this information to make necessary adjustments to your website to improve the overall user experience.

10. If Your Not on Page One, You’re Not Being Noticed 

Especially with Google’s new zero-click answer feature that displays text from the top result, if you aren’t ranking on the first page – you aren’t getting noticed. In fact, if you aren’t displayed at the top half of the first page you may not be getting noticed. This new Google feature often eliminates the need to even scroll past the first half of the page to pinpoint the match to the user’s search. This makes it very difficult for practices that fall past the top three ranks.

While there are many more benefits to optimizing your website, these 10 reasons showcase exactly why your practice needs to prioritize building an SEO-friendly website. By focusing on SEO, you stay relevant in your specific industry and specialty, increase your client reach, and generate long-term brand equity.