Posts By: Geoff Braught
Benefits of Paid Advertising: Drive More Conversions
Paid advertising has come a long way from billboards and newspaper ads. Today, digital advertising allows you to get your ad in front of the people most likely to become customers. This effective use of an advertising budget is your new tool for generating leads and converting customers.
Measure and Track Your Advertising Results
Tracking the success of digital ads is easy. You can track clicks, impressions, and conversions with pay-per-click (PPC) and cost-per-mille (CPM) ads (also called cost per thousand). You don’t pay unless someone clicks the PPC ad, which is ideal if you’re trying to generate website traffic. With CPM ads, you pay per 1,000 impressions, or the number of times your ad appears.
CPM ads help you create brand awareness. The statistics for each ad type illustrate how well your campaign is performing and whether you’re generating your target number of conversions.
Engage More People on Social Media
Today, getting engagement solely through organic (non-paid) content is difficult. Paid advertising is more likely to end up in front of your intended audience than organic content.
Ads targeted at your customer base’s demographic will generate leads. The individuals behind these leads will feel motivated to check out the organic content on your social media pages and website. Paying for targeted ads displayed in social media feeds lets potential customers know you exist.
Reach Niche Markets
Paid ads are powerful at reaching a niche demographic. If you’re advertising legal or home services for a physical location, paid ads can target only people within a certain radius of your business.
When you set up paid ads, use your customer profile to refine the audience your ad will reach. Factors like keywords, interests, demographic information and career details will help you define that niche. Remember that long-tail keywords are better than broad keywords targeting an audience looking for your specific product or service.
Control How Much You Spend
You can set budgets with paid advertising. In a PPC model, you choose the number of clicks to pay for when creating your campaign. Once you reach these clicks, your ad stops appearing. Since you control how much advertising you pay for, you aren’t in danger of accidentally overspending. If an ad is more successful than you thought, scale up your budget immediately. If an ad is flopping, you can pause its run before spending too much on something that isn’t working.
Test Ads Across Platforms
The factors above come together to allow you to test several marketing strategies across different ad platforms. Say you’re an automotive shop. Try testing the same ad for a repair special on two social media platforms to see which platform offers more conversions. You could also run two versions of your repair special ad on the same platform to test which version creates more leads. The real-time analytics and budget control make running these tests efficient and easy.
Get the most out of your paid ads by working with experienced professionals. LMH offers paid advertising services, including analysis and optimization, to get your brand in front of your next batch of customers. Contact us today to get started.
21 SEO Essentials for Every Piece of Content
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a frequently-used term that not everyone understands. The fundamental goal of SEO is to generate web traffic to your website via search engines and other free promotional methods rather than through paid advertising. If you want to improve your website’s SEO results, this checklist of 21 essential content components is a simple tool to help you optimize every post you create.
1. High-Quality Content
Consistently publish well-written, high-quality content relevant to your business.
2. Long-Form Content
Long-form content, generally referring to content over 2,000 words, offers valuable information to readers and can improve a site’s search engine ranking.
3. Evergreen Content
Create valuable content that stays relevant over time, such as tips, how-to processes, FAQs, and checklists.
4. User Experience
Incorporate simple navigation and the ability to search on your website to provide the best possible user experience.
5. Internal Links
Link to related internal topics on your site to help search engine bots find and rank your content.
6. Optimized URLs
Optimize URLs by creating short, clear page names that include the primary keyword.
7. Title and Subheadings
Your title and first sentence must capture your readers’ attention and inspire them to continue reading. Use H2 and H3 subheadings to break up your content and engage a reader’s interest.
8. Images
Create eye-catching graphics that supplement the information and add descriptive alt text to images to boost SEO.
9. Keyword Research
Don’t assume you know the best keywords for your topic. Take time to conduct keyword research.
10. Primary Keyword
Use your primary keyword within the first two paragraphs and once in a subheading. Only use the primary keyword three to five times in the body to avoid keyword stuffing.
11. Secondary Keywords
While researching keywords, find two or three relevant low-competition keywords as secondary keywords. Use three or four secondary keywords in your content and once in a subheading.
12. Long-Tail Keyword
Use one long-tail keyword that contains over three words and has less search volume and competition than the primary keyword.
13. Outbound Links
Add a few outbound links in your content to reputable noncompetitor websites. These outbound links add value and depth to text for your readers and help them develop trust in you by providing a source of more information that readers can explore.
14. Backlinks
Get backlinks to your content from industry leaders and other related businesses.
15. Authority
Build your site’s authority by sharing accurate, well-written content with reputable sources.
16. Conclusion
Close articles with a powerful conclusion and a call to action.
17. Mobile Friendly
Design your site for cross-platform functionality and mobile access.
18. Site Speed
Analyze your site speed and boost site performance as much as possible, even if it requires a simplified design.
19. Social Sharing
Make it easy for visitors to share your pages with prominent social sharing buttons.
20. Meta Description
Create a 150- to 160-character-optimized meta description using your primary keyword.
21. Schema Markup
Add schema markup with Google’s free Structured Data Markup Helper tool.
Whether your business focuses on home services, legal, or automotive, the experts at LMH can improve your organic SEO results and optimize your paid advertising tactics, including pay-per-click (PPC) and social media ads. Schedule a free consultation to identify how we can help improve your website’s performance.
Best Practices for Getting More Solar Clients
Your solar business is in a rapidly growing space, where competitors are continually expanding into or popping up for solar services. It’s crucial for your solar business to identify effective marketing strategies so you can connect with the right niche and convert interested businesses and homeowners into solar enthusiasts who are ready to install and grow their own solar installations. The following best practices will give your solar company a solid foundation for your marketing activities.
Build a Branded Website
Solar installations are trending simply because solar panels become more affordable and accessible. Though interest is high, many potential solar customers are still uncertain about the ins and outs of solar installations. Your solar company can build brand awareness and establish itself as a valuable thought leader in the industry with an informative and well-designed website. Best practices for your solar website include:
- Creating organized content silos for different types of information so consumers and search engines can easily navigate the site.
- Providing informative and easy-to-read content with facts, statistics, and actionable recommendations.
- Including CTAs that explain exactly how customers can take advantage of solar installations and what they stand to gain.
- Featuring consistent branding with a simple color scheme, one or two fonts, and an attractive logo.
Incorporate Targeted SEO
Solar businesses need marketing that targets both their services and service area. You must identify the best keywords and phrases and incorporate these throughout your websites in the form of landing pages, URLs, and blog posts. Videos are another powerful SEO tool. These are especially effective for solar companies that have some intriguing content to show pertaining to installations.
You can also boost SEO by making wise use of the Google Business Profile tool. Every solar business should create or claim a Google Business Profile for the company. You can then specify services, identify service areas, provide contact information, and link to your website. It’s even possible to make posts directly through the Google Business Profile which will further boost Google search engine success, particularly in your company’s locality.
Use Paid Advertising
Paid search engine advertising is typically available through a pay-per-click or pay-per-thousand impressions model. Ads that target a well-defined local audience can lead to more conversions by keeping your business at the top of results pages when users look specifically for solar installation or repair services in your area.
Paid social media advertising is another area worth considering. Paid ads on a site like Facebook can reach millions of potential customers. Facebook offers several levels of targeting to help businesses reach potential customers based on location, interests, and other demographics. With a well-constructed website, effective SEO strategies, and some well-placed advertising, your solar business can successfully establish its presence in this industry and begin building a satisfied client base. Lokal Media House offers all the marketing services your solar company needs to get started.
15 Simple Website Color Schemes and Moodboards
Color is an incredibly powerful tool when it comes to your website design. It can be used to attract the attention of new customers, express depth, drive conversions, and even earn a customer’s loyalty. Good color choices require careful planning and a strategic eye. When done correctly, your colors can influence how your website and brand are interpreted as high quality (along with a simple layout and great copy).
So why is color so important in website design?
Color helps us to process and store images and feelings differently, and having a cohesive theme across your branding can help increase recognition and assert your business as best in class.
Fundamentals of Color
Here’s a quick breakdown of the fundamental basics of color emotions in your branding to help you understand how to be intentional with your design so you can optimize results in your home services or local business.
- Greens: Bring a sense of soothing, calm, and reassurance. Signifies wealth, growth, and prosperity.
- Oranges: Evoke energy, desire, warmth, and confidence
- Yellows: Promote enlightening, abundance, clarity, optimism
- Reds: Evoke passion, commands attention, courage, urgency
- Blacks: Bring a sense of sophistication, power, formality, mystery
- Grays: Promote balance, neutrality, security, authority, maturity
- Whites: Evoke freshness, hope, goodness, light, cleanliness
- Golds: Bring a sense of wealth, success, generosity, wisdom, and charisma
- Browns: Promote stability, reliability, organic, rootedness
Example Color Schemes for Your Business
Here are 17 excellent choices for color schemes that can help transform your website into a powerful, trustworthy source of inspiration for your customers.
Bold Color Choices for Success
If you want to make a statement on your website and in your social media branding, bold colors with deep notes will strike the right cord. Think in terms of contrasting golds and oranges with blues and greens.
Muted Colors for a Quiet Confidence
Play on the earth tones of nature to exude a quiet, grounding confidence. This will resonate deeply with your customer’s inherent journey.
Blues and Greens for Wealth, Credibility, and Trust
If a calm sense of tranquility, integrity, and wisdom is what you’d like to convey, then opt for a color palette that provides a foundation of blues and greens with a pop of contrast.
Interested in designing a website to draw in clients? Get in touch with us to see how Lokal Media House can help customize your website as you scale your business.
10 Home Services Marketing Tips
Marketing your home services businesses is different from marketing brands with a national or global reach. When your business is targeting in-person services in a specific locale, you need equally targeted marketing campaigns to successfully reach and expand your audience. Try these tactics.
1. Maintain Your Google Business Profile
Google Business Profiles are one of the first things customers see when searching for home services in their area. Carefully optimize this profile to include a comprehensive listing of services, complete details on the service area, and more.
2. Incorporate SEO
Target locally optimized keywords to reach leads who are actively looking for relevant home services in their area. Phrases like “plumbing repair in Des Moines” or “AC maintenance Boston” help target the right searches.
3. Streamline Your Website Design
A well-organized website is crucial for effective home services marketing. Include your company’s contact information at the top of every page. Make CTAs clear and actionable on every page, and provide detailed information on services and solutions provided by the company.
4. Invest in Paid Search
Pay-per-click advertising can boost business placement on relevant searches. Evaluate each PPC campaign for ROI to gradually hone these into the most effective advertisements.
5. Create a Social Media Presence
Social media sites facilitate interaction and relationship-building with local customers. Post seasonal home maintenance advice to establish your company as a reliable resource for homeowners in the area. Share promos, specials, and contests via social sites as well. Always respond promptly to interactions.
6. Solidify Your Branding
Create a cohesive brand. This should include a recognizable logo, a distinct palette of two or three colors, and one or two typefaces. Use these across all home services marketing materials to solidify brand recognition.
7. Incorporate a Live Chat Feature
Add a live chat feature to the business’s webpage to grab and convert leads while they’re most interested in your company’s services. Failure to connect effectively at the first moment of interest can cost you sales while having an easy way to connect will help immediately convert leads to scheduled customers.
8. Craft an Email Marketing Campaign
Create an automated email marketing campaign that’s tailored to each customer’s journey. Schedule annual offers for tuneups when maintenance is due, or promote replacement units when the customer’s current installation is nearing the end of its life span.
9. Use Direct Mail Marketing
Direct mail marketing can complement an active online presence perfectly. Include a QR code on postcards to convert these traditional campaigns into easily trackable online leads. Drop postcards to relevant zip codes to increase sales in targeted areas.
10. Solicit Customer Reviews
Send thank-you cards to customers and request reviews on relevant sites such as your Google Business Profile. Positive reviews increase legitimacy and encourage sales from future leads. Implement one, some, or all of these strategies to increase sales for a home services business. Lokal Media House can assist with a variety of marketing services in this industry, carefully tailoring each campaign to the unique needs and prospects of that individual business. Reach out to get started now.
5 Ways to Market Your Local Remodeling Business
Marketing a remodeling business requires a thoughtful approach to web design, social media posts, SEO, and paid advertising. These highly localized companies must reach a relevant audience without wasting precious ad spend on individuals who are outside the service area or interested in the wrong services. Try these tactics to enhance your remodeling business’ marketing.
Enhance Web Design
A whopping 85% of consumers indicate that a quality website is important for businesses. In the remodeling business, this is especially true, as the right portfolio can easily make or break a sale. Your remodeling business should maintain an extensive collection of project photos so prospective customers can scroll through before-and-after shots and get a clear idea of what you can do. Other essential website features include:
- Detailed information on the services offered.
- Visible contact information at the top of the page.
- Clear branding featuring your company’s logo, colors, and typography.
Incorporate Search Engine Optimization
Proper SEO can vault your remodeling business into one of the coveted first-page spots on SERPs (search engine results pages). SEO is a complex process that involves selecting the right keywords and links and incorporating them throughout the page in a natural manner.
For a remodeling company, this will include detailed phrases pertaining to the specific services offered and the company’s service area. A thorough SEO marketing strategy addresses page titles, subheadings, meta descriptions, content, images, videos, links, and more. Claiming and optimizing your company’s Google Business Profile is an essential part of boosting SEO as well.
Invest in PPC Advertising
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising places your company’s website at the top of relevant searches. To develop an effective PPC campaign, you must consider the exact keywords that you want to compete for. Remember, broad keywords not only cost more, but they’ll also deliver less lucrative results. It doesn’t help to reach a national audience if the business only serves customers in the Chicago area. You can also exclude words from PPC campaigns so phrases that are similar but irrelevant won’t direct searchers to the business’ page.
Create a Social Media Presence
Social media offers a high-traffic platform for businesses to interact with customers. Your remodeling company can easily keep its social sites active by posting photos before, during, and after a project. Beautiful remodels can organically garner comments, likes, and shares, boosting recognition for the business.
Seek Customer Reviews
Customer reviews on pages like Facebook and Google Business Profiles lend a lot of legitimacy to businesses. Customers can share not only their experiences but their photos as well. Many shoppers feel these posts are more reliable than what the business shares itself. Consider making a personal follow-up with customers once the job is complete and soliciting reviews from those highly satisfied homeowners. Working with an experienced professional can streamline the process of setting up online marketing campaigns. Lokal Media House offers a wide range of marketing services tailored to remodeling businesses. This includes personalized strategies for SEO, social media marketing, web design, and paid advertising campaigns. Contact our team today.
4 Advertising Trends for Your Landscape Business
The landscape industry is actively growing, presenting an abundance of opportunities for businesses in this space. Advertising is essential for landscaping companies to connect with new audiences and expand their existing customer bases.
In today’s increasingly digital world, it’s crucial for much of this advertising to take place online. Strategies like SEO, PPC, website design, and social media marketing can make a dramatic difference for growing your landscape business. Use these methods to effectively spread the word about your landscaping business and gain valuable new leads.
Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of organically improving a site’s ranking through prudent keyword use. For your landscaping company, the best SEO is a combination of relevant service-related keywords and local keywords targeting the service area.
A whopping 97% of people use the internet to learn more about a company. After performing a mobile search for a local business, 88% of consumers call or visit that business within 24 hours. It’s important for any local service provider to create content that will capture this audience of shoppers who are actively looking to make a purchase.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising
PPC ads help get landscaping companies to the top of SERPs (search engine results pages). If this prime placement garners attention, your company will pay for each click. It’s important to use the right keywords in PPC advertising so these clicks effectively convert into sales. You can gradually hone your PPC presence to yield lucrative results by paying close attention to campaign performance. It’s also important to optimize the landing page for effective sales, keeping essential information and the latest promotions front and center.
Social Media
Social media offers the opportunity for your landscaping business to actively engage with your customers. Each platform has its own strengths and weaknesses. Using them all for their optimal features can help your company deliver a powerful, multifaceted campaign. Highlight brilliant imagery on Instagram, target Facebook for interaction and post brief announcements to Twitter. Manage these social media accounts active and respond to all comments, messages, and shares promptly. For your landscaping company, visual posts are especially impactful. Social media offers the optimum space to showcase your successful jobs and seasonal outdoor features.
Website Design
A landscape company’s website is a prime point of contact for customers. This is the ideal place for a visual portfolio of the business’ work. Use photos or even videos to bring beautiful landscapes to life and inspire new potential customers to start their own projects. Keep contact information readily visible at all times so the visitor never has to search for the next step when they’re ready to convert. Include a detailed page for each service so customers can easily find all the information they need to research their needs and understand how your company will meet them.
A mindful combination of sleek website design, smart SEO, engaging social media content, and prudent PPC advertising can yield powerful results for your landscaping business. Working with a professional advertising team can help ease the burden on internal employees while garnering outstanding results.
Ideas for Marketing Your Commercial Construction Company
Nothing drives more customers to a commercial construction business than an effective marketing strategy. In this day and age, the best way to reach potential customers is through online advertisements and social media advertising. Leveraging these digital tools can help your business grow financially and increase its visibility. Reading about some imaginative ways to use these resources can help you create high-quality promotional content. Read on to learn six different ideas for marketing your commercial construction company.
1. SEO Content Strategies
Learning how to optimize a search engine results page (SERP) is one of the best ways to increase your business’s visibility. Creating SEO content for a website promotes recognition in a search engine’s algorithm, allowing users to find it more easily on the results pages. To drive more traffic to your website, it’s helpful for you to design a variety of different SEO content.
2. Paid Google Advertising
If you’re still struggling to get user hits after creating new website content, you might benefit from using Paid Google Ads. These ads can appear on Google search results pages, driving more traffic to a website. They can also allow you to provide a convenient click-to-call button, allowing customers to reach out quickly. Paid Google Ads also provide a variety of payment options to match your business’s budgeting needs.
3. Social Media
Social media is another incredibly powerful tool for promoting your commercial construction company. Maintaining active profiles on a variety of social media platforms is a good way to increase customer awareness of the company’s brand. If you want to increase your online engagement, you benefit from hiring a dedicated social media manager to run these accounts.
4. Website Optimization
Optimized websites get more traffic than non-optimized ones. To create an optimized website, you can enroll in a website design course or hire a dedicated professional to create streamlined web content. You might also research the websites of other construction businesses that appear at the top of SERPs. To increase your company’s visibility, mirroring the style of sites that perform well is an effective strategy.
5. Stunning Visuals
To attract more online users, it’s important for you to create visual website content. This can be an effective way to encourage customers to stay on your website, while also promoting your business practices. To include visual content, it can be a good idea for you to try out some different types of design software. You can also hire a dedicated designer to make icons, logos, and background images.
6. Email Campaigns
Using email capture devices on your website is another good way to market your commercial construction company. After your construction company collects email addresses from the site’s visitors, you can prepare email campaigns that promote different services. Running these campaigns allows you to release surveys to collect data and reach specific groups of clients. There are many ways to promote your business in the digital age, so it’s helpful to combine a variety of different techniques. Here at LMH, we offer professional website design services and other types of marketing support. Contact us online today to find the best marketing solutions for your commercial construction company.
How to Get More Leads for Your Foundation Repair Business
Do you want to know what the foundation of your foundation repair business is? While the appropriate materials and equipment are important, thoughtful marketing efforts can help you build a loyal client base. Below are some of the most effective ways to get leads for your foundation repair business.
Perfect Your SEO
Perfecting your foundation repair business’ SEO is one of the most affordable ways to increase your business’ leads. While it generally takes four to six months to see improvements in SEO, this method produces long-term results. Some businesses choose to have in-house team members make adjustments to their websites’ SEO, while others hire outside agencies to do it for them.
Improving a website’s SEO may involve implementing the proper keywords. You can start by researching which keywords draw the most website traffic in your area. Your results may lead you to incorporate keywords like “foundation repair near me,” “foundation contractor,” and “house foundation repair” into your website. Perfecting your website’s SEO may also involve making the meta titles and descriptions more concise. You may adjust the meta titles’ and descriptions’ length and include calls to action to increase their effectiveness.
Invest in Paid Google Ads
Investing in paid Google Ads is another way that foundation repair businesses can get more leads. Paid Google Ads produce more instant results, and they help your business compete with local ones in your area. With Google Ads, you can quantitatively measure the success of your campaigns and control how much or how little your business spends on advertising.
Post on Social Media
Make it a goal for your foundation repair business to stay active on social media. You can work across various accounts and commit to a consistent posting schedule so that you can properly engage with existing and potential clients. Experiment with different kinds of content, including brief text posts and short video clips. Be sure to define your brand voice so that your clients know exactly what business is behind your witty posts.
Optimize Your Website
Another way to get more leads for your website is to optimize it for your users. For example, you may consider converting a single webpage into multiple web pages that are easier for your visitors to digest. Instead of having all of your services and company information on one webpage, you may make separate pages like “Foundation Repair,” “Sinkhole Remediation,” and “Soil Stabilization,” depending on what services your company offers.
As you start to optimize your website, you can consider changing the font type and size to increase your website’s readability. Whatever visuals you include, be sure that they’re of high-quality and can load quickly whenever a user lands on your website. You can also cater to mobile users by incorporating responsive links and a fast page load speed.
As you grow your foundation repair business, it’s important to stay up-to-date with the latest marketing techniques. These techniques can help you stay ahead of your competitors, maintain a loyal client base, and become a reputable company in your area.
