What is dental marketing? There’s no doubt you have searched online for a business, and frankly most of your patients are doing the same thing. Consider your direct referrals are also reviewing your online reputation, searching for your practice, and visiting your website before calling you or visiting the office.

It’s estimated that nearly 80% of all non-referral new patient leads in the dental industry begin with major online search engines, and the reality is that Google, Yahoo, and Bing have taken the place of the Yellow Page strategies of the past. With the explosion of mobile phones and their ease of accessing information at your fingertips if you’re not building your online brand, you are being overshadowed by your competition regardless if you’re the better dentist.

Internet marketing for dentists is essential to growing your business, retaining patients and is critical to your overall success. For the same reason, I don’t recommend a patient performs a root canal it’s important to hire a professional marketing expert that knows precisely how to position your business online and drive results. Not only will this make the best use of your time, but you will see results and more patients much faster.

Knowing some basics about internet dental marketing can go a long way regardless of if you hire a marketing professional or not. The go-to steps for successful internet marketing for dentists are as follows.

 

You Must Have a Great Dental Website for Your Practice!

Your patient’s first impression and the online marketing of your practice all start with your site. Patients will quickly navigate away from a webpage if they find it outdated, unattractive, slow, hard to use, poorly laid out or not mobile friendly. Your site should be informative, clear and easy to follow. When websites are designed well with user experience and conversion in mind, they will be laid out in such a way that patients can find the information they’re looking for and easily contact you.

Make sure to have the following information clearly displayed and readily available on your website:

• Quick access to your contact information as well as your hours and directions to your office(s)
• Clear information about the services you offer
• Clear information about what insurance, carrier/payment policies you work with and those you don’t
• The option to schedule or request appointments via the web page (this doesn’t work for all practices depending on your back office setup)
• A place for potential patients to read reviews and patients to write testimonials or reviews. (If you ever see the review stars in search results this is the first step to getting those to appear)
• Links to reach your Facebook, Twitter, and other social media pages
• Access to your blog (which we recommend that you write content for at least once a week and share to your social media pages)

Check out a site we designed for one of our long-time dental clients below. We put a focus on beautiful design, but most importantly user experience and strong calls to action had to serve the visitors and our marketing goals.

Note the Phone number and CTA for making an appointment (Our #1 marketing goal) placed at the top of the page and again book appointment in the main hero image. It’s important that these things appear above the fold, so the user doesn’t have to scroll to find them. Purposeful design should be your approach across your entire website to maximize converting leads into new patients and maintain an excellent user experience.

 

Local SEO And Dentist Search Engine Optimization

You’ve probably heard the term, and you probably recognize your practice needs it. But, what is SEO? SEO is the acronym for Search Engine Optimization, and if you aren’t using it, you are losing patients to your competitors who are. Don’t worry, though. Despite your lack of SEO, there is still time to fix your situation and actions to ensure you are always top of mind (and top of the page) with your audience. But consider the longer you wait, the harder and more costly the job is.

Search Engine Optimization is the process of improving your search engine rankings and presence using various tactics like On-page and Off-page Optimization, Content Creation, Link Building, and Social Media. Search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo show links and websites that are considered authoritative and relevant to the users search terms. Relevancy is determined by many things like content, keywords, domain authority and links both to and from other web pages. Example “Cosmetic Dentist Chicago”

The overall goal is to create website authority. An authoritative site is promoted by search engines because it contains useful information about the user’s search. On page content and links back to it on places like social media, blogs, related keywords and consistently updated blog is picked up by search engines and are recorded as “authority signals.” Your website stands a higher chance of being placed above other sites because it is being updated and is informative to the user.

SEO is a complicated process that helps get website traffic at a low patient acquisition cost from organic search and natural listings. SEO done properly is crucial to your site’s success and visibility of your practice in search results.

SEO for dentists that features a mix of long tail keyword terms like “dental implant expert near me” will convert on the page at a much higher rate than broader search terms like “dental implants” because long tail searches generally indicate the user is closer to making a purchase decision versus initial information seeking.

 

Google Maps and Google My Business Optimization

Being seen in Google Maps is critical to your practice, and Local SEO combined with Google Maps and Google My Business Optimization is the only way to ensure you show up in the coveted top three spots.

Local SEO consists of optimizing your Website, Google My Business listings, and building authoritative citations centered around your location, so Google knows where your business is located and what services you offer potential customers.

You simply must do more than your competitors to have any chance of showing in the top results on search or Google Maps results. I recommend that you hire a marketing professional to optimize your website. While many SEO companies offer a broad range of monthly costs and services, you get what you pay for, and I would steer clear of cheap SEO offers that are typically outsourced offshore, put your site at risk of search engine penalties and provide little long-term value to your practice.

 

Patient Reviews And Testimonials Are A Big Deal

Encourage people to review your practice. Reviews help build your brand authority and patients trust which increase the chances of converting a website visitor to a long-time patient.

A surprising 84% of users say that they trust online customer reviews and testimonials as much as personal recommendations. These referrals are your best opportunity to win the confidence of potential patients and contributes immensely to many factors that help your sites SEO.

Your online reputation is ultimately what prospective patients see when they locate you on the web. What are people saying about your practice? By taking charge of your online reputation, it will inspire you and your staff to provide a better experience for patients.

Use online sources like Google, Yelp, and your social media sites to get customer reviews that are authentic, and it will help people choose your practice. Don’t be afraid to ask your current patients for these reviews!

Once you have reviews, you can have them auto fed into your website where patients can see them. Your SEO team can apply schema data markup language to make sure search engines see and index them so you can finally get those impressive stars you see for some search results on Google. (NOTE: Google has made this much tougher to achieve with recent algorithm updates)

Social Media Marketing For Dentists Is Powerful

Today, it is vital for you to have a strong presence on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and Google+ in order to keep your practice top of mind for patients. A large percentage of your potential patients use these social media websites and so should you. Search engines like Google place a high value on your website’s relationship with social media and the more social engagement you have, the higher your site will rank in organic search results.

But how do I make social media work for my dental practice?

Social media is a fabulous way to gain more trust with your existing patients and start a relationship with potential new patients by sharing useful dental related blog posts, content and most importantly getting to know you and the personality of your practice.

Here are some helpful tips for social media content:

• Easy to access links back to your website, service pages, contact info, and blog
• Include a link back to a relative page on your website with almost every post
• Patient Reviews about your practice
• Before and after photos
• Discounts and special offers
• Posts about good dental health
• Reviews on various dental products such as toothbrushes, teeth whitening kits, etc
• Sprinkle some fun, humorous posts in to keep it light
• DO NOT post graphic images of dental case studies and dental procedures. You will lose followers, and frankly, most people think it’s a bit gross

One of the most powerful methods of boosting traffic and capturing names for your mailing list from social media is with contests and giveaways customized to your business. Giveaways with prizes like a free in-office tooth whitening are great.

PRO TIP: One contest idea we find works very well is doing a blog feature about one of your staff members that highlight who they are, likes interest and how what they do for your practice is important and impacts patients. Not only do the staff members LOVE being featured, but their family members and friends eagerly share the posts across social media.

Heres where it gets powerful… A few days later, we do a promoted contest with a Facebook Paid Ad (it’s super cheap) and enter participants into a random drawing for whoever answered a question about the featured staff member accurately. Of course, they need to visit your website to read the staff profile to get the correct answers. People love it, and after you choose the winner, you have yet another post to share on social media about who won and what they won. All of this value from your initial blog post and posting it to social media.

You can create and post related content that can be engaged and shared by a large number of people on social media but make sure to link your website in these posts. Apart from its tremendous impact, social media marketing is essentially free and will expand your reach. There are several platforms, but I recommend you start with Facebook and Twitter. For early success on these platforms target your existing patients and their friends and family.

If you don’t have the time or staff to tackle social media, you can hire a professional to help do this work for you. We love building our clients social presence.

 

Paid Advertising (PPC) For Dentists Drives Immediate Traffic

Paid Social Ads Work And They’re Cost Effective

Because social marketing is an excellent way to get your practice seen by a large number of potential patients, paying for ads on these sites can also be a winning strategy especially when using contests or promotions. Facebook ads offer a great way to target your potential market with laser precision and not only drive traffic to your website but help build your social media following at the same time.

Great case study from Facebook’s ad platform featuring a dentist in South Carolina illustrating the power of Facebook social ads in the image below.

Paid Search Ads Support Your Other Dental Marketing Efforts

You can also use Paid search to appear directly on major search engine’s results pages like Google. Finding the appropriate place for your practice will depend on a variety of factors. I suggest doing PPC in combination with other marketing efforts like SEO and Social Media to get the most from your budget. Truth is Paid Search ads for the dental industry are very competitive and have increased costs, but when done right they can net a great ROI. Practices that rely entirely on Pay Per Click Advertising will often burn through their budgets quickly due to the increased costs especially when not managed well.

Retargeting Site Visitors and Existing Patients

Retargeting also referred to as remarketing is when you visit a website an invisible cookie is placed on your browser which allows advertisers to serve up targeted relevant ads when you are on other sites like Facebook. Think about when you are browsing the internet, and you see ads for products or stores you may have visited in the past. It’s not a coincidence that’s the power of retargeting at work. When a user visits your site they have shown interest in your practice, and it is much easier to impress your brand further by placing your offer in front of them with an ad after they clicked away and increase the chances of them returning.

 

Conclusion

If you’re serious about taking your dental practice to the next level, your long-term approach should be to diversify your traffic sources and make an investment in a combination of great web design, SEO, social media, and PPC. A well balanced and effective internet marketing strategy will include many of the points listed above, and you should implement all these tactics or hire a marketing professional that knows how to get the job done.

THIS STUFF WORKS! If you tried these methods in the past and were unsuccessful, you probably hired someone who didn’t know what they were doing or maybe even tried doing it yourself and weren’t able to dedicate enough time to ensure success. If you have any questions or need assistance getting your practice growing with digital dental marketing, we can help. Contact Us Today!

Running an Ecommerce business is tough work. As if keeping inventory stocked, your website working, shipping running smoothly, and providing stellar customer service isn’t enough on your plate, you’re also expected to market like a pro. It’s a lot to take on, especially if you’re a solopreneur.

However, when it comes to marketing, a lot of it’s just testing and automation. As long as you avoid some of the easy-to-make mistakes, you’ll be able to get your marketing whipped into shape in no time.

But what are those mistakes, and how do you avoid them? Let’s break down three Ecommerce marketing mistakes that are easy to make (and easy to fix).

Mistake #1: Failing to Identify Your Target Demographic

This is a huge blunder that many businesses make. You must know who your target customer is. As the well-known business coach and CEO, Meredith Hill once said, “When you speak to everyone, you speak to no one.” You can’t market to everyone out there and make an impact.

Sometimes businesses find it helpful to create buyer personas, or fake people who represent their ideal demographic. Think about your buyer persona.

• What’s their age?
• Are they married, single, dating?
• What’s their gender?
• What do they do for work?
• What are their hobbies?
• What is their annual income?

Can you answer those questions? If not, it’s time to take a closer look at who you’re targeting. From social media posts, to website, to paid ads, you should always be able to create marketing content with your ideal buyer in mind.

Think of it this way. Let’s say you sell high-end power tools. Now, you could create a Facebook ad campaign and target every person 18-75 in the United States, because power tools are objectively useful to everyone, right?

But, who’s more likely to buy:

A: 72-year-old Ethel, proud grandmother of seven, living on her fixed income in New York City?

OR

B: 37-year-old Rick, professional contractor, with two children, living in Texas?

Sure, Ethel might want some power tools. Power to her! But Rick is hands down a more likely candidate to buy your power tools.

Knowing and targeting your ideal demographic will help you focus your marketing efforts in the right place. It will keep you from overspending on paid campaigns, and ultimately help you more effectively communicate with your potential customers.

Mistake #2: Not Testing Enough

It’s crucial that you test, test, and test again. Often, Ecommerce businesses copy-and-paste what works for competitors and cross their fingers. That’s not going to cut it. Instead, try out a bunch of different strategies and see what works best for you.

With social media ads, for instance, try a few different formats. Test out image ads, carousel ads, and video ads. Change up the words in the ads, too. Look at your ad budget and commit to spending a portion of it testing the waters. Before you do that, make sure you have some analytics going, so you can see what’s working and what isn’t.

Run your first ad and take note of click-through rates, drop off rates, and, most importantly, conversions. Then, try a different ad and do the same thing. Then, compare the results. Rinse and repeat with different ads, until you know you have a winner. It’s like a gladiator match. Only the best ad will survive. 

The same goes for testing product descriptions and landing page copy. Are you seeing that a lot of people visit your product, but then never purchase? You might have an issue with the product description. Try some different descriptions or images.

Keep testing until you find the magic formula. Taking the time to test will put you a step above your competitors.

Mistake #3: Spreading Yourself Too Thin

When it comes to marketing, and all aspects of your business, the single worst thing you can do for yourself is to spread yourself too thin. A study by The University College London found that people who work greater than 55 hours each week increase their risk of stroke by 33%. Studies have shown us repeatedly that working too much leads to health complications, emotional distress, and ultimately lower productivity.

You don’t want that. You have a lot of responsibilities in running an ecommerce business, but there are a few ways to avoid burnout.

Hire Experts or Ask for Help: If marketing makes you cringe. Hire a marketing expert to do it for you. Sometimes that isn’t in the budget, but studies have shown that investing in marketing produces high returns. If you can’t afford it,  take on an intern, or get help from friends and family if you can.

Automate Where You Can. There are several social media automation tools and ecommerce automation software that make payments and inventory simple. Almost everything digital has an easier solution out there. Find it and utilize it.

Simplify. You don’t need to be on every single social media or run ads on every platform. There are so many marketing paths to choose from: emailing, mailing, social media, advertising, influencers, and more. You don’t have to do them all. Choose the ones that work for you and get rid of the rest of them.

Wrapping it Up

Ecommerce isn’t easy, but if you avoid these three common mistakes, you’ll be ahead of the pack. Just remember to:

1. Identify Your Target Demographic
2. Test Everything
3. Don’t Wear Yourself Out

You’ve got this Ecommerce thing in the bag. Keep chugging along and avoid these mistakes, and you’ll be on the path to Ecommerce super success in no time.

There’s no doubt email marketing is one of the most effective ways to follow-up and communicate with your customers.

In fact, email is the preferred source of business communication for 72 percent of consumers and averages an ROI of $38 for every $1 spent. Now if your email campaigns don’t get that kind of result, then I have some sure-fire tips you can do to improve the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns right away.

1 – Use A Recognizable And Trustworthy FROM Name

This is the first thing that appears in most email clients, and the first thing readers look at when deciding whether to open your email or not. Using a name that is recognizable and relevant to your audience in an ever crowded inbox is key to getting your readers attention. It’s a best practice to use the name of your company, brand or company figurehead here. A/B testing over time can offer more insight to what works best for your business.

2 – Don’t Block Customer Communication With An Unfriendly Reply-To Address

Email is a great way to open up communication between your business and your customers. But, if you’re using a variation of “no-reply@your-business.com,” it eliminates the opportunity for customer interaction, seems unfriendly, and may even affect your overall delivery rates. Many subscribers will naturally hit reply, and expect a response and if they can’t email you they probably won’t open up future emails.

3 – Write An Email Subject Line That Gets A Prospect to Open, Read, and Take Action

It doesn’t matter how much research and time you put into the body of your email if your email gets deleted before it even gets opened. The best subject lines are short, original, creative, intriguing, and informative without giving too much away. The crew over at HubSpot have some great examples of effective subject lines.

4 – Personalization Goes A Long Way

If your list has the names of users, it’s important to make it personal and address them as if they were in the room with you. Addressing them by name helps to connect them with your message and increases the chance they will keep reading. Most email marketing software uses merge tags to include it in your emails automatically along with a host of other useful information about your prospect.

5 – Segment Your Subscriber List To Increase Personalization

Speaking of personalization the more targeted your message, the better your results will be. List segmentation lets you target customers based on their interests, location, and needs. It will also help increase your open and conversion rates dramatically.

6 – Speak Directly To Your Reader

Not all subscribers are the same, but it’s important to write your email with the segment your targeting or your ideal custom avatar in mind. It doesn’t matter if your list is ten people or 50,000 speak to them directly as if they were there in person.

7 – Provide MASSIVE Value

You can’t always be selling in every email. If you want people to keep reading your emails, you need to offer MASSIVE value. Most people subscribed because they wanted a deal on their next purchase, more information to get them closer to buying or perhaps expert information about solving a problem they might have. When you provide value, your emails are more likely to be read, and they’ll find a deeper appreciation for your brand.

8 – Make Sure You Have A Strong Call To Action

Whether you want people to click on a 15% off sale or you want them to read your latest blog post, you need to make sure your call to action, links, and buttons are distinct and typically above and below the fold. Your click through rates will increase by sending a clear message to your readers.

Pro Tip: Limit your calls to action if you’re sending an email that has several calls to action it may justify a separate email.

9 – Your Email Must Be Mobile Optimized

Mobile has exceeded desktop as the readers’ preference for email, with 55 percent of email now being opened on mobile devices you just cannot ignore optimizing for mobile. If your email doesn’t look excellent and operate smoothly on mobile devices, your probably distancing a vast part of your audience.

PRO TIP: Make sure your subject lines are mobile optimized. You can preview how they will look before sending using this easy tool.

10- Testing Is Key To A Successful Send

It’s important to send multiple test emails before blasting your campaign to 1000’s of people. You can preview how your email will look across popular email clients like Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook using free tools like Litmus email testing. Make sure to check ALL of your links and ensure they are going to proper destination etc.

Conclusion

Effective email marketing is not only highly profitable for your business, but when following the tips above you can increase open rates, drive more traffic and ultimately grow your business while pleasing your audience with excellent content at the same time.

If you need assistance with email marketing or email automation we can help. Contact Us Today at 310-400-0561.

There’s no disputing the importance of business goals and how they enable business owners to prioritize objectives and set benchmarks to assess performance.

As you’re looking back at the past year and preparing for 2021, this is a perfect time to set new business goals, redesign the approach to the ones where you may have come up a bit short over the last year and devise a plan to help you get results.

If you answer NO to any of these questions in 2020, We can help devise a marketing plan for so you can reply YES to all of them in 2021…

•Did I make as much as I hoped in 2020?
•Is my online business growing as fast as I hoped?
•Did the internet marketing agency I choose, do what they said they would in 2020?
•Am I getting the ROI I had expected from my online marketing efforts in 2020?
•Did I complete ALL of my online goals for 2020?

If not, let’s get started… right now so you can say YES to all of these things at the end of 2021 Contact me today!

So I’m always talking about why SEO is ideal for driving targeted traffic to your website to produce leads and increase sales, but what if I told you there’s a much easier way to double your business before you start driving more traffic?

Well, there is, and it’s no secret its just often overlooked by businesses, and digital marketers who tend to put too much importance on vanity metrics like the amount of traffic their site gets instead of attracting the right target audience who will ultimately convert at a much higher rate.

You see by doubling your conversion rate with Conversion Rate Optimization you can grow your sales and reach your goals much faster than by increasing your traffic.

Just think about all the ways, we drive traffic to our websites like SEO, paid search, social media, email marketing, or even print ads and just how much time and money, it will take to increase the traffic to a site. But instead, if you concentrated on improving your website conversion rates with the site traffic you already have you could make an immediate impact on your business.

 

 

But How Do I Figure Out My Conversion Rate?

Easy! You divide the total number of sales or leads by the total unique visitors to your website * 100. Example: 20 Sales / 1,000 unique website visits * 100 = 2.00% Conversion Rate.

Once you know your conversion rate, it’s simple to project what changes to traffic or conversion rate will do for your total sales in the future.

Website Traffic * Conversion Rate = Total Sales and if you want to take it further, you can multiply Total Sales * Your Average Sale Price to calculate how these changes will impact your potential revenue.

It’s pretty clear the result will be identical regardless if you double your traffic or double your conversion rate.

If you don’t want to do the math you can check out this cool conversion rate calculator at Entrepreneur.com
 

So What Do I Do After I Increase My Conversion Rate?

Once you can increase your conversion rate, you can then focus on driving additional traffic, and guess what? That extra traffic will convert at a higher rate, and you will get way more ROI from your traffic investment if you focused on the conversion rate first.

Here are a few ways to help you increase your conversion rate:

• Make sure your offer is the right offer. Just because you have an offer doesn’t mean it’s the right offer. Make it compelling and make sure it resonates with your audience.
• Your offer needs to be easy to find on your page.
• Test Your Landing Page Design by making small changes and gauging their impact on your conversion over time. A/B or split test to make a direct comparison and refine your offer based on the data.
• Customers need guidance! Make sure to direct users with a well thought out message that ultimately leads them to a single call to action.
• Simplify the purchase or lead capture steps by removing unnecessary steps or form fields that result in customer confusion and disinterest.
• Offer free useful information in exchange for an email address so you can follow up and convert over a longer period.
• Use Remarketing, which helps you persuade indecisive visitors to go back to your site.
• Add a landing page popup, overlay or exit popup to present or ensure your offer won’t be missed.
• Make your phone number more prominent if calls are your goal.

 

Applying these tips will help your landing pages deliver precise, high-quality information and a clear call to action, which will lead to a valuable increase in both Conversion Rate Optimization and overall visitor satisfaction. If you need help with your CRO strategy, please contact us today at 310-400-0561 for a free consultation!

Often when we meet with new clients, we spend lots of time dispelling myths about SEO, how it works and how search engine optimization can serve their business best.

The biggest misnomer about SEO is that your primary goal should be to rank #1 for your company keywords like, “plumber,” “dentist,” or “chiropractor.” There’s no doubt those keywords can drive traffic to your website because they do get lots of search volume, but one of the reasons they get such high search volume is because they are incredibly general. The quality of traffic you get from them with regards to the searchers intent will vary considerably depending on your business and what your goals are for SEO.

Your #1 goal for SEO should be to drive qualified traffic to your website and then convert the traffic into leads and ultimately sales.

When thinking about ranking keywords, it’s better to think about longer phrases referred to as “long tail” keywords. There’s an apparent difference between someone searching for a general term like “dentist” compared to someone searching for “cosmetic dentist Los Angeles, CA”. The person using the more descriptive phrase has more intent to find a cosmetic dentist located in Los Angeles, CA.

The users search intent and the relevance of the keyword should always be considered when deciding what keywords to target. You can extrapolate this across any niche and any business. Not only will it give you a better understanding of your customers and what they’re seeking, but it will offer much better results from your SEO efforts. Don’t fall victim to SEO myths and vanity key performance indicators like this one. It’s important to rank high, but what term ranks high is more important when it comes to building quality traffic to your site.

We are experts at SEO keyword research and can set your site up for success with not only the general keyword terms but laser focus on long tail keywords that will lead to a high conversion rate. Give us a call today at 310-400-0561 or CLICK HERE for a Free SEO Analysis.

 

I thought SEO traffic was free?

Well, there is no doubt that compared to paid search advertising like Google AdWords or Facebook Ads it is free because you are not getting charged every time someone clicks your website from a search result. But make no mistake it’s not free! It takes time, effort and money to get your site optimized and appear at the top where users will see you. The good thing is you’re building an asset for your business with Local SEO as opposed to saying goodbye to those paid search clicks once you stop paying for the service.

But my website is awesome!

If you build a stunning website, it doesn’t mean you’re going to rank high on the first page of Google, and it surely won’t produce any significant traffic results. If you want to rank high and get clicks, you need an authoritative domain with highly relevant content and trust signals that allow search engines to easily match your web page with users search queries. And most importantly you will need to outpace your competitors in the area to ensure you rank above them.

What are the SEO cost factors?

SEO is not a one size fits all solution because every business and every category are different with unique needs and solutions to outwork your competition.

One of the biggest factors determining how much local SEO will cost is your competition.

If you’re a national brand or in a larger competitive industry like a law firm, dental practice or eCommerce, then you will likely have to work harder than your competition and spend more to increase your domain authority and trust signals with unique content and link building than in a less competitive niche.

Because of the competition factor we also analyze your competitors when doing your site audit to see what kind of work it’s going to take to outrank them before giving a quote for our SEO services.

The number of services or products you offer

The size of your business and how many services or product offerings you want to promote play a significant part in the overall size of your SEO effort. If you want to target several keywords, it will require building content and separate pages on your website that will also need to be SEO optimized. If you’re a local pool service company with a few key services the cost and workload will be much less than a national e-commerce website with 5000 products.

How many business locations you have

Ranking more than one location in search requires additional work and money than ranking an individual location. Multiple locations require separate pages for each location on your website, unique content, different citations (Every mention of your business on the web is known as a citation.) and separate Google my business profiles for each location that are all well optimized for local search.

Where your business is now and what’s been done before with local SEO

If your business is just getting started, then you can’t expect to have earned a dominant place in local search results, unless your niche is not competitive or you’re the only game in town. Likewise, if you’ve been around for years and have done some SEO in the past, there’s a chance it was done incorrectly, and that will require a bunch more time to correct any existing mistakes, violations or inaccurate citations and business mentions across the web. This can be incredibly time-consuming to correct these type of issues.

You can see now there’s a lot more that goes into figuring out how much local SEO will cost your business. If you’ve looked at SEO services in the past then you know prices can vary wildly depending on what level of service your business needs. From cookie cutter automated SEO at a few hundred dollars a month that won’t get you the results you want or $3000+ for large national businesses. If you do it yourself its going to require a bunch of time and rarely will you get the results your seeking. We suggest hiring a professional regardless if you hire us or not to ensure your Local SEO success.

Do you need Local SEO help?

Our average local SEO client rate ranges from $750-2000 per month depending on the customer’s needs. We do a FREE custom quote for each client to ensure they are getting exactly what their business needs to achieve success. Contact Us Today!

Anytime we do something with digital marketing whether that’s posting on social media and linking back to our website, doing paid advertising or sending an email campaign with email marketing the intention is to drive traffic to our website, convert those visitors into leads and ultimately into customers.

Unfortunately, Google Analytics doesn’t always connect the dots of where a visitor originated from and thus doesn’t give us all the data we need to make future marketing decisions. It’s important to see where the click came from when analyzing what worked and what didn’t. This data tells us what platforms are working so we can make educated decisions and funnel more resources into or ignore completely.

So, what is the easiest way to track and determine which marketing campaigns were successful?

Simply use the Google URL builder to track your links. You can easily tag URLs with unique variables that will help you track which of your campaigns are producing traffic and conversions.

For example, you can use unique campaign parameters to find out how many users come to your website from a link included in a weekly email newsletter, Facebook post or Craigslist ad.

If we were sending an email campaign we could use our email marketing platforms reporting to see how many people clicked the link, but we want to see this data directly in Analytics and track how they interact and whether they convert or not.

Let’s see how the URL gets structured with the Google URL Builder tool.

Instead of using the regular link: https://www.convergedigitalmarketing.com/contact-us/

We use this campaign tracking link instead:
http:// www.convergedigitalmarketing.com/contact-us?utm_source=email_blast&utm_campaign=google_url_builder_tips&utm_medium=blog

How To Use The Google URL Builder Tool

Step 1: Visit the Google Analytics URL Builder and follow these easy steps.

Step 2: Enter the link destination you want users to click. In our example, we are using our contact-us page.

 

Step 3: Add the parameters that you want to track. There are five parameters listed below, but the first three are the most used unless you’re doing links for paid ads.

• Campaign Source: The referrer: (e.g. google, newsletter)
  Tells analytics where the visitor originated. We’re using “email_blast.”
• Campaign Medium: Marketing medium: (e.g. banner, email, CPC) Tells analytics what type of medium it’s from. We’re using “blog.”
• Campaign Name: Product, promo code, or slogan (e.g. spring_sale)
  Tells analytics the name of the campaign. We’re using “google_url_builder_tips.”
• Campaign Term: Identify the paid keywords
• Campaign Content: Use to differentiate ads.

PRO TIP: We like to use the Campaign Content variable if using the same destination more than once on any campaign to improve CRO (conversion rate optimization) and determine where users clicked in the campaign using things like header, footer, sidebar, CTA, text, image1, image2, etc.

 

Step 4: Copy and paste the newly created link into wherever you want it to appear.

PRO TIP: If you are using Chrome Google includes a URL shortener tool which I suggest if using a naked link as opposed to anchor text. Example: https://goo.gl/XjXDca

Step 5: Repeat these steps for every link you want to track in each promotion.

How to view tagged campaigns in Google Analytics

After your campaign has been launched and enough time has passed to generate traffic you can go to Google Analytics, click “Acquisition” on the left menu and then select “Campaigns.” If you have received any click traffic, you will see your unique campaign name and all relevant information which will undoubtedly help you make better decisions about where best to put your marketing efforts.

Conclusion

If you put these steps into action consistently for anything you want to track, your campaigns will surely benefit from the additional data. If you need assistance with your marketing or analytic data we can help just contact us today for a free consultation, we would love to help.

By the way that contact link is a tagged link using the steps outlined above 🙂

We recently teamed up with our friends over at Render Branding and developed this stunning website for one of the finest Park City, UT custom home builders in the business Tall Pines Construction. Not only did we need to match their amazing custom home work with our website development, but we needed to deliver a website that showcased the quality of their work along with a simple to navigate user experience so new clients could see just how special the team over at Tall Pines is.

We have done a ton website development and internet marketing work with Render branding over the years and as always the designs they ask us to bring to life are nothing short of epic! There’s no doubt the client absolutely loves the result, and we’re positive his present and future customers will also.

Check out some of our handy work below and make sure to visit http://www.tallpinesconstruction.com to see what they are capable of building.

If You’re ready to take your companies internet presence to the NEXT LEVEL with a captivating, gorgeous website, then contact us for a free quote or call 310-400-0561.

Like all marketing efforts whether its print ads, paid search or SEO, the numbers have to make sense to your bottom line. The specific numbers and potential will be different for every business, but in short you need to generate more money than you’ll need to invest in your SEO for it to be profitable.

The primary goal of SEO is not just to rank in search engines like Google to generate traffic, but to get targeted and relevant traffic to produce leads and profitable sales! If you want it to serve your business long term, it must be a valuable investment.

Compared to traffic creation methods like paid search advertising, SEO is a long-term play, and it typically takes a few months to see results. However, these results tend to be less expensive overall and serve your business far longer than most other marketing channels.

So what are the important numbers to track?

• Number of searches for your target keywords (found using Google’s Keyword Planner Tool)
• Estimated click-through rate (Based on Google Organic CTR Study)
• Estimated conversion rate from visitor to customer
• Total revenue per customer

Please keep in mind your numbers, click-through rates, conversion rates and Avg revenue per customer will vary. This example is simply to illustrate how to calculate the potential value from each keyword using SEO.

1,500 Searches per month
30% Click-through rate (Estimated If you’re ranked #1. Based on the CTR study linked above its actually 31.24%, but we will use 30% so our estimations are a bit more conservative)

2.0% Conversion rate from visitor to customer
$400 Average revenue per customer

Based on 1,500 total searches per month and a click-through rate of 30% you could potentially get 450 visits to your website each month and convert 9 (2.0%) of them into paying customers at $400 each equals $3600 per month in total revenue from SEO.

Once you have these numbers it easy to compare your estimated revenue vs. your investment in SEO to decide if SEO is a solid investment for your business.

Need help to figure out if SEO is right for your business? Request a free SEO analysis today.