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August 5, 2024 by

Applications For Real World Metaverse And Virtual Real Estate

Recently, we were on a Twitter Space webinar to discuss the use cases of web3 NFTs, metaverses, and virtual real estate (digital real estate) associated with actual real world locations which you can visit physically. These are different than “fictional world” metaverses such as Decentraland, Sandbox, and similar virtual real estate metaverse platforms which don’t associate directly with actual locations in the physical world.

Some of the benefits web3 assets, which merge NFTs and metaverses along with existing online marketing efforts, include:

  • Existing web2 SEO efforts such as ranking in the search engines, Maps, YouTube and elsewhere
  • Local lead generation
  • Reducing advertising spending around town in order to acquire a new customer, client, patient, or event attendee/fan
  • Rewarding your existing customers, clients, and fans in new ways to foster further participation with your company
  • Repurposing your images and video content
  • Building Artificial Intelligence (AI) avatars to answer prospective customers’ questions with a good degree of accuracy while simultaneously featuring your real world location
  • Associating your company with known landmarks
  • Brand new ways to solve problems and associate your business with the easy-to-understand solution
  • Beginning to open your business to using or accepting cryptocurrency, altcoins, or other payment forms beyond your existing methods of sending/receiving funds
  • Much more

Thank you to Marcus (“wenairdrop“) at Iheartdomains.com for hosting the Twitter Space. The audio recording is available on his website, or you may play the audio recording below:

You also may play the recording from Spotify at this link: https://open.spotify.com/episode/03she1WRozgkE1TbAc4Hh8?si=8144659bf0a04f94

Filed Under: Backlinks, link building, local marketing, metaverse, nft, search engine marketing, SEO, virtual land, web3, Webinars
May 28, 2024 by

Local SEO With Reddit And Forums

How Can A SEO Consultant Help You Rank On Page 1 For Local Keywords Using Reddit And Other Forums

Since February 2024, the search engines have seen a significant shift in how the first page of results are returned after someone makes a query (search). This is especially true for Google.

What is challenging many local business owners, however, is the degree of first page search results which are showing Reddit and other local forums on the upper half of first page results. Even more concerning to them is the actual result being returned inside Reddit oftentimes is over a decade old and outdated!

Let’s take a look at some page 1 results of for a high population USA city like Dallas Texas. The first result is from the end of May 2024, and the keyword being searched is “laser hair removal Dallas”. I chose this because I have no laser hair removal clients, so there is no bias in the search history on this browser.

Another search (also in May 2024) is “best chiropractor Dallas”.

A Quick Analysis Of Reddit And Other Forums — And What Can Be Done To Help Make Your Phone Ring

In both examples, the “Discussions and Forums” section of these two local searches both appear in the first 3-4 organic rankings, coming after any Sponsored (paid) ad placements and the local Maps section. At the time of this post, the “Discussions and Forums” each have two of their three spots dedicated to Reddit; and the other spots (respectively) are City-Data.com and Quora.

This is very useful information for a number of reasons:

  • It means that you can participate on the platforms which are appearing in the “Discussions and Forums” section.
  • If the particular threads (topics) are still open for posting, then you can jump into that discussion and gain exposure if you add legitimate value to the discussion
  • Your profile page on those platforms (Reddit and others) also can help your overall search engine rankings due to getting links from a high-authority platform
  • You may be able to get your phone to ring faster with new business IF (!!) you “play nice” on each platform

Using the “laser hair removal Dallas” example, let’s open one of the Reddit threads/discussions. In this case it is the most recent one which Google listed, in this case a discussion started roughly four months ago.

A few things to note here:

  • The thread/discussion was pulled by Google from the r/Dallas sub-Reddit. This is the largest group dedicated to the City of Dallas, with supposedly 407,000+ members who have joined this group.
  • The replies to the person’s original question don’t have any links in the replies.
  • Note that in these first replies, no one is posting from a company-branded Reddit profile.
    • This doesn’t mean that you can’t do so
    • It is just an observation that perhaps a happy customer (client) of yours may post a reply to an open thread (discussion) in a relevant sub-Reddit on your behalf
    • This is virtually no different than having a happy customer leave a review for you on Yelp, Google Maps/Business, Facebook, TripAdvisor.com or any other review platform

The Benefits Of Taking This Action Step For Your Local Marketing

There are several benefits to doing this kind of value-addition marketing:

  • You, or a happy customer/client, can jump immediately into the discussion and get exposure on this hyper-relevant topic
  • We know it already is “ranking” well in Google as the thread which appears in the 3 options under the original “Discussions and Forums” section we saw earlier
  • You can begin to earn trust in your business locally by those who have notifications set up to be made aware when others participate in this particular discussion
  • The 407,000+ members of this one sub-Reddit (the r/Dallas group) could provide you with roughly one-eighth of 1% of that number as possible first-time awareness of your business. In this case 1/8 of 1% = 0.125%. 0.125% of 407,000 people = 509 people (rounded).
  • Being even more conservative, reducing that number to less than half still equals a potential 250 people who will be first introduced to your business…..

…. so you had better know how to “play nice” inside Reddit! Otherwise your business can gain some backlash and negative publicity at the local level!

What Is Considered Playing Nice Inside Reddit? Is It The Same For Other Forums Or Platforms Which Google Currently Rewarding With Page 1 Rankings?

Great question! The answer is both “Yes” and “No”.

Starting with the “No” first, one local-oriented platform where you can post content without a lot of concern for “playing nice” is a site like Patch.com. You can’t be a “sleazy salesman”, but you are allowed to post basic ads, upcoming event listings, and standard business profiles provided that Patch has a local section of its website dedicated to your geographic area. Learn more about Patch marketing here:

SEO And Marketing Your Local Business On Patch.com

Reddit and the other “Discussions and Forums” platforms, however, require you to play nice and add a tremendous amount of value & expertise on the topic. It also helps if you reward others’ contributions by liking their posts, replying nicely to their comments, and sharing some value you found.

Just like Facebook, you have some choices on Reddit:

  • You can post SEO keyword-optimized content, with links to your website or other website properties (such as YouTube, social media, or even press releases), on your own profile. This would be like posting content on your own Facebook wall/page, and not in a group.
    • You are still subject to people leaving comments, but they would have to find your specific post or know about your Reddit profile first
  • If you decide to post in the more heavy-volume sub-Reddits, then this would be like posting in a Facebook group relevant to your desired audience.
  • This can be both a good and bad thing, so always err on the side of being “nice” and conservative with your postings once inside a group which you didn’t create from the ground up.

Here are some ideas of how to add value in your reply to the original poster as well as those who replied to the original post’s content in a high-volume sub-Reddit group. In no particular order:

  • Compliment the original poster and/or someone who has replied in the sub-Reddit
  • Clarify any topic if there is confusion, and do so in a nice way. Always double-check before you click the “Submit” button!
  • Cite authoritative sources. In the example of laser hair removal, consider citing a small snippet & include a link to a source such as the American Academy of Dermatology website page discussing laser hair removal (example by clicking here)
  • Remember that your post may be read by someone months later, long after the original discussion’s participants already have found their preferred local service provider. This is fine!
    • You want to build trust in the eyes of ANYONE who reads the thread/discussion
    • Just as you found the discussion via the first page of the search engines, so too may someone find the exact same discussion the next day (or even the next year!) after you participate in the conversation
  • Share helpful multimedia such as news clips, relevant YouTube videos, podcasts, infographics, or anything else which is helpful to the original conversation
  • At first, DON’T place a link to your website inside your actual comment/reply. Instead, just have those links in your profile.
    • Most Reddit users are intelligent enough to click on your profile to learn more about you if they find your contributions to be valuable to them

A slightly modified approach to all of this is recommended for the non-Reddit forums which appear in Google’s page 1 search results. Earlier we saw that City-Data.com and Quora appeared; but, for the most part, it has the same approach – just with minor modifications.

Note that your Reddit profile does permit a small amount of text which allows for a business description (1-2 sentences) plus your phone number and business address. The latter is only if you want people to visit your business location.

Can This Be Outsourced Or At Least With Minimal Time Involvement From The Business Owner Or Employees?

Yes. However, any local SEO consultant who uses Reddit and the forums intelligently will want to protect your business from harm as a first priority. There will need to be some conversation on a consistent basis so that any replies made to your business Reddit profile, uploaded by the consultant, are accurate and valuable.

For example, your SEO consultant or agency may not know a single thing about laser hair removal! Therefore, in the early days of your working with the consultant, there will be some questions about trusted sources of information so that the consultant then can craft replies and make initial posts (on your Reddit page’s profile or in the high-traffic groups) with specificity. The last thing you want in Reddit is to come across as rude, not intelligent about your own business, and seem like a “hard selling sales person”.

That may get your profile banned by Reddit, or at least kicked you out of the high-traffic sub-Reddit where your prospects are spending time… especially the city-specific ones with larger membership numbers!

If you need any help with this, or any other local search engine optimization and lead generation needs, then you are welcome to contact us here:

Contact Us

Thank you for your time and we look forward to speaking with you soon.

Filed Under: reddit, search engine marketing, SEO
August 4, 2023 by

SEO for Local Businesses Using Virtual Lands, NFTs, Web3, Metaverse and AI

At the time of this post (early August 2023) most local businesses couldn’t care less about anything pertaining to Web3 such as metaverse, virtual lands, NFTs, and AI (other than being scared of it). Most don’t even use or possess any cryptocurrencies or altcoins or digital tokens. Despite the rise of these new technologies, the average local business owner only cares about getting more phone calls, email leads, text messages, walk-ins or newsletter/social media subscribers to help generate new business.

Much like in the first part of the 2010 decade, most local business owners don’t understand the “WHY” they need to spend time, money, or other resources on those new technologies. “Decentralization”, “community”, “DAOs”, and other web3 topics are just nonsense words to them at this point in time… and that is fine! This is because no one yet has explained to the local business owner — all the way from a pizza shop owner to a criminal defense attorney to a plumber to a dentist — how these technologies generate a return on investment of time, money or other resources.

Back in the early 2010’s many local business owners didn’t understand why they needed Facebook business pages, Google Maps pages (even for directions and reviews), Yelp pages, LinkedIn business pages, nor other social media properties. Up until now, web3 topics have no relevance in the mind of the average local business owner. This is because the web3 enthusiasts haven’t yet even explained how such technologies even can do something as basic as boost existing search engine rankings.

That begins to change for you right now!

ice cream sundae - used for metaphor regarding web3 technologies and local business owner SEO and lead generation

What Does An Ice Cream Sundae Have To Do With Web3 And Search Engine Rankings?!?!?

Most people at least understand the concept of “fundamentals” and “nice to haves”… and one of the most universally-understood ways to show an example of this is an ice cream sundae!

If you owned a local ice cream shop then chances are you almost never have anyone come into your shop to buy JUST the “nice to haves”. Odds are that no one has ever come in JUST to buy sprinkles, hot fudge, cherries, or peanuts….

… but virtually everyone has come into your shop to buy at least a scoop of ice cream or a cake with ice cream as the main component!

In this case the “fundamental” thing people want from your shop would be the ice cream, and only a certain percentage of people want all the “nice to haves” or “add-ons” like fudge, nuts, whipped cream, etc.

In the case of using new web3 technologies to help any local business owner generate more business from prospective customers and clients, the main focus (as of August 2023) is to give that business owner the “fundamental” benefit of increased search engine rankings for main local keywords. In our example, increased SEO rankings are – for now – the “ice cream” because this can lead to new phone calls and emails.

The “nice to haves” or “add-ons” would be benefits in the future such as:

  • The ability to add a 3D building onto the virtual land plot
  • Adding Artificial Intelligence (AI) “avatars” to interact with prospective customers inside the 3D building
  • Tie-ins with AI tools for automation, local competition analysis, avatar creation, and other AI benefits
  • Other “metaverse” interactivity, including paying for local advertisements on 3D buildings for local landmarks
  • Increased value of the metaverse/virtual land (as mentioned in this April 2023 article from the Dallas Observer)
  • Selling digital t-shirts for metaverse avatars
  • Treasure hunts in the metaverse to “mine resources” and otherwise have a “gamified” experience
  • Ability to purchase metaverse digital assets with cryptocurrencies
  • Etc.

example of virtual land web3 NFT to be used as part of larger local SEO marketing efforts

Virtual Land For Local Business Search Engine Ranking Improvements

One thing the average business owner CAN understand is not ranking high enough in the search engines for desired keyword phrases; and, therefore, missing out on prospective phone calls or other leads. This post will introduce one of the first ways that a local business owner can see search engine ranking increases (aka “web 2” searches) by leveraging one of these new web3 technologies which any local business owner can begin to understand conceptually.

That method is virtual land in the form of a non-fungible token (NFT). All this means is that it represents digital ownership on the blockchain, much like the ownership title to your home or commercial property is registered with your local county.

Virtual land represents a piece of the earth where his/her business operates, much like one understands an online map which represents the location of the office or store. At this point in time, there are several “metaverses” which represents either fictional worlds or represent all (or most) of Earth. Our situation requires us to focus on the Earth-based virtual lands; and at this time there are four (4) main metaverse platforms which don’t require any Virtual Reality goggles or headsets of any kind:

  • Earth2

In order to help your local search engine rankings for the last part of 2023 and beyond, we are going to narrow your focus to the virtual land NFTs available in the last two options: Next Earth and MyLand

Why?

Solely for the SEO benefits, at least in the short-term.

Next Earth has partnered with another company in order to have a “1-2” approach:

  • The virtual land (NFT) allows for a description which permits links to your website and other web properties
  • Generate new “business layer” pages which can be indexed by the search engines AND help push up your local search engine rankings

Later in 2023, and into 2024, the business layer component also will allow access for 3D buildings, AI automation tools, and other “nice to haves” mentioned earlier in the section on ice cream!

MyLand doesn’t have the partner company, nor the AI integrations, yet. You can place a link, however, in the description of your land and begin the link building/SEO benefit. Integrations for 3D buildings, digital avatars and more already are available for the platform should those be of interest to you.

So What Is The Real Use Of Virtual Land, And How Does It Make My Phone Ring Within The Next Month Or Sooner?

Great questions!

When it comes to local search engine rankings, the search engines have their own algorithms for what they deem to be A.R.T. or R.A.T. or T.A.R. The combination doesn’t matter as all that those letters mean are:

  • A = Authoritative
  • R = Relevant
  • T = Trustworthy

Links from authoritative websites, surrounded by relevant and geographic-specific content, will help your search engine rankings improve in most cases. When you purchase digital real estate (virtual land) which represents the land where you operate some or all of your business, then you have to add important content to the pages which can be read (and crawled/indexed) by the search engines.

There are several steps to this, so if you aren’t familiar with the following then be sure to contact us for help (email us here):

  • NFTs and OpenSea.io
  • Web3 wallets like MetaMask
  • How to format links
  • Synchronizing one’s virtual land (digital real estate) NFT with a partner business layer for the SEO benefit
  • Link building to the NFT URLs in order to get them indexed by the search engines and pass along more authority
  • Formatting the SEO title and description tags properly

If done properly, hopefully you soon will notice an increase in your search engine rankings for keyword phrases most relevant to the SEO title, SEO description, links, and other content you added to your virtual land.

So How Does This Differ From Just Another Online Maps Listing Like Google Maps Or Waze Driving Directions?

Another great question!

At its most basic level, virtual land (digital real estate) which represents land where you operate a business is actually LESS functional than Google Maps. Some will permit reviews, some won’t, and you have less control and flexibility than Google Maps (aka your Google Business Profile listing).

Additionally, one of the prominent SEO authority websites (Backlinko) recently updated its list in 2023 to include roughly 170 ways to generate backlinks and traffic to a website.

So why would anyone spend money on this virtual land?!?

Yet another fantastic question too!

Your goals when it comes to online marketing, besides generating new business, are to accomplish any combination of the following:

  • Save time
  • Save money
  • Increase precision
  • Generate new revenue / profit avenues
  • Scale your business quickly
  • Reduce liability
  • Improve brand awareness and turn customers into loyal “fans” like a sports team’s loyal fan base

Unlike practically all of the 170+ current backlinking and traffic-generation methods mentioned in the Backlinko article, virtual land (digital real estate) and other web3 links (POAPs, NFT profiles, and even web3 websites) are the only ones which offer the “add-ons” like the ice cream sundae mentioned earlier!

These “add-ons” to virtual land/digital real estate NFTs and their associated SEO business page functions can help you achieve your “big picture” goals about saving time, increasing customer awareness and engagement, generate new revenues, being on the cutting edge of technology, and other benefits. In particular you either right now can, or very soon will be able to:

  • Get Artificial Intelligence (AI) content generation tools which can automate your blogging & content marketing efforts to save you time and/or scale the amount of content you can share with prospective customers/clients
  • Add in 3D buildings where you then can design a virtual office in whatever manner you want with interactive images, galleries, and more.
  • You can give prospective customers a better understanding of your business/office/store location such as proximity to major roads and highways, where to park, and more. That way the person can get a better understanding, using his/her digital avatar, of what is around your business location.
  • Soon you will be able to create AI avatars of yourself – or a spokesperson for the business – in whatever voice you would like. You then will be able to put that digital representative for the business inside a 3D building and answer commonly-asked questions, much like the “FAQ” pages you see on many websites.
  • You can convey information in a different format in order to make it easier for a prospective customer or client to understand the problem you are solving and/or to visualize and “experience” the final outcome. For example, a local tax professional can create a “relaxing spa day” in the virtual land metaverse — and attach that to his/her 3D office building — in order to convey the benefits of tax savings and deductions which the tax professional might be able to provide.
  • Soon people even will be able to place online orders for customized items, like custom furniture, after having visited the metaverse 3D building on your virtual land. The prospective customer can mix/match colors, flooring, wall colors and see his/her digital avatar sitting on the digital furniture in order to “test” how that person might look to others when he/she invited friends or family to the house.
  • Much more to come soon

All of the above are current, or soon-to-be-released, “add-ons” or “toppings” to the main goal (the “ice cream”) of getting increased leads coming from the search engines. No other existing SEO backlinking methods offer this range of additional benefits in the short-term and longer-term.

The associated business pages which are synchronized with the main virtual land page (NFT) also can be used to test new areas of town if you buy virtual land plots in new areas. This might work if you need to test an online market and want a lead generation website or other web property. Click this link for more on that topic.

This Sounds Great…. But Do You Have Any Proof That Any Of This Has Worked?

Yes!

In late July/early August 2023, a chiropractor in Dallas needed help. He wanted more search engine exposure for one the wealthy Dallas suburbs which was just under five miles away from his office. He ranked #10 (bottom of page 1) in Google for the keyword “chiropractor SUBURB TX” as well as #10 for “chiropractor SUBURB Dallas”.

Within 5 days he jumped up 5 spots in Google for both keywords as a result of the search engine optimization on the virtual land NFT, the business page and land page associated with the underlying virtual land NFT, and link building efforts to boost all 3 of those properties. Yes, he even got a phone call to schedule a consultation from the suburb he wanted when he hadn’t heard from anyone in that suburb previously.

This is considered a good “win” from the search engine perspective for several reasons:

  • Not only are there numerous chiropractic clinics in the Dallas area, each with their own websites, there also are potentially dozens of social media properties, local business directories, chiropractic / medical directories, Yelp and similar review sites, and blogs which all are competing to be #1.
  • There are many SEO professionals serving these Dallas area chiropractors who all want to be #1 as well!
  • The city has over 2 million people plus the neighboring suburbs, so the competition is fierce for first-time phone calls or emails for such a service.

Over time there will be more case studies added to this website and the LinkedIn page.

What Is My Next Step?

If you are comfortable taking action on your own then start with the Next Earth and MyLand links mentioned earlier, and use the promo codes if provided to save on your first virtual land purchase. Then learn more about how to format the links & SEO tags and then how to synchronize your land with any third-party business layer pages like Next Earth has. Once all are live and look good, then do your social sharing and link building (or even tiered link building) to the new properties in order to get them indexed in the search engines.

You then can study the mechanics and strategies for the “add-ons” such as 3D buildings, AI automation tools, and adding digital avatars. You also can join the various Discord communities or follow your preferred virtual land platform on the major social media sites + read their respective white papers.

If all of the above seems too daunting, or you just don’t have time, then schedule a consultation with us. We can discuss the real world situations you are facing including competitors’ recent online marketing actions, how your prospective customers think and what they need, and where you are in local search engine rankings for your most appropriate keywords. After that we then can customize a game plan which is appropriate for your specific needs, budget, and any constraints.

Thank you for reading all of this and feel free to contact us with your questions either via the email contact form or the LinkedIn company page.

Filed Under: nft, SEO, virtual land, web3
June 22, 2023 by

SEO And Marketing Your Local Business On Patch.com

This page will use Dallas Texas as the example city for various ways in which local businesses can market their products and services on the Patch.com website. There are several ways in which a local business can see an increase in new customers or clients by using the features inside (and outside!) of Patch in intelligent ways.

First, let’s compare Patch with sites like Craigslist and NextDoor:

Craigslist

Service listings in Craigslist now typically require a monthly fee (roughly $5/month) for service business classified ads like HVAC, roofing, and even licensed professions like tax returns and real estate. This is different than it was in the past. However there is no targeted zip code/regional advertising other than the flat monthly fee.

Craigslist doesn’t permit reviews and it doesn’t have a “social” component to its features. You can list events for free, but you will have to pay to get exposure in other regions if your business crosses Craigslist’s regional boundaries.

NextDoor

Nextdoor has very basic free listings for businesses such as this Dallas-area business. Your business is allowed to add a logo, some pictures, hours of operation, a website link, and a small business bio. You will have to pay to get exposure outside of a small radius around your physical office/building/store location. Nextdoor users are allowed to leave reviews, but business owners have minimal option to reply to those reviews unlike Google Business Profile (Google Maps) business listings.

So Why Use Patch?

Patch, at the time of this post, is more powerful at the local level than most people realize. It has the ability to offer some nice benefits to any local business owner:

  • Free to join
  • You can have two listings -> one “personal” and one official “business”
  • Your services can be added as “Classifieds”
  • Your company’s events can be promoted locally
  • Paid advertising options within Patch exist (see more here)
  • The classified ad service listings, if optimized properly, can rank in Google on their own for local keywords
  • You are allowed to add an image with your classified listings (not all classified ad sites permit this)
  • The links inside your business profile and classified listings can help power up your main website, Google Business listing, YouTube channel and other web properties to rank higher in the search engines
  • You can follow other local businesses and like/share their postings, thus raising awareness of your business once they see you engaging with their content
  • Local news keeps you updated on happenings in your area
  • You can post local news (not just service listings) and start to build trust in your company from other local Patch users

Combining the above, you can increase the chances of your business gaining new customers/clients and building goodwill in your local market.

Examples Of This Working

This local Dallas sports bar offers a stage with large screen, DJ booth, microphone system, and more in case a private party wants to rent the restaurant for an awards event, live music event, or even a large birthday party. Their Patch listing ranks #1, even above Maps, in Google for those seeking such a venue:

If you post an event, the links inside the description can be used for “off-page SEO link building” to help send traffic to the inner pages of your website. The goal is to use relevant, authoritative and trustworthy websites to point links to these non-home page portions of your website in order to boost those pages higher up in the search engines.

Patch is interesting in that even after the event has concluded, it keeps the original listing live. This means that the power of those links doesn’t go away once the event is finished. This listing is still live even though the event concluded a few weeks ago (from the time of this post):

Your listing on Patch even can rank well when people go the search engines and look for a wider geographic area. In this case, local training classes for “Dallas Fort Worth” are ranking #1 in the organic listings (just under the Maps listings) in Google despite the Patch listing only being posted in the “Dallas” community:

Sometimes you need to increase your company’s brand name plus the city in which you are located for increasing search engine authority that your business is a legitimate local company. Here is one such example where this was done, especially for a business with office out of the home:

Some times you may be entering a niche within a highly-competitive local market. Bathroom remodeling in Collin County is highly-competitive with the County’s overall revenue potential for quality contractors, so this niche (shower glass doors) is using Patch to begin to enter that market and start getting phone calls:

Occasionally you get a unique situation such as this driving school located on the Garland-Richardson border. The main instructor also is approved by Texas DPS to be an off-site “third party” driving test location. This is so that people won’t have to wait for weeks to take their driving tests, especially in high-population areas like Dallas and Garland.

If you are expanding into a new region, you also can use Patch to test (probe) and see if you need to invest heavily in pay-per-click for a new niche. In this case, a video production company with a Downtown Dallas address wants to enter the niche (“podcast video recording”) in a suburb of Dallas – in this case McKinney. The Patch listing ranks #1 in Google after the “Sponsored” paid ad section of the search result.

What Else Can Be Done With Patch?

In addition to ranking in the search engines and using the description of your profile & classified ad service listings for SEO link building, here are some first step suggestions:

  • Engage with the local businesses and active people in your geographic area. Do this to start to build awareness and trust in your company.
  • Post any open-to-the-public event that you are hosting or promoting. Using the sports bar example earlier, they should use Patch to promote the nights when they have boxing, MMA, or major professional or college sporting event watch parties.
  • Test new niches and/or markets with an ad to determine if your Patch listing will rank in Google quickly (like the podcast video recording example above). If it doesn’t rank on the first two pages in the search engines after a week, then your “probe” indicated that you likely will need to invest more into SEO hard costs like link building, content creation, on-page SEO development and possibly something like a paid press release.
  • Do some low-cost advertising within Patch to reach neighboring areas. Using the sports bar example again, they are located on the border of Dallas and Irving/Las Colinas. Currently they are in the “Dallas” Patch community due to their physical address, so they should consider paying to get exposure in the “Irving” Patch community for their services and/or events.
  • ** An advanced technique is to consider any listing on Patch (your business profile or one of your classified service ads) which links to your website as a “Tier 1” web property. In competitive local markets you can boost both your Patch listing as well as your main website with intelligent “Tier 2” link building, CTR traffic, social sharing and other advanced off-page SEO techniques. Contact us for more details about your specific needs.

Finally, be sure to geo-tag your images with appropriate latitude/longitude, meta data in the Properties field and more to help your efforts. You likely spent time and/or money on your photos and graphic designed image files, so take a few extra steps to give each image file the best odds of helping you. Once geo-tagged you can use these image files where appropriate, such as on your Patch business profile and your individual Patch classified listings.

While Dallas Texas was used as the example in this post, the action steps mentioned are applicable to most areas of the United States. In some cases, you can reduce website costs if you only care about getting quick wins in the search engines; but please note that you can lose your rankings overnight if your Patch profile gets deleted. It always is best for you to have a fully-optimized website which you control all aspects: domain registration, website hosting, content, SEO optimization, images, other multimedia, and control the access as to whom can make changes.

Thank you and hopefully you found some benefit in reading this far! If you need help with your local internet marketing then Contact Us to schedule a call. We then, together, can customize a game plan to help you achieve what you would like to do in order to grow your business.

Filed Under: classified advertising, Event, internet marketing, link building, local marketing, online marketing, SEO
April 26, 2022 by

Search Engine And YouTube Marketing For Political Campaigns

YouTube Marketing And SEO For Political Campaigns

seo and video marketing for political campaigns and candidates

If you are running for political office, or if you help the campaign of a political candidate, then you likely are attempting to get awareness to the campaign’s various messages. This currently may be done by mailers, billboards, TV commercials, radio commercials, and social media – depending on any restrictions you have with state and/or local campaign laws. These are all great options as certain segments of constituents trust them as their primary sources of awareness on politicians and political issues.

Many politicians and their campaign managers, however, don’t properly utilize YouTube and other video-sharing platforms. There are several ways to maximize those platforms’ abilities to reach the targeted audience in a cost-effective manner.

Furthermore, if designed ahead of time, it is possible to rank your main website and/or video(s) on page 1 of search results. These would be for keyword phrases being entered into the search engines by voters who have not yet made up their minds regarding a candidate.

What Are People Searching When It Comes To Elections?

Here are some examples of the kinds of searches being entered by your prospective voter, yet where your candidate’s website (or video or interviews on established appropriate media) are not yet ranking on page one of the search results:

  • “candidates who support ISSUE” (targeting issues-based voters)
  • “State/District primary candidates”
  • “who is running for Congress in DISTRICT?”
  • “political candidates running for POSITION in CITY”

search engine optimization for political candidates and campaigns

What Results Show Up For Those Searches?

The above types of searches are just the beginning of the list of ways voters are using search engines to get more information before making a decision in early voting or on election day. Additionally, most searches that have any discernible search volume usually produce returns on the first page of results from sites such as:

  • Ballotpedia.org
  • State-specific or city-specific media website
  • Wikipedia
  • Secretary of State website page
  • local Republican or Democrat website page

Typically, your candidate’s website or other web properties (YouTube channel, LinkedIn page, Facebook page, etc.) do not appear on page 1 of the search results…

… but they easily can!

What Does All Of That Mean For My Campaign?

By identifying the keywords which people are likely to type into the search engines as Election Day gets closer, you can optimize your website & other web properties to put your message on page 1 of the search results. This way you are making it easier for those prospective voters interested in the topics, and therefore more likely to vote in the upcoming election, to find what you want to convey instead of having to “hop around” to find your campaign’s messages… even if your candidate is the perfect fit for that voter doing the searches!

What About YouTube And Video Marketing For My Political Campaign? How Can That Help Me On Election Day?

YouTube is a great option as, once your channel gets approved by Google to run political ads, you then have many options to help you get the word out about your campaign. These include:

  • Easy-to-share video content messages which can be sent by email, text, social media, embedded on blogs, put into press releases, etc.
  • The videos can rank quickly in YouTube (and possibly in Google) for some of the kinds of keyword phrases mentioned earlier which are being entered by voters
  • If you have an issues-based video message then you can run paid ads in YouTube, targeting the videos about that issue. You then can do radius-based targeting to reach the right audiences by age, geography and more
  • You can take other favorable videos about the candidate which are on other YouTube channels, and add then you can add them to a keyword-optimized playlist on your channel. There are additional steps to get the playlist more exposure in YouTube and Google search results

The above are just some of the ways in which you can leverage YouTube to help your candidate get more exposure from messages which he/she approves and meets all necessary guidelines for approved political advertising. The same would apply to candidate forum videos, videos in other public appearances and more.

What About Other Video Sharing Online Platforms?

Depending on which office your campaign is targeting, appearing on interest-based video-sharing platforms can benefit your campaign as well. Whether you repurpose existing video content, or you decide to generate brand new content, a conservative-leaning candidate could add content to a video-sharing site like Rumble.

Those videos then could be shared on conservative-leaning social platforms like Telegram, Gab, and others. While that was just a hypothetical example, the principle works for whichever political party or leaning that your campaign has.

The other video & social platforms which permit video uploads can be very helpful in certain circumstances, so some upfront strategy session work would have to be done to determine if and how such alternative platform marketing would be beneficial to your campaign.

Do You Have Any Actual Examples?

case studies about youtube and seo marketing for political campaigns

Yes!

In early 2022 there was a Congressional primary election for district representing much of one of the larger-population metropolitan areas. The campaign brought me in to help, but the Google Ads account wasn’t approved for political advertising until just 5 days before the election. Early voting had already started, so here are the numbers we were able to get in the 4+ days before ending the campaign:

Views (25+ seconds of video watch time as an ad + organic views) = 18,000+ in the 4+ days targeting just the desired geographic areas in the district

** The number of people who voted in this primary election for the district was just over 22,000 votes total (early voting & election day combined)

Clicks to the candidate’s main website from those 18,000+ views = just over 800 clicks/visits in the 4+ days

Watch time (in minutes) of the candidate’s videos = nearly 1.5 minutes per “view” = roughly 27,000 minutes of watch time

deciding whether to use online marketing video sharing platforms for political campaigns

How Does All Of This Compare To TV, Radio, Mailers, Streaming News And Other Advertising Which Supposedly Reaches The Same Audience?

In addition to the benefits of being hyper-targeted for paid ads, long-term benefit due to rankings in YouTube and the search engines, and possibly intercepting traffic which otherwise would go to your campaign’s opponents, there are additional cost-saving benefits:

  • Fast turnaround time – sometimes as fast as 24 to 48 hours (assuming your Google Ads account is approved to run ads). This “speed-to-market” has its own cost savings and indirect financial benefits
  • Typically less than 50% of comparable television and radio ads, with very precise ads targeting
  • You won’t pay for video ads in YouTube unless the viewer watches a minimum of 50% of the video’s length or 25 seconds (whichever comes first). Even those who “skip” the ads after 5 seconds still give you no-cost exposure to the viewer
  • You also can track inbound clicks from YouTube to the campaign’s website, social media channels, and more. From there you can get people to opt into an e-mail newsletter or social media property; and then those people can be invited to meet the candidate, donate, etc.

If I Want To Explore This Further Then What Are My Next Steps?

First, let me know what kinds of video content you already have. Does the content align with what voters in your desired geographic area are seeking? Does the candidate have any video content, with some sort of third-party approval (such as applause from attendees at a candidates’ forum), which can position the candidate favorably?

Once the answers to the above questions are “Yes”, then we will have to determine how people are searching online in your area for issues, candidate endorsements, and more. We then can determine what is desired by the people you are trying to reach in your geographic area, and start to match up your video content with what those people trust and are reading/watching online.

There is a lot more to leveraging YouTube, search engines and other video-sharing platforms. While it often is considered an “afterthought” by many candidates and campaign managers, you can gain a quick competitive edge in your current (or upcoming) race by investing some time and part of your budget into these ads. They can help you in more ways then you may realize and possibly help you on the road to a victory celebration at the end of Election Night!

Contact us today here: Click Here

Filed Under: politics
February 21, 2020 by

Medical Practice SEO, Online Marketing And Lead Generation

Case Study For Medical Practice Search Engine Optimization, YouTube Marketing, Pay Per Click, Facebook Ads, And Lead Generation

medical practice online marketing seo lead generation

This post will show the case study results of a multi-month campaign to help a medical practice (in this case a women’s health center in the Midwest United States) increase website traffic and phone calls.  The doctor wanted to target women, with a special emphasis on those seeking help with all things related to pregnancy.   This particular area of the country also faces a significant challenge with women in child-bearing ages who are currently using or struggling from the withdrawl symptoms of opioid and painkiller use before/during/after pregnancy.

The latter is important to know as it was part of the YouTube video ad campaign targeting.  The goals of course were to get more immediate phone calls; but the goals also were to improve search engine rankings and increase social awareness of the doctor’s multiple office locations within roughly 20-30 miles of each other.

 

SEO For The Medical Practice

Several services are performed at his center including OB/GYN services, mammograms, pregnancy care, and much more.  He also performs specialized women’s health surgical procedures.

The SEO efforts worked significantly well for the searches done in/for the towns where he had his various office locations.  Here are just some of the Google ranking results (“SERP’s”) for many of his desired keywords:

  • OB GYN CITY 1 (#1 in the Maps rankings and #3 in the organic results)
  • OB GYN CITY 2 (#1 in the Maps rankings and #3 in the organic results)
  • pregnancy care CITY 1 (#1 in the Maps rankings and #1 in the organic results)
  • pregnancy care CITY 2 (#2 in the Maps rankings and #2 in the organic results)
  • women’s health care CITY 1 (#1 in the Maps rankings and #1 in the organic results)
  • women’s health care CITY 2 (#1 in the Maps rankings and #1 in the organic results)

 

skeptical woman

If you are making decisions for a medical practice and seek guidance on how to gain exposure to your digital/online web properties which have your practice’s contact information (not just your website) then you likely want to know where situations were not as “rosy” or didn’t work out like expected.  That is a healthy (no pun intended!) way to approach any case study you encounter, like the one you see on this page.

So what went wrong?

There are 10 towns nearest to his 3 main office locations which have median household income (according to Census data) of $50,000 or more.  While his website mentioned those towns, he did not have unique pages set up for each of those desired towns – let alone those unique pages having unique content and optimized SEO tags specific to that town.  This hurt his SERP’s (especially in Google) for the same keywords mentioned above.

Here are the results for two of those nearby, higher-median-income towns:

  • OB GYN HIGH INCOME TOWN 1 (YouTube video ranks #4 and “Areas Served” page of website ranking #7 organic)
  • pregnancy care HIGH INCOME TOWN 1 (YouTube video ranks #2 and “Areas Served” page of website ranking #4 organic
  • women’s health care HIGH INCOME TOWN 1 (#1 in the Maps rankings and #1 in the organic results)
  • OB GYN HIGH INCOME TOWN 2 (no rankings anywhere on page 1 of SERP’s)
  • pregnancy care HIGH INCOME TOWN 2 (website’s “Areas Served” page ranking #10 in organic results – bottom of page 1)
  • women’s health care HIGH INCOME TOWN 2 (no rankings anywhere on page 1 of SERP’s)

 

TAKEAWAYS FOR SEO FOR THIS MEDICAL PRACTICE

There were several things which could have been done better to help him rank in the organic rankings in the SERP’s for the nearby towns.  These include, but are not limited to:

  • Build out high-income town-specific pages, each with unique content on them specific to that town.  Then optimize those new pages for relevant keywords and the town name
  • Create more video content, optimized specifically for that town, and embed it on the new town-specific page
  • Geo-tag stock photos (or photos he provided of his practice locations) and upload them onto the new specific town page
  • Double check with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools for any errors or other issues preventing these new pages from getting indexed and crawled
  • Create custom Google My Maps with driving directions from the specific high-income town to nearby landmarks, including driving directions to his office locations and more
  • Get testimonials from patients in the specific town and embed on the new town-specific page
  • Possible schema markup for that particular town’s new page
  • Alt text with the specific town for any image embedded on that page
  • List of services for patients in that specific town such as pregnancy support groups, etc.

 

Had the above been done then he likely would have seen an increase in relevant website traffic from the towns he wanted.  Even if the town specific pages had a lower conversion rate than the rest of his website (hopefully not, but just staying conservative for this example) then he still would have noticed an increase in phone calls from the higher-income towns.  This is because the volume of relevant traffic visiting his website and/or videos (or medical/doctor directory listings) which would be ranking well would be so significant that even a lower-percentage conversion rate (calls or emails) would have generated new patient appointments.

We also could have added more outbound links on his new town pages which would have linked to his directory pages on Healthgrades.com, Zocdoc and other places with favorable reviews.

 

Google My Business (Maps) Results For This Medical Practice

This was very favorable for the 5+ mile radius around each of his office locations.  The statistics and metrics given to us for the Google My Business listings (sometimes mistakenly referred to as Maps results/analytics) for his three main office locations showed several favorable benefits over a 3-month period:

  • Nearly 900 phone calls coming to his two main phone numbers which he used (the same two phone numbers applied to each office location as he had a centralized phone service).  It is unknown how many spam/telemarketer calls came in, but even if it was 2/3 of the time (being vastly exaggerated for this example) this would mean he still received 300 phone calls (1/3 of the 900) from possibly legitimate patients.  Of course some would be for current and previous patients, but he still saw an increase in new patients as a result of his favorable Maps/My Business results in the “Snack Pack” (3-pack) of maps results showing for the local Google searches.
  • We didn’t see as dramatic a pickup in calls from Bing, but there was a steady flow of calls each month coming from Bing
  • We didn’t see many click-to-call metrics coming from Yelp, but this was because we didn’t emphasize Yelp that much during this project
  • He saw several hundred “clicks to website” (as defined inside the Google My Business analytics/metrics reporting) and several hundred clicks to get directions to his various office locations.
  • He received some reviews on his Google My Business/Maps locations.  While he received several favorable reviews on Facebook, not as many went to Google to leave positive reviews.  This is an area where he can improve upon in future months

 

Additionally, his two main office locations (of his 3 in total) showed a dramatic increase in the generic searches where his listing appeared, versus just “branded” (practice name) or individual name (such as his name of “Dr. XYZ”) queries.  This means his various business listings, especially for the two main offices, started to gain significant increases in awareness for searches/queries being done within a 10 mile radius of each location for phrases like:

  • “ultrasound near me”
  • “pregnancy doctor CITY 1”
  • “nearby mammogram facility”
  • etc.

google my business maps lead generation seo online marketing

So why did this happen?  What was done right?

Several things were done to help him improve:

  • Double-checking for correct category, business address, hours of operation, etc.
  • Adding all of the services, surgery types, and other benefits of his practice
  • Including links to his listings on Healthgrades.com and other medical professional directories
  • Geo-tagging the images and then choosing the correct category after uploading into the GMB listing
  • Same for raw video files (uploading the raw files, not just the YouTube videos)
  • Sharing content on the updates as “micro” posts (like a mini-blog) and value-added content
  • Doing link building and social sharing of the micro-website (a business.site URL) which automatically comes with all verified GMB listings
  • Intra-linking the Google-provided properties with other Google assets
  • Other advanced GMB tactics

 

WHAT ELSE COULD HAVE BEEN DONE?

There were several additional things which could have been done to get him even more exposure, thus more prospective patients:

  • More geo-tagged photos and raw videos, especially for the advanced services and surgeries he offers
  • More quality citations, especially from local county-specific and medical-specific business directories which would permit the addition of his practice’s name, office address, phone number and website
  • Building out the high-income town-specific new pages and sharing them on the GMB updates
  • Taking the individual URL’s (links) for each post/update we made and sharing those links on high-authority web 2.0 properties like a Tumblr blog themed about women’s health.  This would have been even better had we claimed a previously-used high-SEO-authority Tumblr name for the blog and re-purposed it to be about women’s health!
  • Using even more of the GMB advanced tactics
  • More link building to the micro-website
  • More Google business reviews with the names of the towns and/or services provided in the text from the individual reviewers

 

YouTube SEO, Advertising And Other Marketing For Medical Practices

This was as close to a “home run” as we could get for the practice, especially for the limited budget we had regarding YouTube.  Like many doctors, he spent way too much on the videographer services (worrying about lighting and the staff worrying about makeup and wardrobe issues) rather than the big concern which was syndication and exposure to his video content. 

Earlier in this post you read that his YouTube videos ranked well in Google organic results (not just YouTube results) for desired local keywords.  The videos which ranked were just 30 second slide show videos with some stock music and just using stock photos and his logo!  While we tried to help him see the bigger picture, vanity and ego played a role here.  He only provided less than $100 for YouTube ads, but we maximized the exposure for what we were allocated; and had he spent less on videographer concerns – and more on getting his video content seen by the right audiences (e.g. women ages 18-24 looking up other pregnancy-related videos in YouTube within 10 miles of each office location) then his phone likely would have been ringing even more!

medical doctor youtube marketing seo ads paid views online video

 

Nonetheless, here are the results from the YouTube marketing he did:

  • Ranked #1 or #2 organic (in YouTube searches) for almost all of his desired keywords for the towns where he has office locations
  • Ranked #1 or #2 organic (in YouTube searches) for over 50% of his desired keywords for the 10 higher-income towns he wanted which were not the towns in which he has office locations
  • Has generated nearly 2500 views on his channel across all of his videos (slide show videos, him speaking on video, his staff speaking on video, and testimonial videos).  Virtually all views came from the counties where he wanted to attract new patients
  • The 2500 views does not even factor in the views of the raw video files in his Google My Business/Maps listings, nor does it factor in views of his videos when uploaded as raw video files on the Facebook pages for each of his office locations.  The number of “views” factoring those would be over another 1500 views.  The 2500 views is just restricted to views in YouTube either organically, as a paid ad/view in YouTube (targeting women 18-35 in his desired counties), and when the video ranked well in main Google searches.

 

WHAT ELSE COULD HAVE BEEN DONE?

The big thing on which he “missed the boat” regarding YouTube is that he never did a thorough video of any kind (him speaking, animation character speaking, slide show video, etc.) talking about the very difficult topic of women dealing with opioid and painkiller problems before, during or right after pregnancy.  The reason why from a marketing standpoint (besides the desire to help these women and innocent babies who would be dealing with all forms of their mothers’ opioid problems) this was a missed opportunity was:

  • We could track that women ages 18-24 in his 4-5 desired counties were watching other YouTube videos on the topic of opioids & pregnancy
  • Many of those videos were on channels which permitted ads to run (typically a video ad before the main video started)
  • Those ad spot opportunities were very inexpensive, sometimes as low as 2-3 cents per “view” (where a “view”, in YouTube ad’s definition, is 25+ seconds of watch time when running as an ad)

 

This means that if he gave us just another $100 to spend, plus just one video speaking directly on the topics of maternity and opioid challenges, then the doctor may have been able to:

  • Get upward of 3000 views (25+ seconds or more of watch time per “view”) from women ages 18-24 in his desired geographic areas.  This would be calculated with a “view” costing him 3 cents, then he would have spent $1 to get 33 “views”.  A $100 ad spend then could have generated 3000+ “views”, possibly more.
  • We could have targeted specific keywords, entire YouTube channels, or even just specific videos which permitted ads to run in front of them like this one:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbeVhMye9NQ

His video also could have been added to a new YouTube playlist on the topic, with his video at the #1 spot (plus a description including a link to his website and phone number), and several videos from authoritative news and medical YouTube channels confirming the issues regarding opioids and pregnant women.

That new multi-video playlist (with his video appearing first) then could have been:

  • Embedded on his website pages
  • Shared on the Google My Business updates/posts section
  • Shared on his Facebook pages
  • Received low-cost paid traffic via Google Display Network ads (an advanced technique here)
  • Included inside a press release about the topic
  • Sent to relevant prospective patients via email
  • Several other ways to show that his words in an opioid-specific video were then being backed up by authoritative other videos (like the PBS News Hour link mentioned earlier)

 

Nonetheless, his YouTube efforts produced solid results and still are ranking well to this day. 

ONE EXTRA BENEFIT TO YOUTUBE ADS

Unlike most other forms of online digital paid advertising, YouTube ads have an unexpected benefit!  That is if you have the videos properly optimized before running them as paid ads in YouTube, then once the ad spend stops… you still may gain long-term benefit.

What does this mean?

In essence, the “views” (25+ seconds or more of watch time when running as an ad in YouTube) coming from the desired geographic area — which match the keywords for which you are optimizing the video — basically help your video(s) rank better in YouTube and, ultimately, Google for desired keywords.  That is why his videos rank well in Google to this day for one of his nearby high-income town keywords.  The paid ads in YouTube came from that town to his slide show video and, once the paid ads/views stopped, the video had gained enough “watch time” and authority to be deemed “authoritative” enough by Google to still rank well for those relevant town-specific keywords.

This is one of the reasons why we fought hard to focus on YouTube ads as much as (if not more than) Facebook ads.  If the “homework” is done properly up front, then the amount spent on ads (views) could be less than Facebook ads… and you might get the long-term SEO rankings as an extra benefit!

 

Facebook Marketing And Ads

His Facebook marketing did okay, but his staff didn’t answer patient inquiries sent through Facebook either at all, or they were very slow to respond.  This hurt his Facebook efforts to gain a ton of new phone calls as women in his area’s younger demographic (18-24) just seem to refuse to pick up the phone and make a phone call to book an appointment.  Most chose to email or send a Facebook message.

Nonetheless, by sharing his videos and some helpful “social” content (like articles about what to do if you believe you are pregnant) and some Facebook ads, we were able to generate about 20-25 phone calls and inquiry appointments for him.

This wasn’t necessarily all that great, considering what could have been the case, but there was no active campaign to have his current and previous patients follow him on Facebook.  That would have been the “seed” to grow the universe to whom he then could share content, with the intent of some of those first-phase followers sharing his “value added” content with their friends and followers.  There were many missed opportunities, but at least the efforts generated new patients nonetheless.

 

 

Instagram, Yelp, Twitter, Tumblr And Nextdoor

instagram medical doctor marketing online lead generation social media

None of these were implemented due to time and budget limitations.  Still, each could have influenced many new prospective patients to call him for appointments as his practice offers a wide range of women’s health services for women of all ages.

Advanced software now can take the Instagram and Twitter and Tumblr platforms to new levels and each can benefit any medical practice across the country in customized ways.  Yes, these social and review platforms even can have search engine optimization (SEO) benefits despite their not being typically associated with SEO or SEM.

In this doctor’s case, Instagram would have been terrific as so many women between the ages of 18-24 use Instagram in his desired geographic areas.  Unfortunately, it is difficult for a third-party marketing service to “handle his Instagram” due to his state’s licensing agencies being stringent on content that is shared on social media.  The content would have had to have been managed primarily by someone on his staff, and there was no willingness to do so by someone with a marketing mindset in his offices.

To clarify, the “marketing mindset” refers to someone who understands that (while staying compliant with state laws and overall levels of appropriateness for the audience) the goal is to grow the practice’s patient numbers.  This would require the intelligent blending of any/all of the following:

  • Choosing the right hashtags to use for Instagram posts.  For example, at the time of this post (February 2020), the Instagram hashtag of #pregnancyannouncement has been used over 570,000 times (https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/pregnancyannouncement/).  Missing the boat on this hashtag and high-volume related hashtags (like #mothertobe and #amipregnant) could lose him valuable new patients from his area.  This wouldn’t even factor in using local hashtags!
  • Incentivizing previous patients to share/like the doctor’s Instagram posts.  This does not mean a monetary incentive, but more of a sense of community and feeling welcomed by the doctor and his staff
  • Choosing appropriate photos showing the overall good feeling his patients get when they arrive at his offices
  • Posts helping with the emotions women feel when they experience any wide number of challenges related to unfortunate health news
  • Attracting to the Instagram page the boyfriends, fiances and husbands in the geographic area to help them better understand women’s health so that they enhance their relationships and trust the doctor (and his team) to protect the health of the women they love
  • When (and when not!) to comment on a patient’s Instagram post, and what to post on behalf of the practice – both from a sense of being appropriate as well as state licensing/compliance agency requirements
  • Much more

 

RECAP

Thank you for reading this far regarding the case study.  There were some solid “wins”, some “losses” and a few missed opportunities.  This website name of “More Than SEO” was chosen for a reason, as you can see that much is required in today’s online marketing environment to grow a local business – especially a medical practice dealing with the high emotions and costs associated with one’s health.

In all, for the time expended and the ad budget given, we are happy with the results but know that so much more could have been achieved.  Either way, you now have a case study showing that medical practice online marketing and SEO is much more than just choosing the color and design of your practice’s website, throwing on the site a few images, and running a few Facebook ads!

We hope that you have a better understanding of your own business model now in order to grow your practice. 

 

FINAL THOUGHTS:  TRUST

trust hands

 

The biggest takeaway we want you to have is that marketing “trust” is now fragmented, even within the very same person you are trying to reach!

For example, if your practice was trying to reach women ages 18-24 in suburban America with a median household income of $50,000 or more then that woman has “fragmented” trust from a marketing perspective.  By this we mean she likely:

  • Doesn’t pick up the phone and call local businesses very often.  She will be more comfortable initiating contact via Facebook or Instagram or email.  Having her fill in complex contact forms on websites (while easier for you to manage) may not necessarily be in her best interest.
  • Spends time with friends online via Snapchat and/or Instagram
  • Won’t respond much (if at all) to local print advertising (e.g. local newspapers, flyers, and local print publications)
  • Might be on Facebook, but may not respond to ads
  • Will be watching videos of interest to her on YouTube
  • Will be making lots of “near me” queries in Google, perhaps via voice searches (e.g. “OB GYN near me” or similar searches)
  • May make home-related decisions on Houzz.com
  • May consult boards on Pinterest for several ideas, especially anything inclined toward static images
  • Will consult national websites for articles like those on Huffington Post or others
  • Uses apps like Poshmark and other apps to make decisions to buy/sell items locally
  • Will rely heavily on local reviews on Google, Yelp, Facebook, etc. before making a business decision or a decision regarding her health
  • Will check the reviews not just of the practice but also the social media of the doctor himself/herself.  That is why doctors now have to be more disciplined in their personal lives than ever before
  • May not listen to any local news on the radio
  • Likely doesn’t know or care about your local chamber of commerce
  • Etc.

In previous decades local “trust” was restricted to word-of-mouth referrals, local newspapers, radio, community publications, chamber of commerce, phone book ads, local TV stations, and a few other “trusted” sources.  The internet and social media and apps blew the door wide open so there now are many changes in how someone making decisions for a medical practice (typically in/above the age of 40) differs from someone a generation younger (18-24). 

The big thing is to “get out of your own head” and how you make decisions; and, instead, get “inside the head” of the people you want to become new patients.  Learn how they think, what they trust, and how they make decisions online.  If you do that, stay humble with your marketing, and offer great service (thus generating a consistent flow of favorable patient reviews!), you should see an increase in your business in the coming months.

If you would like help for your medical practice or other medical-related business (ranging anywhere from compounding pharmacies to revenue cycle management to medical equipment) then contact us here:

CONTACT

 

 

 

Filed Under: internet marketing, lead generation, local marketing, medical, online marketing, pay per click, SEO, small towns Tagged With: , , ,
July 9, 2018 by

How To Find Commercial Intent Keywords For B2B Lead Generation

The Big Picture

In this post, you will discover several examples of finding keywords for lead generation through the search engines for business-to-business (B2B) queries across a wide range of intents. While most people want to jump into the conversation about which keyword tool to use, there are dozens of great articles on how to use a handful of quality keyword tools for various purposes.

Instead, this post is going to focus on what actually happens in the real world from nearly a decade of my interacting everyday with clients who simply want one thing: a steady flow of qualified, prospective customers (or clients) whom they believe that they can convert into long-term business once on the phone or communicating by e-mail or other means.

While this may seem to be “pedestrian” to seasoned internet marketing professionals, akin to helping the local plumber who wants more calls by just posting a simple ad on Craigslist, the truth is that even the B2B space company owners and executives simply want more leads. Remember that if they could grow their businesses at a respectable level by word-of-mouth, trade shows, mailings, TV ads or other older models of marketing and advertising then they would do so instead of having to trust outside help for the “confusing” internet marketing such as SEO, YouTube ads, Facebook ads with retargeting, hashtags and other things which (at first) they don’t believe have anything to do with their particular business models.

Real World Conversations

Everything I will mention here is based on dozens of actual conversations which have taken place with owners and executives over the phone, in their offices’ coffee break rooms, via e-mail, in fancy executive offices, in car rides, or over lunch and coffee shop conversations. These conversations took place with companies across vary different parts of the United States and Canada such as Los Angeles, suburban New York, Dallas Texas, mountain areas of Colorado, Chicago, Tucson Arizona and other United States cities and small towns.

One other way you can pick up new keywords, along with the prospective customer’s (client’s) motivating reasons for calling, is to listen to actual customer phone calls or first e-mail communications to the company. If you can get access to these calls, such as archived audio files from lead generation tracking phone numbers or copies of e-mails to the sales department, you will glean a lot more than you probably realize!

Examples Of Clients For This Post

To help you discover how to find good B2B keywords, in addition to your listening to actual customer calls and reading initial customer emails, here are the examples I will be using:

  • Manufacturer of a specific kind of part you find in laptop computers, tray tables on airplanes, consoles for trucks and SUV automobiles and small medical devices

  • Attorney who wants to reach owners and executives of healthcare practices and related businesses who need legal representation when accused by the government of fraud and other federal healthcare violations

  • Concrete company based in the suburb of a top-five United States population area who needs to reach property owners and managers for B2B sevices like parking lot repair, concrete containment pads, dock leveler construction, and concrete core drilling

  • Advanced experiential design and visual content studio which works with Fortune 100 companies, NBA and NFL teams, major universities and top 20 U.S. City museums on interactive/immersive experiences. These include augmented reality trade show exhibits, creating VR sports games for professional teams, 3D building projection mapping for museum openings, and related services

International B2B Manufacturing Keywords

For the manufacturer of parts which wants to reach mechanical engineers and product design engineers around the world, this can be more challenging than you may believe initially. In addition to foreign translation of landing pages (along with geo-targeted AdWords campaigns also translated into the foreign language), just finding out what is being sought in this B2B dynamic is not always so easy.

We started by going back through Analytics and determining if there were some special phrases which were not obvious that kept repeating. The president of the company and I sat down for over an hour and went through about 300 phrases, narrowing the list down to 15-20 keyword phrases which we would not have thought of originally.

As for the main keywords, we used the various forms of the product sold by the company. There are 4 versions which customers use all the time, so we built our keyword lists from those root phrases.

To modify for the B2B space, and also to “get inside the mind” of a mechanical engineer sitting in a cube deep in an office somewhere in North America (not the easiest target audience to reach!), we also went back to the original emails and remembering real world conversations the president had at trade shows and customer meetings. The big keyword modifiers in this case were:

  • “OEM”

  • “custom” (the company designs custom parts to then be used when an engineer is trying to spec in the part into the design)

  • “manufacturers” (and “manufacturing”)

Only once all of this work was done did we go into the Google Keyword Planner and use the various features such as related keywords, seeing what competitors were targeting on their meta title and meta description tags, etc. We then used the Keyword Planner to see if there was any demand (at least 10+ searches/month) for the specific phrases; and we found about 40 more keywords which were based on concepts which engineers seemed to be entering including:

  • Direction-based such as “one-way”, “360 degree”, “pivot”, etc.

  • Compliance-based such as RoHS, REACH, etc. — as the engineers needed to make sure that the parts that they including meet their needs to reduce liability for their companies. Again, this is “getting inside the head” of the prospective customer to adress his/her needs even before the question gets asked

  • Weight-related such as “foot-pounds”, “under X ounces”, etc.

Discussion of how to integrate all of these B2B keywords we discovered will be mentioned in the last part of this post.

United States-Based High End Service To Major Corporations And Organizations

For the company providing high end “experiential” brand storytelling, this presented a different set of challenges. The company’s market is major U.S. Corporations, professional sports teams, big city museums and major civic organizations and colleges.

The keywords we decided to use needed to meet three different means of being found:

  • Google – both regular search results as well as Google Videos and Google Images

  • YouTube (and Vimeo) for searches being done within the video platform

  • LinkedIn – keywords to be used to “rank” well for queries entered either in LinkedIn’s “people”, “companies” or “content” searches

In this case, many searchers are looking as casual “browsers” rather than “buyers” of the services offered. They search for phrases like “experiential marketing”; but the “buyers” are searching for phrases like “experiential design studios” or “immersive marketing and branding companies”.

The B2B searchers occasionally make question-based searches like “How can I use augmented reality in my trade show exhibit?”. These are tough to determine, so for a high-end service company it will be a case-by-case basis. If time and budget and content permit, then go ahead and pursue those for your SEO efforts.

Otherwise consider a LinkedIn company page post with that question as the lead sentence; and then run a hyper-targeted paid ad to people with the specific job titles and who work at companies of specific sizes to reach the audience with the “question” as the “hook” which encourages the reader (via LinkedIn paid ad) to want to discover more about the company.

Local Businesses In Major City Targeting B2B Phrases

The concrete company in a suburb of a major city, and serving the entire region, gets to play more of the typical “local SEO” game. The keywords here are more straightforward.

We went after three categories of keywords:

  • Services which get entered normally, but only get entered by those with commercial intent such as “parking lot repair CITY” or “concrete containment pads CITY”

  • Services which normally have consumer intent, but modified with the word “commercial” in front of them such as “commercial concrete drilling CITY” or “commercial asphalt removal CITY”

  • The generic phrases like “commercial concrete contractors CITY” and phrases indicating some sort of pre-existing experience such as “bonded concrete contractors CITY”. The latter may be searched by a municipal employee needing to go outside of the normal channels to get something accomplished, but still requiring some sort of reassurance before that person calls the local business

Attorney Reaching Medical Practice Owners/Executives Across USA

The attorney who aims to reach people in all 50 states who own medical practices and other medical businesses such as toxicology laboratories has his own challenges for SEO. Instead of trying to rank locally for phrases like “DWI attorney CITY” or “personal injury attorney CITY” (both of which can be VERY challenging keywords to rank #1 in big cities!!), the challenge is to convince owners/founders/partners of a high-dollar medical business that this attorney can minimize damage to their personal reputations, prevent the loss of millions of dollars of fines to the federal government, and minimize the risk of prison time. Again, these are federal cases so the risks are severe for being charged with Medicare fraud and similar crimes since those convicted get mentioned on the Department of Justice website, local news stations and other outlets which can damage the lives of their loved ones for years.

The types of keywords we chose include:

  • Going after the very specific niche practice area of law. These could include phrases like “Stark Law defense attorney” and “federal healthcare fraud attorney CITY” (for major cities)

  • Giving reassurance of previous indicators (yet no guarantee of future) success. This could manifest in keywords like “former federal prosecutor for healthcare fraud” and “federal healthcare defense attorney case results”

When it comes to marketing for legal practices, be sure that you are compliant with that firm’s state bar’s marketing and advertising regulations. Some states are very stringent and restrictive in terms of what you can do with your online marketing. If you were to outrank another legal firm paying for SEO services (because you know what you are doing!) then any violation of the state bar’s regulations – no matter how out of date those laws may be – could cause fines and reprimands due to the other law firm reporting the violation(s). Tread carefully here, but you could do very well if you speak with law firms (and other licensed businesses) in your state and let them know that you can market them successfully… and within their licensing board’s marketing and advertising regulations.

Integration With The Rest Of Your Search Marketing Efforts

You are able to use the keywords you find in several ways. For the keywords with the most demand (monthly search volume), you likely will put those in the SEO meta title and description fields; and you even may use the keywords in the <h1> and other header tags, anchor text for internal links, etc.

Your secondary keywords (or LSI synonym keywords) can be used for other purposes in your search engine marketing and other inbound search platforms. For example, your secondary keywords could included in:

  • The text of the content on a relevant page

  • In the image meta data (before uploading the image) or in the alt text, caption or image filename

  • Tags or description for a relevant YouTube video

  • Text of a LinkedIn company page update

  • For local B2B companies, include the keywords in their citations and Google My Business listings (services section, “about me” section, etc.)

  • YouTube channel’s “About” page and “Discussion” tab

  • Etc.

Additionally, you can bid on the extra keywords in relevant ad groups in a search network ad in Google AdWords; and remember to improve your ad quality scores to lower any “surcharges” you might recognize (per click or per 1000 impressions) assigned to that particular ad/keyword combination.

Finally, by listening to the inbound phone call recordings and/or reading initial inbound e-mails to sales teams, you also can use the keywords or phrases (which lead to problem solving or dealing with high emotion) in your online banner ads, trade show marketing, and other marketing & advertising efforts.

I hope that these examples of actual conversations and real world situations help you with your B2B marketing efforts. If you need any help then you are welcome to reach out and contact me through my website (click here) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/morethanseo-com).

Filed Under: b2b, keyword research
June 10, 2016 by

Google My Maps Marketing And SEO Strategy

Benefits Of Using Google My Maps

One of the more unique tools offered by Google in recent months is its new “My Maps” functionality.   The ability to use for real world marketing, online marketing, SEO, boosting your YouTube videos, boosting awareness of your website’s (or other web property’s) images, inner pages and posts, and “Tier 2” link building is impressive.

 

What Is “My Maps”?

Unlike regular Google Maps, which promotes specific locations such as your corporate headquarters or store locations, this tool enables you to make an indefinite number of “maps” which you can customize and use to show the public several aspects of your business.   For example, you can create a custom My Maps map of:

  • Cities where your customers or clients are located anywhere around the world
  • Specific locations where you may have been a public speaker
  • Locations where you have been an exhibitor at trade shows
  • Event venues where you have performed or had your products (or services) used
  • Any other way you can think of displaying relevant geographic information in a visual manner rather than a simple list

 

Why Should I Consider Using This My Maps Method?  What Benefit Can It Give Me To Make My Phone Ring Or Otherwise Grow My Business?

These are great questions!

Since this is a Google-owned property, which you can access using your Google account that you likely already use for YouTube/Gmail/Docs/Blogger (Blogspot) blogs/etc., you will easily be able to create many of these maps.  The benefits are many, including the flexibility to highlight subsets of your business such as “Client Locations In 2015” (and you can do another My Map for a previous year like 2014) or some of the benefits mentioned earlier.

In terms of online marketing and SEO benefits, you surprisingly can get more benefit out of these My Maps than you may realize.  Here are some specific things you can do with these Maps:

  • Most people don’t know that these My Maps can rank on their own in the search engines, much like a YouTube video can rank on its own.  Be sure to do proper keyword research and put the keywords in the correct My Maps fields
  • In the description field include your business “NAP” (for citations) and your phone number, if appropriate
  • In the description field link to your website, your social media properties, and any other web properties that make sense to promote (e.g. a press release distribution account central location, YouTube channel, guest post that features your business favorably, etc.)
  • Embed optimized YouTube videos in the specific map marker locations to help with local SEO for videos
  • Embed optimized (including geo-tagged) images in specific map marker locations
  • Link to inner pages on your website (or other web properties) which are relevant to the geographic area defined by the map marker
  • Much more

 

What To Do With These My Maps Once They Are Created?

You can do several things with these custom My Maps, both with the direct link and using iFrame embed code.  You can:

  • Embed the My Maps iFrame code on your website, blog or other primary web property
  • Share the link to the My Maps URL on your social media properties
  • Share the link in any e-mail newsletter you have
  • Make a QR code to the specific URL and share the code on print materials at trade shows, business cards, or other marketing done in the real world
  • Have the iFrame code get embedded on third-party web properties to send traffic to the My Maps page
  • Many other ways to market the link to the My Maps page (URL)

 

If you would like help on creating, marketing, getting search engine marketing benefits, or getting real world benefits from these custom Google My Maps then you are welcome to contact us.   We can help you gain more exposure to the My Map as well as promote your website and other web properties.

 

Examples Of These My Maps

Here is an example of a My Map for an optometrist in Dallas who wanted to promote the neighboring businesses near his office location:

 

Here is an interior designer based in Dallas, listing the nearby cities and suburbs where she has clients:

 

 

Here is a DFW real estate agent who lists some North Texas new neighborhoods where the home builders are offering incentives for prospective home buyers:

 

Here is a Map of client location history for a defense attorney who specializes in health care fraud cases such as those pertaining the False Claims Act, CLIA, Medicaid billing, anti-kickback and similar medical industry situations:

 

Here is a My Map featuring some of the locations of a commercial modular construction manufacturing company’s recently completed projects across the United States:

 

And here is a ranch and farm real estate broker’s My Maps listing of counties and towns featuring recently sold ranches and agricultural properties in Texas and Oklahoma:

Filed Under: Backlinks, image marketing, lead generation, link building, local marketing, Mobile, my maps, QR code, SEO, video optimization, youtube Tagged With: ,
April 13, 2016 by

YouTube Playlist Optimization And Marketing

YouTube playlists.  Whenever I mention these to clients, there usually is some sort of indication of confusion or other state of uncertainty as to what they are as well as how to use them for marketing purposes.

The benefits of understanding YouTube playlists, however, are worth the effort for several reasons.  Here are just some:

  • It is possible to rank # 1 for local keywords in YouTube, sometimes within as little as one hour
  • In the description you can put your phone number and primary company address or store location
  • You can use the description field to boost your primary web properties like your website, LinkedIn page, Facebook page, local business directories, etc.
  • If done right, the actual playlist page (URL) could rank well on its own in the search engines
  • You can share the playlist via social media
  • Just like a single YouTube video, you can embed the playlist’s videos on a website or blog
  • The iFrame embed code permits the ability to add one anchor text before you start embedding the code, just like a single YouTube video
  • You can create a QR code to the playlist
  • If you ever want to add or subtract (or reorder) videos in the playlist you can, but the link (URL) and embed code won’t have to be changed/amended anywhere you originally posted it
  • Many other benefits

 

So Why Use A YouTube Playlist Instead Of Just A Video?

If you only have a small number of YouTube videos uploaded, but you want to rank well in YouTube’s search engines (plus gain possible exposure in the main search engines), you can reuse your same videos over and over in various playlists.  This presumes, of course, that the videos you use are relevant to the keywords for which you want to rank and gain exposure.

The big benefit is that you don’t have to incur the time and production costs of having to make individual videos for each keyword.  You are welcome to do so, and more value-added & relevant videos always are beneficial to your business; but if you can’t produce more video content due to the time and expenses then you can use your current content over and over to your benefit.

In order to make this work, however, you will need to add videos from OTHER YouTube channels which have permitted “embedding”.  Most publicly-available YouTube videos are permitted to be embedded.  Should a particular channel’s owner decide to turn off embedding then that video simply will drop out of your playlist when viewers watch it.

Are There Any Special Tricks To Make This Work?

Actually, you won’t have to resort to “tricks”.  Just make the playlist description and the included videos relevant and value-added.  For example, here is a recent playlist based around commercial modular construction companies (go here).

Over time, the company plans to have more videos of its own; but it also has added videos explaining certain concepts and varying types of modular construction approaches.   Those other videos are from other YouTube channels, but when combined it can help (“adding value”) give the viewer a better understanding of that section of the construction industry.  By NOT being self-serving, and including others, they are able to add a robust, keyword-rich description plus include a link to their website and add their phone number.

 

Local businesses, who want to rank well in YouTube for local keyword phrases, should add at least three kinds of videos:

  • Their own currently-uploaded videos which are relevant to the keyword for which they want to optimize
    • Alternatively, they can use a video on someone else’s channel which features their business favorably
  • Authoritative videos which are relevant to the specific town, county or region
  • Authoritative videos relevant to the subject matter

 

Here is one such playlist which meets all three of those, and over time the company likely will add more videos to the playlist meeting all three video types.   If you want a few more examples of local businesses ranking well with their playlists then you are welcome to look at these:

 

What About E-commerce Sites?

The same principle works for e-commerce sites.  Just make the link in the playlist description link to the specific product (or product category) page.  One company which sells specialty hams by mail has done this by adding videos discussing recipes with leftover ham.  You can watch the embedded playlist here:

 

That’s Great, But Once I Have A Playlist Properly Optimized…. What Do I Do With It?!?

This is a fantastic question.  You have many options depending on your goals.  If it simply is to make your phone ring, be sure to lead the playlist with your desired video; and make sure that video is optimized with your website, address and phone number.  Contact us if you need help with this or anything else mentioned so far.

As mentioned earlier, you can share the playlist on social media in order to boost the view counts.  Just make sure that your social media followers will gain real value from watch all of the videos.  This is why they need to be “value-added” and explain confusing topics, confirm beliefs, refute myths, add humor, generate emotion or otherwise give some sort of value.

Here are some other actions which can be done:

  • You can use YouTube as its primary purpose:  as its own community/social media property
    • You can comment on other videos, leave channel discussions, and other participatory actions within the YouTube community to attract traffic naturally to your channel and playlists
  • E-mail the playlist to your newsletter subscribers
  • Embed the playlist on relevant pages on your website or blog, with an explanation as to why a website/blog visitor should watch the playlist
  • Buy low-cost, but still very targeted traffic, to the playlist URL and/or one of your web pages which has the playlist embedded.  Google Display Network ads are great for this, but you have to be smart as to how you go about targeting and bidding.  Your ad sales copy (text or banner/image) also plays a role here
    • Note that this is NOT the regular Google Search Network
  • Buy ads to your playlist link/URL from relevant videos within YouTube.  You even could pay to get traffic from the videos of your competitors, but be careful here and make sure that you are compliant with all laws and regulations before doing this
  • Get the playlist embedded on third-party blogs for the ranking purposes
  • There are several other things you can do with the playlist so contact us for suggestions and help

 

This is just the beginning of what can be done with playlists and the marketing of them.  Send us your questions and we can help you specifically or make future blog posts about this method of online marketing.

Filed Under: videos, youtube
October 18, 2015 by

Pay Per Lead Discussion

One of the new advances in internet marketing for local businesses is the push to work with pay per lead (PPL) services.  There are benefits and drawbacks to this strategy.  Here is a recent page we added to this website which covers the basics of pay per lead companies and whether they are of enough interest to you to warrant further discussion:

Filed Under: lead generation, local marketing, online marketing
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