In the spirit of giving back and getting our country going again, in this post we’re going to go over every major base that your business strategy online needs to cover to help you thrive! As long as you actually complete and rectify any holes within these priority points, you are well on your way to more customers finding your products and services when they are searching online.

Across the board, most businesses took a hit of some kind during the pandemic and are looking to recoup quickly and continue with heads raised high full steam ahead.

*The Marketing Lab’s Solution: Under each section below you will find our solution to each problem that we have tested and modeled for our clients over the past decade. Steal it, model it, give it to your team to handle, or hire us to do it for your business. Either way, you’ll be moving in the right direction. Here’s to improving your overall marketing efforts online. Cheers!

Table of Contents

• Mobile Website Audit

• Ongoing Website Updates, Backups, Uptime and Security

• Monthly Reporting and Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) Tracking

• Google My Business and Local Maps

• Technical SEO

• Content Creation and Blogging

• Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising / Google Ads

• Professional Photo and Video Commercial Production

• Online Reviews and Reputation Management

Mobile Website Audit

Wait, why the mobile version of the website? Google switched its search engine over to ‘Mobile-First Indexing’, which basically means they are going to judge/score your website within their search engine based on the phone version of the site and not the desktop or laptop-sized version. When was the last time you pretended to be a customer who searches for your company or services online? When was the last time you visited your website address using your phone’s web browser? And maybe you’re still wondering why all this even matters.

Global reports, and our own personal client data, reflects that mobile usage already outpaces desktop usage for 95% of our clients. For some reason, tablets are lagging behind, but mobile is winning on all fronts by a good margin (and predicted to only increase). We can attribute this to the overall technical advancements of mobile phones that can now act as mobile computers that we have access to every moment of the day, so when a need or problem arises it can easily be solved by reaching in our pocket and performing a search on Google, Bing, Facebook or YouTube.

TML’s Mobile Website Solution: We research, design and build your website from the ground up with mobile-first concepts in mind from the start of any project receiving a new website from our team. Research begins with your current online standing, your industry’s specific needs, and against your top main competitors. Our web team designs your website for trending modern user conversion elements that lead the user to action, like filling out a form or finding the phone number and hours of operation easily. Your website is then built using modern frameworks and responsive and optimized across all devices from mobile phones and tablets, to laptops and desktop computers.

We offer Mobile-First Web-design and hosting for speed and reliability for the best chance of gaining the quickest results against your competition. If you have a current website that was designed relatively recently within the past few years, then usually it can be optimized, we take each customer’s website on a case by case basis as every website uses different technologies and every client has unique requirements.

Ongoing Website Updates, Backups, Uptime and Security

If you want to build authority online and within Google’s eyes, you’re going to need to generate new content and updates to your website on a continual, monthly basis at the very least. Any SEO program that doesn’t involve a lot of great content that’s optimized isn’t up to date with their strategy at all. This ensures you dominate most competitors and leaves you on par among the top elite. Website optimizations for speed and user accessibility are also crucial.

Websites also require regular maintenance so that they continue to load quickly on all devices. Backups are a necessity to any professional website online in the chance of something going wrong in a worst-case scenario, which leads us into security features that need to be added and managed to block any malicious attacks from inevitable hackers and bots that exist online. Server and website uptime monitoring is also important so you know if and when your website goes down so that you can diagnose the issue ASAP and get it back online as quickly as possible. Note: If you’re running paid ads, downtime will literally burn your budget!

TML’s Website Updates and Performance Solution: Our web team has reoccurring tasks weekly, monthly and quarterly to make sure your website stays secure from attacks, fast and optimized for best performance on search engines, and alarms that notify our team 24/7 and 365 to know at all times whether your site has gone offline for any reason so your visitors won’t find a broken website and move on to your competitor.

Monthly Reporting and Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) Tracking

In most cases, the businesses that we come across usually don’t have proper tracking and reporting metrics in place to quickly gauge how their online marketing campaign is performing. The bare minimum is normally having a Google Analytics tracking code installed by a web developer. Tracking the basics like how many visitors you are getting to your website, how long they stay, what pages they like the most, and what actions they take while on your website are just a few of the things you can have a pulse on that will help improve your overall strategy and find weak points that need to be addressed.

You also really want to track online web form submissions, phone calls (with the ability to record and playback later for quality assurance), how well your ads are performing, Google Local Maps and My Business user metrics, how many customer reviews from the web you are getting (and the ability to reply to reviews for the best reputation management), how your social media engagement is performing and what the engagement is like and where it is coming from the most; if you’re tracking these points well, and keeping tabs on them on a month to month — year over year — past 90 day period, then you are in a great position to utilize the data in improving your marketing campaign overall.

TML’s Reporting and Tracking Solution: We provide our clients with more data than most of them would ever need! Our team places a focus on what your business’s main goals and desires are in order to build a reporting system that revolves around your specific requirements. In addition to tracking web site user data, we track calls (and optionally store their audio recordings if you’d like for reviewing), web form submissions and website performance that we need to monitor in order to continually outperform the metrics on a monthly, 90 day, and year over year basis.

Google My Business and Local Maps

The way your customers find your company online depends on your business listings across the web. Garnering positions on the coveted local map begins with your name, address, phone, (NAP) consistency online and your website. Google My Business also tracks a ton of important information like user mobile click to call reports, how many users asked for directions to your business storefront, overall progress and activity reports like search terms/keywords users typed to find your business on Google. You can also control the way your business is portrayed with images, information details, and posts.

TML’s Google My Business and Local Maps Solution: On the initial launch, our team handles all the information on the web and diagnosis all the issues based on all the actual business data we receive from the client, known as the NAP (name, address, and phone number) among other details, NAP being the most crucial. We can manage multiple locations and take ownership of any listings that may not be claimed under your business accounts. We manually obtain business listings (also known as online citations) with your business details to well over 30 major platforms, optimizing each one along the way.

Technical SEO

Every page on your companies website should be optimized. Technical SEO involves elements on the page that the user sees and doesn’t see, but that the bot can read and understand behind the scenes. This goes beyond text and images and involves the code underneath the pages, to headings and titles or alt-tag and anchor text for example. You have to make sure you are optimizing and providing clear information about the problems your company provides solutions for (all the products and/or services, in-depth, that solve your customer’s problems) in the right areas, so that your potential customers find you over your competitor when searching on all the various platforms online like Google, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, etc.

TML’s Technical SEO Solution: We will go over your current website and pick it apart, read every paragraph of content that you haven’t read in years (..or ever!) and optimize the on-page based on real-world search data in order to reveal your strengths, room for improvement and the competition’s strategy along with their weak points.

Content Creation and Blogging

A large part of search engine optimization, in general, is content. Content is the text, the images, the title/alt-tags, and meta-descriptions that you see and also that the robot sees when crawling your website in order to rank you for placement in their search engine. Content has been deemed so important that Google suggested it so often that the mantra in the digital marketing space became “content is king”.

If you don’t have a page/post on the subject matter, service, product; then you DO NOT have a chance to build authority around it when it comes to ranking in Google’s search engine, as the Google bot takes over 300+ factors into account when pitting you against the competition online on their Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

TML’s Content Solution: We have a small team of creative authors who research, write, edit, and final draft all the copy we create in-house and for our clients. Whether its content for a new website, pages, reoccurring weekly/monthly blog posts, or e-mail newsletters, our team has you covered.

Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising / Google Ads

We normally come across these 4 scenarios for local businesses running paid advertising:

1. Your competitors are running ads for the services and/or products that you provide when you run searches around the web, but yours are nowhere to be found.

2. Your ad spend and cost-per-click is high because your overall campaign (campaign/ad-group structure, ads, text information, positive and negative keywords, target settings, landing pages) is not optimized.

3. Your clicks and impressions look good, but you are not connecting with your audience and there are little to no conversions to show for; which leads to the budget being spent, good activity on the account, but no actual return on your investment (ROI).

4. You are currently not running any ad campaigns at all and have no idea where to begin because you have a) been burned before, b) the quote you received was too high, or c) it was overly complicated for the time that was available to be dedicated on your teams end to run a successful and efficient campaign.

TML’S PPC Solution: We help you manage your PPC campaigns to get you the quality leads that you need in order to grow your business. Don’t currently have any pay-per-click ad campaigns running? We can build you a complete strategy from scratch as well! We know how to reach your target customer in your target area without wasting your hard-earned dollars. Our team will set up and optimize your campaigns and landing pages, and then help manage it on a weekly and monthly basis. Attention with impressions and clicks (click through rates) is only half the battle. We diagnose the landing page the user is sent to after clicking on your ad to make sure that it has the best practices for ultimate conversion!

Professional Photo and Video Commercial Production

The saying goes that a photo is worth a thousand words, and video could mean thousands! We always point our customers in the direction of getting some great photography of the business location, front door, inside, drone areal footage, the entire team, etc. This helps build trust and authenticity for your clients to visualize and start to feel a personal connection and trust before even speaking to one of your team members.

TML’s Photography and Video Solution: We have professional camera-man on our team that can film on location and then edits the final product in order to get beautiful images and videos for the website and your companies overall web presence in order to better represent your brand online quickly and easily for your new potential customers.

Online Reviews and Reputation Management

Most businesses live or die by local word of mouth, and online its no different. Like it or not, most business listings will give users the opportunity to write a review based on their experience with your brand or team. Once the review is published its online for all to see whenever they come across your brand on Google, Yelp, Facebook, etc. Not only is it important to gain more positive reviews than your competition, but you also want other potential customers to know that you are heavily involved in making sure their experience will be positive no matter what and it gives an opportunity for you to respond with your side of the story to any negative reviews a customer may have written.

TML’s Reputation Management Solution: We manage the reviews you get on a monthly basis on the top platforms and respond on your behalf with your permission / pre-approved guidelines. This shows users you are actively monitoring your reputation online, and thanking customers for their business and positive reviews and making the best of a negative review and experience by showing you care and hear their cries! All in all, we think it’s a win as long as you respond. We also want to display all those great reviews on your website and landing pages so customers know how great your brand is from others and not just your team.

The Marketing Lab’s Solution

In our experience, most small businesses are running at full steam fulfilling their daily tasks and obligations to their current customer base. It is no wonder that over 85% of businesses outsource their most crucial digital strategies to professional, data-driven marketing agencies just like ours.

If you’re interested in learning more about our services and how we can help your brand build more authority online and in turn, drive more sales, then reach out to us via Live Chat, Call 305-697-8271 from 9a-5p EST, or Submit this form here.