Online Marketing Strategies to Make Your Business Shine in 2017 | Part 1

(Video Transcription.  See video below.)

Stephan: Good morning guys, how are you all? Good.

My name is Stephan, I work with a company called Get The Clicks and the FSDA has asked us to go ahead and come out and talk to you guys a little bit about web marketing today.

Just kind of so I can get a little bit of a feel is there anybody in here that is from Orlando? What about Miami and South Florida, Boca Fort Lauderdale area? Yes okay. What about west coast, Tampa? Okay.

So, I am kind of here to debunk any myths. You guys are kind of a smaller group than what we usually speak to. We have two hours, this is not for seeing. So, if we want to jump off the presentation for a minute and if you guys have specific questions. If you want to run it a little bit more like a workshop that is perfectly okay with me. If you want to hold your questions until the end that is fine with me too. Whatever you guys prefer I will be going through a lot of stuff but it is not a presentation where I am going to stand up here and preach from the pulpit and tell you guys that Google is great and you should be doing Google and you need to rank on the top of Google, you already know all of that.

I am going to get a little more granular. I’m actually going to explain to you guys really how they think and why Google does what they do and kind of give you guys the tools to be able to take that information and then really use it advantageously against your competition. I make no qualms about it, we are a company that reverse engineers. Just so you understand our philosophy.

Most of the time when you hire companies like us you are going to get one of two types of presentations. A, they are going to sit with you and you’re going to tell them I have a website and I want to be at the top of Google. And then they put a nice presentation and a proposal together for you that is pretty much based on what they think you can afford. The other thing is they may have packages and so then the package deals like some of your big box store SEO companies out there, you can go online and you can pick a package.

And what do you do? Well you are going to pick a package based on price, on what you can afford. And there is a huge flaw in that and I’ll explain to you guys why that is. At the end of the day the only way to do this is to reverse engineer what the guys at the top are doing. It is a very, very simple approach, it is a very simple theory. You just need to know what you need to look for. And then once you know that you can actually implement it very easily.
So, I am here today to really show you guys how to do that and then if you guys decide you want to come and talk to us afterwards there are three lovely ladies that are sitting over there. We do have a booth on the floor, what is our booth number?

Female speaker: 1121.

Stephan: 1121. So, if you guys want to come and talk to us later I’ll be more than happy to go ahead and do that. I don’t know what the internet access exactly is down there but if you have any specific questions about your business please by all means go ahead and ask away.

They didn’t give us the correct count so there is actually a little more people in here than we actually had thought. Every single one of you should have two booklets. Each one of you guys should have one of these spiral bound notebooks, if you don’t please see me or one of these ladies afterwards. Give us your business cards and we will be more than happy to drop one in the mail to you guys.

Number two you should have one of these worksheets. You can actually enter information about your business on this worksheet and if you follow this worksheet at the end of the seminar you will have a recipe to go back home and literally start to implement. If you don’t have one of these they can actually be downloaded directly off our website. It’s a free download and we are not even going to ask for your email address. So, you can go ahead and do that as well, it is in a very simple excel format.

We are not web developers we actually come from marketing and financial backgrounds. We are all about business development. So, for us it’s about ROI. So, at the end of the day if you can’t measure it, you throw it out. So, we have some rules, we have some rules that comes to digital marketing.

You don’t need money. If you don’t make money from it, it doesn’t really make a lot of sense. But the only way you are going to know if you are making money from it is if you actually track it. So, we are going to be addressing that a little bit.

We are going to talk about conversion optimization, things of that nature. You need to go niche, you need to be different. Lots of people tell me that well, I’m different because I have great quality service or we’re really fast or we have great prices. That doesn’t count. You need to have something that really makes you stand apart from the rest at least in your initial presentation.

 

Your Website is No Longer a Marketing Tool…

One of the things that I am going to harp on that I really want you guys to understand is your website is not a marketing tool. It’s not. If I was standing here in 2010 you could probably make the argument that it is, but it no longer is. Who out here does any kind of other marketing other than online? Networking events, anything along those lines? I can see some hands right there, okay great. So, you are at a networking event and you meet somebody and you tell them what they do. If you tell them what you do, they will tell you what they do and so forth and so on. And so, you kind of introduce yourself.

Well that person may or may not need a pool contractor. Maybe they say, “Holy cow you are exactly what I’ve been looking for. Great.” Or they are just going to take your business card and say, “You know Joe it’s nice to meet you” and move on their merry way.

Now the web isn’t like that. On the web, there is already predetermined demand. Why? Because somebody is searching for pool contractors. So, your website it’s not marketing you, your website needs to convince that end user that you are the best solution for their need. And if you are convincing them that they need to do something that is sale, right? Because at the end of the day what do you want them to do? call you or email you? The rest is just fluff, the rest is just to satisfy the Google gods, right? So, what you want to go ahead and do is you really want to go ahead and get that understanding, get that in your head, that your website is a sales tool.

Reverse engineering, I touched on that earlier. It is very very simple. I am sure each one of you guys have gone on Google and there is your arch nemesis. I can’t believe they are back up on number one, they are always on number one. I can’t understand why are they always on number one. Well you are going to learn why today. Because the beauty of it is that there really is no voodoo or gray area when it comes to SEO. That entire notion is just promoted by SEO companies that want to keep lots of people in the dark because that is how we get to charge lots of money.

That is not really how it is. It is a very regimented very black and white process that you can go through in order to achieve what you are looking for and reverse engineering is the first step in that.

I touched on number four, it’s not a marketing tool it’s a sales tool. And number five, little rule don’t forget rule number one.

Probably lots of you guys have seen this before, it’s a heat map. We live in the western world where we read top to bottom left to right. So naturally speaking you want to go ahead and be in the top left hand corner of the Google search engine results page. Well, that is what Google wants you to think. Fact of the matter is that it really depends on the behavior the psychology of the end user. Think about the way that you guys are searching on Google. Chances are if you are looking for a quality service, what are you going to do?

If you are on a Google search engine results page and you are looking for a quality of service. Are you going to look at the ads or are you going to go below the ads? Below the ads. Why are you going below the ads?

Male speaker 1: [unintelligible 00:09:18]

Stephan: Exactly, why?

Male speaker 1: [unintelligible 00:09:21]

Stephan: You know people are paying to be at the top. They are not necessarily the best. So where do you go? So, pool contractors, you guys are your prime example. What is underneath the ads? The organic. And what part of the organic is under the ads? The map right. I’m going to go ahead and draw this up here because we are going to reference back to it.

So, Google by the way changed this recently. If you guys remember if this was a Google search engine results page we used to have ads on the right, but those are all gone now. What they did now is you generally have three to four ads at the top. Then for the most part you’ve got your map section right here. They call it a snack pack now for most. That means there are three. Then you have got what is essentially part of your main organic section. And then on the bottom again you have got some ads.

Now you guys are local businesses you are not national. Anybody for whatever reason here has a national business? No? Okay. You guys are all local businesses. You service a particular city. You service a particular radius, you have a service area. Your gold is right here in the maps, you want to be in the maps. So, what that means right here even though Google plans most people are clicking up in there, you are really moving below that. You are really moving into that maps area.

Now, does anybody in here do any emergency services? You do? What do you do for emergency services?

Male speaker 2: We have our pool side and then we have our water treatment side. If they don’t have water, it’s an emergency.

Stefan: Emergency service. Okay great. So, psychology of emergency service. Holy cow something is broken and I need it fixed immediately. Do you go on your computer or do you go on your mobile device? Mobile device, that is right. Do you know that the way that Google lays things out on a mobile device is different than on a desktop? On mobile devices, they are actually pushing the ads a lot more and they have gotten really good at even hiding them. So, if you run emergency services there actually is an opportunity to go in to the ads and actually provide a very nice positive ROI. So again, it is the psychology behind that will actually drive it.

This is an interesting statistic and this is actually contractors across the board, this is not just pool. But I will tell you it pretty much holds true for almost any industry. Each column you guys see here is essentially the percentage of traffic a website receives based on the position that they are displayed in. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out the first couple of guys actually get the most. But notice that the first three really get the lions share and why is that? Well that is because you have got map sitting again at the top here. So again, getting in to the maps is absolute key.

 

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate, it’s a stupid techy term. But anybody have any idea what that means? No, okay. Bounce rate is actually something Google pays very close attention to and so should you. If you don’t have a webmaster or if you have a web marketing company right now you want to make sure that they report back to you on the bounce rate on your website every single month.

Bounce rate is essentially this. A visitor comes to your website and then bounces off and leaves. Why would somebody do that? Maybe they are an existing customer and they just needed your phone. Well in Google infinite wisdom, and I say this with all the sarcasm in the world, is that they believe if somebody bounces off your website it’s a negative user experience. And so, from that standpoint they demote your site. So, your webmaster, your web developer it’s their job to reduce the bounce rate. In other words, to make people go one step deeper.

So, what do most of us do? Most web developers even do this they say, “Well you want people to go ahead and call you and so make sure your phone number is in the header”. It’s actually a problem because if your phone number is in the header your bounce rate is going to go up because a lot of your existing customers are just going to go there and say, “Okay here it is. Let me go and call them”. Click, goodbye.

So, a lot of times what we recommend to people is, don’t put your phone number in the header, put a contact button in the header and then you click on that contact button that takes them to the contact page. Guess what? Now the visitor has gone in to one more page and you are no longer bouncing. Simple fix and it will easily bump up your website a couple of clicks on Google.

By the way, bounce rate is reported in Google Analytics. Does anybody in here look at their Google Analytics reports? Cool good, anybody else? I see a couple of hands back here. Okay awesome. Does anybody ever wonder why Google gives it to you for free? They are just such an altruistic sweet little company. They purchased Urchin in 2005 and took their technology and turned it in to Google Analytics. Well I’m sure all of you before you embedded the code read the terms and conditions on it, I’m positive of that. In those terms and conditions, you guys were giving Google all the power to evaluate anything you want on your website.

So, they are giving it to you for free so they can data mine everything. And that data mining affects your rank. We have actually unhooked Google Analytics from websites and watched their rank go up. Think about that. There is a strong argument to be made that if you really want to take this serious you may not want to consider Google Analytics, you may want to think about companies like Mouseflow and things of that nature. Its maybe a twenty dollar a month investment. But trust me the analytics are way better and you are not reporting back to Google.

So, no fuzzy math. I kind of mentioned this earlier. The way that we do things just so you guys understand I’ll give you guys a quick background on us. I got into this in 2007. I worked for a real estate investment trust and we got completely screwed over.

[00:16:22] [END OF PART 1]