Search Marketing Partner Checklist

Now that you’ve made the decision to market your business via search engine advertising,

you need to find the best partner, one that can answer YES to all of these questions.

 

Do you put my ads on all search engines without giving preference to your own directory?	WSI Local AdWorks is publisher agnostic, reaching over 98%* of the places people search online. We put your ads on ALL the leading search engines, including Google®, Yahoo!®, Bing™, and Ask®, and many specialized local directories like Local.com®, YellowBot℠, Insider Pages™ and more. Then we dynamically shift your budget to the sites that perform the best.
Do you offer display advertising on the web’s top sites to build my brand?	WSI Local AdWorks offers the broadest range of locally targeted display advertising in the industry with over 20 Display media bundles comprised of the web’s top sites plus a myriad of individual sites such as Facebook, MySpace™ (Fox), and Kelley Blue Book®. Our network of media properties reaches an estimated 90% of the total online audience in the U.S.
Do you offer re-targeting to bring consumers back to my website?	WSI Local AdWorks offers a unique Remarketing feature that remembers consumers who visit your website and later displays your ad on other sites they visit across the web. This reinforces your brand and recaptures interest in your services after they’ve left your site.
Do you provide a local representative to consult with me in person?	WSI Local AdWorks is built on the foundation of local relationships with customers. You work directly with your local Internet Consultant (IC) who meets with you face-to-face to determine your goals, set up your campaign, update you on performance and bring you new solutions to grow your business.
Do you have a team of certified specialists to manage and optimize my campaign?	WSI Internet Consultants are backed by a team of over 100 technology and campaign management experts with certifications from Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft® who oversee every aspect of your campaign from provisioning through optimization to ensure the best results.
Will you help me with my online reputation?	WSI Internet Consultants help you assess your reputation on major search engines, directories and review sites such as Google Maps™, Yelp® and more, then create a plan to promote positive reviews.
Do you build my budget based on the unique number of searches for my services?	WSI Internet Consultants create a custom budget for your business based on the number of searches for your services in your target geographic area, the estimated click-through rate for your keywords, and the average cost-per-click on the search engines.
Do you offer real-time reporting with details on conversions including calls, emails, and web forms?	The WSI Local AdWorks platform provides 24/7 online reports with granular details on your true conversions—phone calls, emails, web forms, coupon downloads and more— all of which show the ROI for your campaign.
Do you optimize my campaign daily based on conversions across all keywords on every search engine?	WSI Local AdWorks uses patent-pending technology to optimize your campaign twice daily based on conversions (phone calls, emails, web events) —not clicks—generated across all keywords and search engines.  We squeeze more performance out of your budget with every adjustment.
Have you run thousands of campaigns for local businesses?	The WSI Local AdWorks platform has run over 400,000 search campaigns for local businesses like yours since 2004 and we are currently managing over 55,000,000 keywords for our advertisers. We leverage this vast experience and proprietary data to setup and optimize your campaign for best results.
Do you offer additional services such as organic search engine optimization, social media marketing,  content marketing or landing page conversion optimization to help build my business?	WSI Internet Consultants have advanced certifications and can help assess your website and  entire online environment in order  to identify opportunities for improvement. We offer you a broad array of solutions including a new website or  landing page, organic SEO, fully managed  social media marketing program and eye-catching graphic design for banner ads among  other services.

If you are in the market for a paid search advertising partner, don't hesitate to call the best in the business. We've been managing successful advanced pay-per-click campaigns since 2004, and offer services suitable for small to large-size companies.

Owners of all size businesses should have a digital marketing plan that takes advantage of the tremendous opportunities available in the internet and digital online environment. If you would like to sit down and discuss these opportunities, you should contact WSI since we have been helping all size businesses grow through professionally developed online strategies since the mid-90's.

If you're in the Madison Wisconsin area, give us a call today at (608) 523-4255 and let's discuss these opportunities right away!

Best Regards,

Thomas J. Holzkopf
Certified Internet & Digital Marketing Consultant
Tom@WSIPrositebuilder.com
www.WSIPrositebuilder.com
Office: 608-523-4255

Looking For A Turn-Key Solution To Manage Your Online Reputation & Leverage Social Media?

 

There are two things business owners and marketing managers need to know about promoting their companies over the Internet: First, that it's now the number one place that customers look for products, recommendations, and even business-to-business vendors. The second thing they have to understand is that there isn't any single way to reach those potential buyers.

For years, companies could find a steady source of new revenue simply by optimizing their sites for the major search engines, executing and refining a profitable pay per click advertising campaign, or circulating articles and press releases that brought attention to their websites. Those are all still good ideas, of course, but none of them is strong enough, on its own, to succeed anymore. The web has simply become too competitive.

That's easy enough to understand, but it doesn't make your job any simpler. There was hardly enough time to add regular posts to the company blog before, and now with trends like social media, online video marketing and  mobile marketing taking up more attention, the whole task of promoting your company online can seem like too much work to even attempt.

There are other alternatives to burying your head in the sand, however. With WSI's ReachCast service, it's becoming easier than ever for organizations of any size to add new, high-quality content every week, and in all the areas that matter most. By solidifying your marketing message and spreading it in a variety of ways, we have found a simple and efficient solution for the business that wants to do it all but doesn't have the time or budget.

Here are just a few of the things you get with WSI ReachCast:

• Submissions and updates to a specialized blog created just for your business, plus to all the major search engines, social media sites and local business directories. No more filling out forms or going through complicated verification checks. We will take care of all of that for you, ensuring that your company gets listed everywhere it needs to.

• Content that's more than keywords. Anyone can generate a set of boring articles, social updates, and online videos. ReachCast gives you access to top tier creative teams that devise the kind of content that puts your business in the right light to get spread around your industry on its own. In fact, our base package includes professional copy writing and syndication of 8 articles per month.

• Online reputation monitoring and management. What are customers, competitors, and vendors saying about you? Watching the web for any accurate and fraudulent information is important in this day and age when a single bad review, showing up in search engine results, can cost you hundreds of future sales. And guess what, with the WSI ReachCast service, we not only monitor your online customer reputation, we also make you aware of any negative comments, and we re-promote the positive ones!

• Comprehensive social media marketing. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube already have hundreds of millions of members, and they are gaining steam every day. There's never been a better time to start creating and strengthening relationships via social media sites. With WSI Reach Cast, we create and help you manage your presence on these social media sites.

If you're tired of watching opportunities to take advantage of Internet marketing go by, try WSI's ReachCast today. It's a great way to make sure that new customers can find you online, and that they hear the right things when they do find you.

Call us today at (866) 531-1686, or submit our request form.

Best Regards,




Thomas J. Holzkopf
Certified Internet & Digital Marketing Consultant
Tom@WSIPrositebuilder.com
www.WSIPrositebuilder.com
Office: 608-523-4255

Recently WSI held an encore session of our special webinar: “How Google’s New ‘Place Search’ Feature Impacts Your Business – Learn to Stay Competitive.”  As always, we had a  great turnout! Our WSI team enjoys facilitating these educational forums which are aimed at keeping your business on the forefront of the Internet and Digital Marketing space. How else would you keep up with everything that is going on in this fast-paced environment?

If you haven't already, you can sign up for our free Inside Edge Newsletter and be invited to all of our future monthly webinars (and of course you can safely unsubscribe at any time!): Inside Edge Newsletter Sign-up.

Business owners and marketing professionals from around the world tuned in for expert insight into online techniques and best practices for adapting to the latest game-changer Google made with the launch of their Place Search feature (their recent upgrade to their Local Listings). All-in-all, this special presentation was geared to answering one question that is undeniably on the minds of all marketing savvy business owners:

“In light of Google’s new Place Search, how can my company stay competitive online?”

With that concern in mind, our webinar offered up strategic guidelines for optimizing your business’s Google Place listing. Additionally, we had a step-by-step breakdown of Google’s major changes to the results page and outlined precisely how they affect a brand’s online presence and credibility. Bottom line, organic search engine optimization of a business’s website  pages, along with a well optimized Google Place listing is required for high placement in those listings. And now more than ever, online customer reviews play a large part in getting to the coveted top position. 

By the end of the session, we feel that the attendees not only learned how Google Place Search impacts their brand’s web presence, but they were also equipped with techniques and tools on how to leverage the new Place Search as well.

To stay competitive in your local market there is an absolute need to optimize your business’ Google Place listing. Clearly, this overhaul of the local search game calls for a much-needed review of your company’s online strategy as well.

If you missed this webinar, click here to see the recording (this is a large file so it may take some time to download). You can also learn more by downloading our whitepaper.

To be perfectly frank, your business is going to get reviewed by people online. It's the nature of the new Web 2.0 beast. Web 2.0 turned the buying decision process on its head, so now your prospective customers are in the driver's seat. Besides talking to family members and friends, customers can now go online and read reviews about the line of products and services that you offer and decide who they want to buy from. And unless you're unlike everybody else, there will probably be a negative review show up on occasion about your business.

Businesses can be proactive about these reviews though. They can have their own online review mechanism built right into their own websites. With this service, they can solicit reviews from their existing customers, and build up a foundation of reviews that would display in both search engine results pages as well as on their website. Experience has shown that unless a business really isn't doing a good job servicing their customer, most reviews are positive. So by having more positive reviews than negative, the negative reviews will most likely not appear on the first pages of those search engines.

Providing reviews to help customers make their buying decision can increase your new clients 10 - 20% (WebVideo Vision). At WSI, we partner with two companies, Customer Lobby and LouderVoice, to bring you online reviews that will appear on the search engine results pages as well as on your own website, or you can even include a link in the signature area of your email.      
    
It's no secret that satisfied customers are going to bring you more sales, and unhappy customers can prevent sales. People who feel strongly about a service they received or a product they purchased are likely to tell others about their experience. Before the internet, this effect was limited to word of mouth. A customer could tell his friends and family, co-workers and even strangers about his great or terrible experience with your company. Back then it took some effort on the customer's part to get the word out, and many people just didn't bother taking the time unless they were extremely displeased.

The growth of the internet and Web 2.0 has made it much easier for someone to praise or complain about a company in a public online environment. There are several online directories that allow anyone to post a comment about a business, including Google. This allows customers to make their opinion of your products and services heard by many more people with very little effort. Unfortunately, it also opens the door to abusers of the system. Business owners pretending to be customers can post positive reviews, and disgruntled employees can post negative reviews. There is no verification that the information posted is true.

With the recent changes made by Google to their Local Listings pages, all of those reviews are about to become many times more visible to potential customers who are looking for a local business. Google Places, formerly known as Google Local Business Listings, is now displaying reviews entered by users on their site and from a number of other directories. The new listing is a combination of your old organic listing, which you may have worked hard to get on to the first page of Google yourself or using professional services, and information from your local listing.  

So now, right next to the organic listing is a link to customer reviews which Google collected from these various directories. Immediately below your URL is your address and phone number from your Google Places listing. Often a small sampling of an existing review may be displayed there as well. If this happens to be a sampling from a negative review, your potential customer will most likely click on a different listing. It's the online equivalent of someone standing in front of your business with a sign telling people not to shop there.

So what can you do about it? Google won't remove a negative review just because you ask them to. And they won't take the time to find out whether the information is accurate. So you need to have a way to encourage positive reviews and address negative ones.

Encourage Good Reviews

As mentioned earlier, if there are more positive reviews than negative, there's a better chance that a review that shows within the body of your local Places listing will be good. Also, there is a better chance that the negative review is pushed to the second page or further back in your organic listings. One way to get positive reviews is to encourage all of your customers to write an online review, but that will result in more negative reviews as well as positive.

So how do you go about asking only your "good" customers to fill out an online review for your business? Since many businesses already have a system in place to solicit customer feedback, often in the form of a telephone follow-up or written questionnaire, you could sort out those who have responded favorably and send them a request for an online review. If your request is in the form of an email, you could provide links not only to your own integrated customer review system, but also to your business's listings on various sites that accept user reviews. You could offer something to your customer in exchange for them taking the time to post a review, such as a 10% discount off their next purchase from you, or some other prize that would entice them to make the effort and at the same time make them feel good about your business.

How to Address Damaging Reviews

If you can contact the unhappy customer and solve whatever problem he had, he may be willing to remove the negative review. Whether or not you think his complaint is valid, it's in your best interest to fix it. A negative review can cost you a lot of money, and the longer it sits out on display, the more money you may lose. If you think about how much you spend to bring in new customers, you probably will agree that it isn't prudent to let a relatively small amount of money to establish a review system get in your way, even if the customer is wrong and you know you are right.

Sometimes it will be impossible to get the customer to remove his negative post. You can still lessen the damage by responding to the complaint online. There is nothing stopping you from posting your own comment explaining the situation or apologizing to the reviewer and stating your offer to fix the problem. If a prospective customer takes the time to read the whole story, they'll see that you are taking the time and trying to make your customers happy.

Occasionally, a review will violate the terms established by the review site, for example using foul language. If this is the case, you can flag the review and it may be removed.

Other Tips

Don't enter multiple positive reviews yourself. Online directories try to prevent fraudulent reviews because they make their site less useful to their visitors. Google Places displays reviews from sites such as Insider Pages and Yelp, as well as reviews posted directly to Google and posted to your own review system such as those that we provide. If you ask your customers for positive reviews, give them links to a variety of review sites including your own. It will look more natural if reviews come from more than one site.

It has always been important for a business to cultivate a good reputation, but never before has a dissatisfied customer been able to reach the public right alongside your advertisement. More and more consumers are bypassing the yellow pages and turning to their favorite search engine to find a business instead. You can no longer afford not to know what reviews are out there or to ignore dissatisfied customers. They have more power than ever before.

Click here to read more about how online customer reviews can help your business, or to see examples of how it is done. Or call us today to set up an appointment at (608) 523-4255, or toll-free (866) 531-1686, or submit the "Free Consultation" form to the left of the page and we will get back to you shortly.

Google Local Listings is now Google Maps is now Google Places is now Place Search ... or is it? One thing's for certain, Google local search keeps changing, and Madison Wisconsin area businesses large and small need to change with it if they want to come up in local listings for their products and services. What are local listings? First, Google's objective is always to provide the most relevant information back to their customers, who happen to be the users of their search engine. So when Google can identify that a search is for a product or service located within a specific geographical location (for example, "internet marketing consultant madison wisconsin"), they attempt to show local businesses that provide those products or services. They've been doing that for a while, but HOW they display that information has all changed.

  In light of Google’s recent changes to the local search game with the launch of “Place Search,” many business owners are starting to re-visit their digital marketing strategy. And since it appears to be a significant step closer to an online version of the Yellow Pages, you are likely to ask yourself one very critical question: “What does Google Place Search mean to my business?”

In short, “Place Search” is a clear indicator that an optimized web presence is a definite MUST for your business if you want to attract local customers online.

But for more comprehensive insight and expert tips, we’ve just scheduled a special webinar for November 23^rd @ 12pm CST. We have WSI Internet marketing experts lined up to discuss the Google “Place Search” feature and educate you on how to leverage the new changes to stay competitive in your company’s local online market.

Some webinar highlights will include:

• The major changes to the results page on Place Search
• How the changes will affect your business’ web presence and online credibility
• Expert tools and techniques that will help your business optimize your Google Place Listing

Here are the registration details (after the webinar, I will be posting a link to the recording) :

How Google’s New “Place Search” Feature Impacts Your Business – Learn to Stay Competitive!

Date: Tuesday, November 23^rd, 2010

Time: 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM CST

Register Now!