Let's take a look at SEO, Reviews, Google Ads/PPC and Your Online Presence to drive traffic to your business.
What is SEO and why is it so important?
Firstly, SEO stands for search engine optimization. This is the process of improving a website in ways to help it rank in search results when users are searching for specific words and phrases.
If you think about how you would normally go about finding information, search for a product or service in your everyday life like most people you would likely reach for your smartphone or sit down at a computer and type a simple phrase into Google. The results you are provided with are what Google thinks will be the most helpful and correct information based on the keywords that have been searched. But in many cases, the sites you see ranking on the first page didn’t get there by accident. They used SEO to help Google understand what their content is about.
But why is this so important? Unlike traditional outbound advertising channels (think cold calling and interruptive ads) inbound marketing is customer-centric. The focus is on creating helpful resources and making helpful information more accessible, not interrupting consumers when they are watching TV or listening to the radio.
This is not only much more convenient for consumers but also results in more qualified leads for your business. Plus, this allows you to reach your audience while they’re already considering making a purchase or contracting a service — increasing the chances that your marketing messages will translate into sales and leads.
Reviews and SEO: does one equal another?
When you think about SEO, reviews from customers aren’t often the first thing that would come to mind. With all other major SEO focus areas to sort through such as content creation and link building, reviews just don’t get much attention. But they should- especially if your business is a local one.
“Google trusts your customers more than it trusts you”
Google depends on signals to determine whether a site is worth good rankings or not. When a customer reviews your business (good or bad), it tells Google that not only is your business a real, legitimate operation, but that other people have interacted with it. This can help future potential customers make decisions. In short, Google loves this kind of stuff. Ultimately:
Great reviews = More stars = More clicks.
Like it or not, people trust reviews. Think about it this way – if you’re a customer faced with a local set of stores and two of the businesses have 2-star ratings while the third has 5-star ones, which one are you more likely to click on? People are more driven to visit your business based on reviews than on your pricing.
CleanCloud Review Feature
We’ve designed a review feature that will automatically boost your rating on
Google, Yelp and Facebook as well as allow you to capture and address complaints. After your customer’s order is complete you can send them a text or an email with a review request, you can also print a QR code and customers at your store can scan it and leave a review very easily.
CleanCloud will check to see if their experience with you was positive or negative. If positive, they will be directed to leave a review. If the review is negative, this provides you with the opportunity to resolve this directly with the customer without any impact on your online reputation. Offering you the ability to retain customers that may have been lost without intervention. If they think they have had a negative experience, the review will be kept internal for you to review their feedback.
PPC
In addition to reviews, there are also forms of paid search, unlike reviews and organic search, this uses paid SEO to ensure you are one of the first things your customer sees.
For many businesses, paid search advertising is about as close to the perfect solution as you can get. Google has become one of the biggest companies in the world due to the success of its paid search advertising product and that is because it is advertising that works and it is advertising that proves to be the most cost-effective option for all types of businesses.
If you want to find out more we have a guide where we look at how laundry and dry cleaning businesses can use digital marketing to drive more customers. Focusing on paid search advertising we will walk you through why it is so valuable to your business and how you can get started. Click here to read: https://cleancloudapp.com/blog/dry-cleaning-laundry-google-ads
Overall Judgement
Today, SEO is an essential part of any marketing strategy.
It presents a wealth of benefits that no other digital marketing tactic can offer.
For many marketers, the biggest draw is that it enables them to earn new customers without paying for ad space. For others, it’s that organic results earn even more clicks and attention than ads.
However, it is by no means a full solution to boost your online presence. Driving traffic to your website is no doubt important, but focusing on increasing the quality of your website traffic is the difference. When you can increase your traffic along with the quality of the visitors, the better you will be able to increase your website conversion and get that traffic to become paying customers.
Overall, a good strategy to boost your online presence is to do your SEO well initially then focus on managing your reviews and potentially supplementing your traffic with PPC.
Want to find out more about CleanCloud’s Review Module? Click Here for a Short Video