 What’s a local business listing? Good question! A local business listing is an online profile that contains your business name, address, phone number and other important information. There are thousand of online directories that allow local business owners to create free listings. Yelp, Bing Places, Google+Local, Yahoo! Local - just to name a few.
Why is it so important to have a local business listing? By creating a listing, you allow your customers to find you on the internet. The more local business listings you create, the more likely you are to be found when searched for. When it comes to local business listings, there is one thing that can become tricky. Making sure all the information, on all directories is correct. Google themselves said “Google improves search results by aggregating information about your business from all over the web. Make sure information about your business on third-party sites is accurate”. If you ever change your business name, address or phone number, it is crucial that you contact and update all the directories you are listed in. That sounds like a daunting task, doesn’t it. It will take some time to update and correct directories if you ever experience a change in information. So, as a small business, stay one step ahead. Keep a list of all the online directories where you create a listing, along with usernames and passwords. Now, in five years when you move to a bigger office space or store front, you know exactly where to go to start updating your information online. As a small business, creating accurate local business listings could potentially set yourself apart from your competition. So take the time to help your customers find what they are looking for. Thanks so much for coming to us at LEVEL 11 Online Marketing to learn more about the awesome world of digital marketing! If you have questions, comment here or go to the contact tab. Resources: https://moz.com/learn/local/listings https://support.google.com/business/answer/4454429?hl=en  One of the biggest mistakes digital marketers make is not establishing analytics goals prior to the start of a campaign. This is extremely common even though one of the key advantages of digital marketing is the incredible target-ability that is unmatched by any other media available. Not fully understanding the ramifications of not targeting your audience effectively with clear analytics goals results in large amounts of unnecessary waste. I have seen shocking examples of digital ad waste (over 98 percent in one instance) and hate to see a business simply throwing money at online marketing as if it is like any other traditional media outlet.
In order to track the success of a digital marketing campaign, it is necessary to define goals (sales, form completions, calls, sign ups, etc.) and ensure that analytics tracking is properly set up for these goals. When it comes to tracking results of your goals, Google Analytics is your best friend. The best part is it is completely free! It takes a serious amount of time to master Adwords, but the time investment is totally worth it. Without key measurable objectives and goals, it is difficult to measure ROI or benefit of a campaign on the results of your business. This is why it is important to define and communicate objectives and to build insights from past campaigns into the planning process for future campaigns. Following through on this advice will help you minimize waste and maximize returns on your digital marketing efforts. Thanks so much for coming to us at LEVEL 11 Online Marketing to learn more about the awesome world of digital marketing! If you have questions, comment here or go to the contact tab.  The growth of social media is drastically changing the way we do business everyday. And not only how we do business but how we market our businesses. For better or worst, social media is the one tool that can completely change your company. The one tool you should be taking advantage of! Today we are sharing five tips to executing the best social media campaign ever! #1 Create your campaign goals The type of campaign you run should be a direct reflection of your goals. Do you want to increase your followers? Accumulate brand mentions? Or maybe generate more buzz online? Having a set of clear, specific goals is the most important step in creating a successful campaign. #2 Choosing the right social networks Using your goals and a basic understanding of your target audience, pick the social media network that will help you reach your goals best. For some, Instagram is a great platform but Facebook may have more potential customer for you. Take time to research various platforms and find the right one for your campaign. #3 Engage Once you begin your campaign, being engaging with participants. Don’t just sit back and watch. If you have ask participants to use a hashtag, make an effort to “like” and “comment” on their posts. Customers enjoy seeing brands engaging with them and are more likely to do business with you. #4 Share relevant content Share content your followers want to see. Provide them with helpful tips or valuable information about your product, share their reviews and comments. One of the best ways to increase customer loyalty is by sharing their own posts about your product. #5 Evaluate As your campaign comes to a close, take note of your progress. If your goal was to increasing your following, figure out how many new followers did you gain. Take note of what your customers thought of the campaign - did you have positive or negative feedback? Luckily, these five steps are fairly simple. Set clear goals, choose the best fit for your target audience and genuinely engage with your followers. Follow these five steps and you will see results in your next social media campaign. Thanks so much for coming to us at LEVEL 11 Online Marketing to learn more about the awesome world of digital marketing! If you have questions, comment here or go to the contact tab. Source: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/272231 The next installment of our TOP 11 series will introduce you to a few things you really need to know about advertising with digital video.
1 – VIDEO QUALITY AFFECTS RESULTS We've all been exposed to both ends of the spectrum when it comes to digital video ads - you've seen beautiful videos that were extremely relevant to you, and you've seen videos that look awful and left you wondering why you were served that video and if you could possibly get your last few minutes back. Is it worth it to invest in high-quality video from someone with a proven portfolio and a reputation for always having the latest and greatest in software and equipment? You bet. The quality of the video you use in your digital video advertising will directly affect the results of the ad campaign. You get what you pay for, and it's always important to make sure that your video production is from a true professional with a proven track record. 2 – AD NETWORKS GIVE TREMENDOUS REACH Ad networks, like Google (through their AdWords platform), Facebook Audience Network, and Yahoo! Gemini, give you a huge reach. When you post a video on any or all of these platforms, your reach instantly covers millions of websites and mobile apps. Welcome to the new world of marketing. 3 – AD NETWORKS HELP YOU TO TARGET Ad networks have a ton of data available to help you to effective segment your audience and be very specific in who you target. Getting the right message (video) in front of the right person drastically improves your likelihood of gaining a new customer. The more targeted you are, the more effective you'll be. 4 – AD NETWORKS TARGETING ISN'T ENOUGH To effectively target your audience in a very granular way, we get into a lot of additional data that 1) isn't available without significant investment, and 2) very few, if any, marketers are willing to invest in (probably because they think it's enough to just use the default settings). This data helps understand not only your business, but your ideal future customer, in a whole new way. There's a reason the average online marketers consistently only get 2-4% of the clicks that we do - DATA. 5 – IT CAN BE INEXPENSIVE We had a client that opened a new location and posted an awesome grand opening video on their Facebook, garnering a couple hundred views. Two weeks later, the same video was posted again with minimal investment, and quickly had 10,000 views and great engagement. If done right, digital video advertising doesn't have to be a pricey endeavor. 6 – IT ISN'T THE BEST PLACE TO START FOR EVERYONE Different brands in different sectors with different budgets need different things. Just by saying that, I just stepped on the metaphorical toes of a lot of other advertisers who think what they do is the be-all end-all of marketing. It's important to evaluate where you are as a business, where your audience is, and what's truly necessary to expand your business. For many businesses, focusing on Search Engine Marketing or SEO to begin with is actually the smarter thing to do. It all depends on what the data tells us. 7 – IT'S MEASURABLE The big question for any marketing is "is it working?" Yet so much of marketing results are only available through anecdotal evidence - something like "do people stop you in the store to say they heard you on the radio?" Ultimately, results from other forms of advertising is evaluated by asking "do you think it's working?" And that's it. Everything we do is trackable. We can track your customers from the moment they see your ad until the time they make a purchase. Emphasizing analytics holds us accountable while also allowing us to continually refine our approach. 8 – IT CAN AND SHOULD BE ACTIONABLE Not to keep picking on traditional advertising, but no advertising out there is as easily actionable as digital. Through your digital video ads, your future customers can act immediately. With one click, they could be on the phone with your sales department, be navigating your website, or even open directions to drive to your store. Making it easy for customers to take action results in higher conversion rates and awesome ROI. 9 – EVERYBODY'S DOING IT Huge companies such as Mondelez (that amazing company that blesses the world with snacks like Oreos) have been actively shifting most of their budget to digital. Why? They report getting twice the return for half the cost. 10 – VIDEO CAN BE RECYCLED High-quality video is truly an investment. Your marketing budget is precious, and dedicating a portion of it to video shows true commitment to this strategy. The video you get should therefore be used as much as possible - use it in your ads, use it on your social media profiles, and use it on your website! 11 – IT'S THE BEST WAY TO CONVEY A MESSAGE Digital video is so flexible and multi-dimensional. No other medium is as effective in conveying a rich message to a specific audience. If your brand is truly worth knowing about, and you have a specific audience you want to reach, digital video advertising is the way to go. About us: Level 11 Online Marketing is a fast growing digital advertising agency that is becoming known for disrupting the status quo. We specialize in digital advertising, video production, SEO, SEM, advanced analytics, custom web solutions via website design & implementation, social media strategies and conversion optimization. Headquartered in Utah, you will find Level 11 team members in Utah, Washington, California, Idaho, and Colorado. We have the best creative minds in the industry backed up by the most talented software developers and video production teams which leads to powerful, efficient advertising campaigns. If you have questions, comment here or email us at info@level11.io today!  We're asked often about which social media networks business should be active on. When a new network comes out, many organizations perceive value in jumping aboard right away. While it may be tempting to be the first one at the table, it's important to remember that the world of social media has gottent to the point where the new social networks rarely compete, much less survive, against the giants like Facebook and Twitter.
Any social media presence should be deliberate and well-planned. This includes which network you're choosing. As a rule of thumb, Facebook is a tremendous default. It's very much the elephant in the room. Beyond that, consider your audience and where they are most active. If you have a very visual product, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, or Snapchat may be for you. If you're a B2B business, LinkedIn is essential. Wherever your audience is, be there. That being said, it's easy to spread yourself too thin. Social media activity is very much an investment. If you're going at it alone, managing multiple accounts simultaneously is often a recipe for disaster (consistency is important in ensuring success, and 3 accounts that are managed "just ok" are far worse than having 1 very well-managed account). Don't bite off more than you can chew. If you're having a hard time figuring out which platforms are for you, and especially, WHICH WILL BE CONTRIBUTE MOST TO YOUR ROI, reach out and ask us! We're happy to offer our recommendation for free. About us: Level 11 Online Marketing is a fast growing digital advertising agency that is becoming known for disrupting the status quo. We specialize in digital advertising, video production, SEO, SEM, advanced analytics, custom web solutions via website design & implementation, social media strategies and conversion optimization. Headquartered in Utah, you will find Level 11 team members in Utah, Washington, California, Idaho, and Colorado. We have the best creative minds in the industry backed up by the most talented software developers and video production teams which leads to powerful, efficient advertising campaigns. If you have questions, comment here or email us at info@level11.io today! Here is a helpful guide of things you should avoid doing on social media. Mistakes you’re making on social media will diminish your current audience and prevent you from growing any meaningful audience in the future, so be sure to avoid these points when creating and managing your social media plan:
1 – POSTING TOO MUCH Some types of businesses really should not post very often. Some sectors simply do not require a very active social media presence, so not only does a hyper-active presence waste your time and money, but it also causes information overload that will cause you to lose audience. Sometimes, simply keeping the cobwebs down on social media is adequate. 2 – NOT POSTING ENOUGH While some businesses simply don't need to emphasize social media very much, others have a lot to gain from being active on social media. Engaging with your audience often in a deliberate and positive way can help greatly in turning your social media followers into raving fans that become a serious source of business. 3 – SHARING IRRELEVANT CONTENT That funny cat video or joke isn't winning you friends. More on this in an upcoming post, but the social media rule of thirds could be helpful here in knowing where you could start - a third of your content could be about your actual product, service, or promotions; a third of your content should share industry tips and news (for example, a realtor sharing tips on home maintenance or landscaping tips for curb appeal); a third of the content should be based on building your personal brand, perhaps through conversations and interactions with your audience. 4 – NOT PROMPTLY RESPONDING Every conversation is an opportunity to develop trust and win a new fan. Listen and respond when spoken to. Whether the conversation is regarding a positive or even a negative experience, you have an opportunity to develop good will with that person as well as countless others that may witness the conversation. Don't let questions, concerns, or comments go unnoticed or unresolved for long. 5 – INCONSISTENT POST FREQUENCY Who hasn't seen one of those blogs that hasn't been updated for months or years? Consistency is essential for developing a loyal following. 6 – INCONSISTENT BRANDING Your brand is something that's taken a lot of time and thought to develop, yet a common pitfall is a disconnect between the branding of your social media presence and the rest of your business. Ensure a homogenous brand through consistent theme, voice, appearance, etc. 7 – SPEAKING TO WRONG AUDIENCE Before creating any content, think about exactly who you want to be reaching. Peers, clients, potential customers, and even micro-segments of your audience, will be reached differently, so putting thought into it will be very helpful in getting the engagement you want. 8 – BEING ON THE WRONG PLATFORM Different businesses have more to gain by being active on different platforms. Again, this has much to do with what audience you want to reach and how you want to engage that audience. Your audience as well as your message will affect which platform you're using - Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. 9 – SPEAKING OVER YOUR AUDIENCE Again highlighting the importance of truly understanding your audience, speaking over your audience (being too wordy, using industry jargon that customers wouldn't be familiar with, etc) can make your followers feel alienated or even make them feel as though you are being condescending. Again, always put thought into who exactly you are trying to reach. 10 – FORGETTING VISUALS People are very visual learners, and quality graphic representations of your messaging will help you greatly in conveying your message. Whether showcasing your product or simply using an infographic, visual aids can help you engage with your audience as well as increase the shareability of your content. 11 – BEING FAKE Be yourself. Be genuine. It's possible to keep up a charade for a while, but it can not only be exhausting, but people can tell when they're being lied to. Keeping it real on social media will help you build trust and work towards establishing your brand. About us: Level 11 Online Marketing is a fast growing digital advertising agency that is becoming known for disrupting the status quo. We specialize in digital advertising, video production, SEO, SEM, advanced analytics, custom web solutions via website design & implementation, social media strategies and conversion optimization. Headquartered in Utah, you will find Level 11 team members in Utah, Washington, California, Idaho, and Colorado. We have the best creative minds in the industry backed up by the most talented software developers and video production teams which leads to powerful, efficient advertising campaigns. If you have questions, comment here or email us at info@level11.io today! Success in Search Engine Marketing (SEM), otherwise known as Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising, requires a great deal of knowledge and experience. That's not to say that it's impossible to figure it out if it isn't in your background, but it certainly isn't something you can pick up in a day. Here's a few things that you need to know about SEM that will help you to begin to understand it better:
1 – IT'S COMPLICATED The first thing to know about SEM/PPC is that it's no simple endeavor. There's some excellent study materials here, and of course our team here at Level 11 loves to help people learn about it, but honestly, there are many things that you'll need to know and understand in order to know how to make the most of your SEM efforts. 2 – IT'S A SCIENCE Knowing how to find AND interpret data is critical to SEM success. Any PPC campaign can have hundreds and even thousands of moving parts, and knowing how to make everything work together for your good requires a lot of work with numbers. Drilling down on the details will be the key to your PPC success. 3 – IT REQUIRES MAINTENANCE SEM is constantly evolving and requires babysitting. There is no "set it and forget it" solution. Not only is technology constantly evolving (there's constantly big news from Google and others about PPC and the tools involved), but even your PPC campaigns will require regular (weekly at the very least) maintenance in order to optimize the investment you have in SEM. This is a huge reason behind the management fees that are typical with running PPC campaigns - success requires constant upkeep. 4 – GOOGLE IS THE PLACE TO START In the world of search, Google is the elephant in the room, and so Google AdWords is the place to start. Reports vary, but Google has about 2/3 of the market share, and Bing is in second place with nearly 1/3 of the market. This means that if you need to do something somewhere, Google is almost always the answer. However, some search traffic does admittedly trend more heavily towards Bing, so as always, check the data before doing anything. 5 – NOT ALL MANAGERS REAP EQUAL RESULTS PPC management is not commoditizable. What this means is that if you were to give your budget to 10 different managers, you'd get 10 very different results. In taking over management for some clients, we've seen thousands of dollars in budget completely wasted on horrible targeting and irrelevant keywords, and we've seen click-thru-rates (CTR) that were far below the average across Google. For comparison, Level 11 often achieves a CTR for our clients that is about 500-800% higher than the average across Google. We really are quite good at what we do. 6 – IT BRINGS YOU NEW, QUALIFIED TRAFFIC A well-executed PPC campaign brings you traffic that likely wasn’t even looking for you specifically, and because you can establish parameters for qualification, you can know that the traffic coming to you already has a high likelihood of converting to paying customers. Would you rather spend your day talking with 100 random people in hopes that a handful will buy from you? Or is it more worthwhile to spend your day talking with 10 people that are vetted and ready to make a purchase? That's what effective PPC does for you. 7 – THE LITTLE THINGS MATTER As the saying goes, the devil is in the details. An Ad that you create on AdWords, for example, only has so many characters you can use and so many extensions you can use. Knowing exactly what you want to say and what you want prospective customers to do means you need to be very judicious with everything you say and do. Again, this is why we excel at Level 11 - we've established processes that ensure efficiency and maximize customer engagement, leading to more money for our clients. 8 – IT CAN BE INEXPENSIVE All different forms of online advertising come with very different costs. SEM can be an excellent way to dip your toe into the water and start figuring out what works. It certainly is possible to achieve measurable success from a PPC campaign using only a small budget. 9 – IT CAN BE EXPENSIVE All due respect to #8, but the primary objective of PPC is to make money, which means that if you perform well with a small budget, you'd be silly to not increase that budget. When you know you're netting significant income from a specific marketing effort, and it's all proportional, would you not be inclined to keep growing? You know you have a well-executed PPC campaign when you want to keep increasing your budget. 10 – INDEPENDENT THRID PARTY AUDITS HELP Just to ensure that everything is doing as well as it should, an audit can be very helpful. Having performed audits for many clients, we come across areas of potential improvement often. Similar to having an outside accounting firm audit your books, a PPC audit can be helpful in making sure that everything is in ship shape. 11 – IT IS CONSIDERED TO BE THE BEST FORM OF SEO Effective SEO takes time, as you can see here and here. That being said, many thought leaders in the industry have said that PPC is now the best form of SEO. Being trackable and extremely targetable, PPC has many strengths that can truly help you increase traffic to your site, and ultimately increase your revenues, immediately. Yes, SEM can be very complicated, but it can be a huge boost to your bottom line today. Luckily, we're RIGHT HERE ready to help you! About us: Level 11 Online Marketing is a fast growing digital advertising agency that is becoming known for disrupting the status quo. We specialize in digital advertising, video production, SEO, SEM, advanced analytics, custom web solutions via website design & implementation, social media strategies and conversion optimization. Headquartered in Utah, you will find Level 11 team members in Utah, Washington, California, Idaho, and Colorado. We have the best creative minds in the industry backed up by the most talented software developers and video production teams which leads to powerful, efficient advertising campaigns. If you have questions, comment here or email us at info@level11.io today! Knowing what to look for when deciding on a digital marketing agency is critical to ensuring future success. Much like hiring a new employee it's critical to be certain that the fit is right and that enough value is being brought to the table to justify the investment. Here's a few great places to start when evaluating your future potential marketing partner (and yes, this will be largely self-promotional, because we're geniuses and we're excellent at what we do!):
SIGNS OF A SMART DIGITAL MARKETING AGENCY 1 – THEY RECOGNIZE EVERY BUSINESS IS DIFFERENT Here's a shocker... every business is different. Because of this, it's important to know that your marketer is able to provide what your business requires to grow right, while also being able to adjust to your ever evolving needs. There is no marketing solution that is one-size-fits-all, so one-trick ponies (classic example could be a social media guru who thinks every business type needs to be super active on Facebook, while other examples are radio, newspaper, or TV reps) aren't able to adapt to individual business needs. And remember, WHAT GOT YOU HERE WON'T GET YOU THERE - your marketing strategy needs to evolve over time, and a truly smart agency will be able to have a long-term point of view in order to anticipate the changes that you'll need to make over time. 2 – THEY WANT TO LISTEN If a marketer comes to you with a prepared solution before getting to know your business, run. Just as a doctor can't diagnose an illness without extensive testing, a marketer can't tailor a solution for you without getting to know you, your business, your goals, and your audience. Only once there's an intimate understanding can a marketer provide an optimal solution for you. 3 – THEY RELY ON DATA TO DETERMINE OPTIMAL SOLUTIONS A smart marketer knows that in order to intimately understand your business and your audience, data is hugely important (personally, we're crazy about it - it's part of every aspect of our operation, and we don't do anything we can't track). Digging into the troves of data and analytics that are available will allow a smart marketer to distill all that data into a strategy that will play an important role in the future growth of your business. If someone tries to downgrade the value of data, or insists that data isn't essential, it's time to say goodbye, because they'll cause you to miss out on a lot of future opportunities. 4 – THEY CONSTANTLY MONITOR CAMPAIGNS TO MAKE ADJUSTMENTS ON THE FLY How hands on is this marketer? There is no set-it-and-forget-it in marketing. If your marketing campaigns are not your marketer's version of fantasy football, again you'll miss out on future opportunities. Just like an international flight, a marketing strategy is a long long journey. If a pilot is off target by even a few degrees, the plane will end up miles and miles from the desired destination. Small adjustments along the way will spell the difference for your marketing campaigns, and only a very engaged marketer will be able to recognize when small adjustments are needed. 5 – THEY REGULARLY HAVE CONSTRUCTIVE MEETINGS WITH CLIENTS This should be a given. All too often, we hear of businesses who have gone months without substantial contact with their marketer. How successful can a marketer be if they're unaware of what's going on with their client? If meeting in person isn't possible, at least communication - phone calls, email, etc - of some sort needs to be happening , and certainly that marketer shouldn't be hard to reach. Don't allow your marketer to be anonymous. 6 – THEY ARE TRANSPARENT Your marketing budget is precious, and you have every right to know what's happening with it. The data and results from your online marketing efforts should be freely available. Success must be measurable, and a marketer that isn't willing to be forthright with data isn't trustworthy. You should have and be able to understand the results that your marketing efforts are creating. 7 – THEY ADMIT WHEN SOMETHING NEEDS TO CHANGE, AND THEY DO IT It's true that sometimes, something isn't working. A marketer that deflects responsibility or who doesn't fix something that's wrong is lazy. We once had a client for whom we had an extensive campaign running across Southern California, and the campaign was targeting men and women of a certain criteria. We found within a week (when significant data was available) that women were not responding to the campaign nearly as well as the men. We immediately made the necessary adjustment and the campaign had great success. Change was needed, and we didn't miss a beat. 8 – THEY RECOGNIZE WHAT THEY’RE GOOD AT Everybody has strengths, and your online marketing partner should be comprised of experts. Meet the team! Get to know them! In reality, a truly professional agency attracts and nurtures the best talent. Unlike an individual marketer, such an agency can offer their client the advantage of a team of multidisciplinary specialists, who can work together to formulate a well-rounded marketing strategy. At Level 11, we've grown by bringing together people who have already established themselves as leaders in their specific discipline, and our clients have been spoiled by having the best of the best at their fingertips. 9 – THEY DON’T RECOMMEND UNNECESSARY SURGERY We were once approached by someone seeking SEO help. With a very niche product and an extremely narrow potential audience, we knew that they certainly would need to excel in organic rankings in order to grow. As we performed our free audit, we found that this business was actually doing quite well. Well enough, in fact, that even significant investment would not move the needle for them. We simply gave them our report and advised them on a couple minor adjustments they could make to make incremental improvements. Not a single dollar changed hands, because there wasn't need in the area they were looking at, nor were any other areas prime for improvement. 10 – THEY ARE NIMBLE Your agency should be able to shift quickly with changes in your market, business, or marketing plans. Nothing stays the same in businesses or marketplaces for long, and the nimble agency not only is aware of changes, but anticipates them with an eye to the future. The nimble agency is ahead of the trends in digital marketing in general and in their client’s business in particular. Your online marketer should be abreast of the changes and new tools and strategies that are constantly becoming available. A successful online marketer keeps a pulse on the future, as hockey legend Wayne Gretzky famously said, “skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” The most valuable agency for you isn’t simply aware of coming trends, but it communicates those regularly to you, and is bold to make suggestions based on those projections, to ensure you stay ahead of your competition. 11 – THEY MAKE YOU MONEY This is incredibly self-explanatory. A successful online marketer will give you more chances to do what you do best, which translates into your business becoming more profitable. Especially over time, you'll know whether or not your marketer is worth keeping around, just by following the dollar signs. Every day, we prove our worth to our clients, and by making our clients more profitable, we become not only a hired partner, but a critical piece of our clients' businesses for years to come. About us: Level 11 Online Marketing is a fast growing digital advertising agency that is becoming known for disrupting the status quo. We specialize in digital advertising, video production, SEO, SEM, advanced analytics, custom web solutions via website design & implementation, social media strategies and conversion optimization. Headquartered in Utah, you will find Level 11 team members in Utah, Washington, California, Idaho, and Colorado. We have the best creative minds in the industry backed up by the most talented software developers and video production teams which leads to powerful, efficient advertising campaigns. If you have questions, comment here or email us at info@level11.io today!  Digital marketing is a discipline that already attracts more than it's fair share of snake oil salesmen. Resellers, middlemen, and pretenders abound (about 90% of SEO companies are resellers, by some counts), which leads to tons of broken promises and unfulfilled agreements. Within digital marketing as a whole is Search Engine Optimization, or SEO (go HERE to learn more about what SEO is and why it's valuable). Simply put, SEO is all about attracting people to your site by having 1) quality website construction and 2) quality, relevant content. If your site is up to par and has what a person is looking for, search engines like Google will be more likely to refer people to you.
SEO companies are often amateur, 1-man shows that are "side projects" at best, where the so-called "expert" claims to know the secret sauce needed for a #1 ranking, when in reality they have no idea how SEO works. What we want to accomplish in this post is to empower you with 11 things you can look for to know if your current or prospective SEO agency is full of it - a relationship doomed to fail. 1 - THEY PROMISE INSTANT RESULTS The most common irresponsible claim of "SEO companies" is that they can get you to the top overnight. These companies are spamming the heck out of businesses trying to prey on owners that don't have an understanding about SEO. There are plenty of people out there who believe the hype and want to fast-track themselves to the top of the organic search rankings. Sure, there's bound to be some keywords that you could rank for relatively quickly, and your company name should rank #1 with a few things done right, but true SEO results take time. It's not uncommon for results to take months, if not years, to happen. It's a very naïve to think that you can have instant results, especially considering all of the variables that impact SEO. Don't fall prey to the false promise of a SEO agency promising you the world. 2 - THEY HAVE SPAMMY LINKS DIRECTED AT THEMSELVES Ahrefs, Open Site Explorer, and other backlink analysis tools will help you evaluate an SEO company's site. Maybe 10% of SEO companies will have solid ratings that indicate they're good at what they do. The rest? Busch league. If an SEO company has no links or poor quality links, how could they help you? 3 - THEIR SOCIAL MEDIA PRESENCE SUCKS, OR IS NON-EXISTENT Today, you have to be on social media in some way, and SEO agencies certainly need to have a strong presence there. It is a display of their ability to create quality content and engage with an audience. Your SEO agency needs to be able to do just that for you, so why work with them if they cannot do it for themself? An under-the-radar agency that avoids social media isn't looking for legitimacy or long-term impact, it's looking to make quick money and sell out fast before doing it all over again. 4 - THEY GUARANTEE A #1 RANKING FOR SPECIFIC KEYWORDS Understand that there will always be demand for specific keywords. Strong brand keywords like "iPhone" or "weight loss" will always be nearly impossible to own. There is simply too much demand and authority already in place that your SEO agency won't slay that dragon. Guarantees are impossible to make in the first place, so guaranteeing a ranking for a specific keyword is insanity. What is possible is incremental progress and local authority. Don't sign up with an agency that promises the world. 5 - THEIR BLOG IS PATHETHIC If creating quality, relevant content is an essential component of SEO success, and a SEO agency has a blog that's full of bad content, or worse yet, they don't have a blog, look elsewhere for SEO help. Imagine what drivel they would create for you if they can't even do something good for themself! 6 - THEY WON'T OR CAN'T EXPLAIN WHAT THEY'RE DOING There is NO secret sauce, voodoo, magic, trick, or back door to SEO success. Shady, fly-by-night companies use this talk all the time in order to avoid explain what they are, or more often aren't, doing with your SEO. We already know how to achieve SEO success: quality website construction, quality content, and good relationships with other sites that result in quality links. If your current or prospective SEO agency isn't transparent, you should walk away. 7 - THEY DON'T DISCUSS GOALS BEFORE STARTING How will they take you where you want to go if they don't know where you want to go?! Is your objective to generate leads? Push traffic to your web store? Gather e-mail addresses? This is the very first thing that needs to be known. Your goals will dictate keywords, content strategy, campaign execution, etc. To accomplish anything worthwhile, your goals must be clearly defined, and if they don't ask about your goals, you should say goodbye. 8 - THEY'RE CHEAP For possibly some select businesses, a website could maybe be ranked for a few hundred bucks a month. Let's think about the numbers for a moment - content will be a few hundred bucks; links are easily each hundreds of dollars; and we still haven't mentioned labor and overhead expenses. True, legit SEO agencies are often in the range of $3k - $10k per month. If it's too good to be true, it's not true. 9 - THEY CLAIM TO KNOW A GUY ON THE INSIDE This bursts the bubble of a bunch of SEO agencies, but there isn't ONE SEO company that knows the secret algorithm or that knows a guy that works in Google that skews results in their favor. For Google, SEARCH IS SACRED, so they will never allow anyone or anything to interfere with the integrity of the search results. 10 - THEY'RE UNREACHABLE it's unfortunate, but many SEO companies are actually side gigs of the operators. These people want some income on the side, but aren't willing to invest the necessary time to master their craft, and therefore, more often than not, leave dissatisfied and disillusioned ex-clients in their wake. To see if you're dealing with a company that's more of a full-time SEO agency, test them with e-mails and calls. If they don't answer or are delayed in responses, that's your red flag. 11 - THEY TALK AUTOMATION Back in the early 2000's, content scrapers, link building software, and other automation tools were commonplace. These days, those tools will get your website penalized faster than you can say something that doesn't take very long to say. Many SEO agencies will claim their automation is key to their low prices. Curating quality content is not an automated task. And ask for a sample report - you can check the links they've built to see if they look like they were made by some automated software. Mention of automation should ALWAYS immediately remove an agency from contention. Conclusion There will always be bad apples out there, but this list should help you avoid being taken for a ride with SEO agencies. NO agency ANYWHERE can guarantee results, because there are simply too many variables out of anyone's control. Your website should be one of your best salesmen, if not THE best, so don't leave it or your SEO up to amateurs. Make sure beforehand that you're dealing with a company that will do honest work, not try to game the system, and is willing to help you understand what SEO strategy they're employing. Of course, we here at Level 11 do SEO for many of our clients, so we're more than happy to answer any questions you may have, and show you what we've done for our clients. About us: Level 11 Online Marketing is a fast growing digital advertising agency that is becoming known for disrupting the status quo. We specialize in digital advertising, video production, SEO, SEM, advanced analytics, custom web solutions via website design & implementation, social media strategies and conversion optimization. Headquartered in Utah, you will find Level 11 team members in Utah, Washington, California, Idaho, and Colorado. We have the best creative minds in the industry backed up by the most talented software developers and video production teams which leads to powerful, efficient advertising campaigns. If you have questions, comment here or email us at info@level11.io today!  In Lewis Carroll's classic story, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the Cheshire Cat famously said to a wandering Alice, "If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there." Essentially, if you haven't determined where you want to end up, the value of a decision is meaningless. Often, businesspeople will make marketing decisions the same way; they'll have no clear objective (though they say, the objective is to "make money"). Marketing decisions shouldn't be made when sales are down, and you want to give things a "jump start", and such decisions shouldn't be limited to your current understanding of your options... you NEED to learn and truly understand your options and their forecasted impact on the profitability of your business.
A pilot once said that for every single degree you fly off course, you will miss your target landing spot by 92 feet for every mile you fly. That equates to about one mile off target for every sixty miles flown. To further illustrate this, if you decided to start at the equator and fly around the earth, one degree off would land you nearly 500 miles off target. The longer you travel off course, the further you will be away from the intended target. Because of this, you need to be evaluating not only prospective ("new") marketing opportunities, but also your current situation. Odds are, there's at least something that you currently do (your "old faithful") that seems profitable. A maxim we often share in business is "what got you here won't get you there", meaning that while you've had great success with that radio Ad or that mailer in the past, the future business landscape is evolving so quickly and your competition is benefitting from constantly improving tactics and methods of marketing that by staying the course, you may very well be sabotaging your own future. Asking the right questions will give you the best start in evaluating your current and future marketing options. Following is a list to help you begin to develop the necessary train of thought to critically evaluate options:
There are many more questions you should ask when evaluating any and all marketing efforts. Taking an inquisitive approach to your evaluation and research will help you to be thorough and make the right decision. As the famous data scientist Charles Deming once said, "without data, you're just another person with an opinion." Having all the information you need will help you to be certain about your decision and be more profitable. About us: Level 11 Online Marketing is a fast growing digital advertising agency that is becoming known for disrupting the status quo. We specialize in digital advertising, video production, SEO, SEM, advanced analytics, custom web solutions via website design & implementation, social media strategies and conversion optimization. Headquartered in Utah, you will find Level 11 team members throughout Utah, Nebraska, Arizona, California, Idaho, and Colorado. We have the best creative minds in the industry backed up by the most talented software developers and video production teams, resulting in powerful, efficient advertising campaigns. If you have questions, comment here or email us at info@level11.io today!  If you've ever wanted to get into pay-per-click (PPC) advertising to drive traffic to your website, you've certainly heard about or used Google's PPC tools. There are two very different platforms that Google offers to manage PPC, so the question most ask themselves is often, "should I use Google Adwords or AdWords Express?"
What is AdWords Express? Google's AdWords Express platform is a stripped-down, simplified version of Google AdWords. In Google’s words, “AdWords Express is an advertising option for businesses that want to get started quickly. It’s ideal for business owners who don’t have a lot of time to manage their online advertising.” If you are strapped for time and money, as most business owners are, this probably sounds like a great deal. You quickly set up a few things and let Google handle the rest. Like anything else, though, there are some significant trade-offs. No Experience Necessary? When AdWords Express first came out, one of the key selling points was that businesses did not need any marketing experience to be successful. Google seems to have backed off that idea, instead now focusing on how quickly you can get your campaign up and running (kinda the same thing, though, huh). While you can certainly do just what Google promises - take only 15 minutes to set up AdWords Express and have an online advertising campaign - the real question is, does it actually work? If you had no understanding of investments and retirement strategy, managing your nest egg alone could cost you a fortune. If you don't know how to work on a car, yet try to overhaul your transmission, you're just going to end up with busted knuckles and an even more expensive repair. Gambling your advertising campaign on 15 minutes of setup can be just as costly and just as frustrating when the results are not what you expected. AdWords Express may be a quick way to get started - it's the EASY button of PPC - but your conversion rate will never be as high as it could be unless you invest the serious time it takes to gain an intimate understanding of the fundamentals of search engine marketing (which takes the same amount of time regardless of the platform you use). The Trade-Offs of Express Once you begin to understand how Google AdWords works, and the various factors that can dramatically affect your conversions, you will begin to realize the inherent limitations of the AdWords Express platform. The full version of AdWords allows you to create and manage your own keyword list, adjust your bids for individual keywords, organize your keywords and ads into tightly grouped themes, and create custom landing pages to maximize the number of leads and sales you generate from your ad campaign. Full AdWords also gives you more targeting options, retargeting capabilities, and multiple ad types. All of these factors work together to improve your conversion rate, so it is best to retain control of them rather than allowing Google to automate the process (more on this later). Conversion Tracking One of the most compelling reasons to choose AdWords rather than AdWords Express is analytics and conversion tracking. AdWords provides several tools to track conversions like phone calls, contact form submissions, and online sales. Conversion tracking is important because it allows you to calculate the return on investment from your advertising campaign (this is a capability that sets this type of advertising apart from all others - the most robust ROI tracking ever). Website traffic and ad impressions are important to measure, but knowing when a click is leading to a sale is invaluable knowledge. Not only does regular AdWords provide a ridiculous amount of feedback and data (so much so that it makes AdWords Express look embarrassing), but your AdWords account can be linked to your Google Analytics account, which provides even more data on the traffic you're generating. AdWords Express does not provide conversion tracking. It reports on ad clicks and ad impressions, but there is no way to determine how many of those clicks converted into leads or sales. That should be a deal breaker for any business owner, knowing just how precious a marketing budget can be. Campaign Migration It is tempting for time-strapped local business owners to begin with an AdWords Express campaign with plans to switch over to the full version of AdWords at a later time. There's a problem with this ideah, however: there isn't a way to change an existing AdWords Express campaign to an AdWords campaign (or vice versa). You can build a new AdWords campaign from the ground up, but you can't migrate any existing data. Rather than taking the time to set up and run an AdWords Express campaign, only to completely rebuild it using AdWords, it just seems logical to set up the campaign you actually want from the beginning. Optimizing for conversions with either of the two platforms really entails the same learning curve, and AdWords provides much more robust customization and tracking features. AdWords Express is not necessarily a bad product, but its limitations make it a poor choice for business owners who want to maximize their ROI. Do It Right The First Time We often are called on to consult new clients on their PPC efforts, generally after they gave it the old college try themselves, or after they went with the brother of a friend who builds websites in his spare time. In any instance, lack of an intimate understanding of PPC and AdWords has led to untold wasted dollars (here's a case study of $10,000 in wasted dollars). In the hundreds of accounts we have audited, there have literally only ever been TWO that didn't really have room for immediate improvement. Besides those two, every other one (including those being managed by so-called "PPC management agencies" that considered themselves the gurus of the industry) was mis-managed. A popular saying is "if you don't have time to do it right the first time, when will you have time to fix it right?" If you've got a feeling that PPC could be right for you (and it is easily the wisest place to start with marketing for the majority of businesses and organizations), we need to talk. Don't let yourself fall prey to the hazards of the DIY mentality. We're always glad to offer our expertise and skills in making your marketing budget do all it can for you (and if pinching pennies is what you do, just know that it's always way cheaper for us to manage it for you instead of hiring in-house PPC managers - just one more way to boost your ROI). About us: Level 11 Online Marketing is a fast growing digital advertising agency that is becoming known for disrupting the status quo. We specialize in digital advertising, video production, SEO, SEM, advanced analytics, custom web solutions via website design & implementation, social media strategies and conversion optimization. Headquartered in Utah, you will find Level 11 team members in Utah, Washington, California, Idaho, and Colorado. We have the best creative minds in the industry backed up by the most talented software developers and video production teams which leads to powerful, efficient advertising campaigns. If you have questions, comment here or email us at info@level11.io today! In general, businesses that advertise through traditional methods (TV, radio, print, etc.) do so for a number of reasons - they have a very broad audience, it’s what the prior generations of business owners have done, they haven’t had time to learn/understand digital advertising, they're skeptical of digital advertising, etc.
Regardless of the reason, it’s important to know just how to evaluate where you are and what method(s) of advertising are going to be right for you. The purpose of this blog is to help you get started in evaluating whether it’s truly optimal for you to continue with traditional advertising methods, or if you should look to make a shift to digital. EVALUATING YOUR AUDIENCE We often encounter business owners who truly believe that “everyone” needs their product. The truth is, there is always an alternative to your product, even if that alternative is simply going without your product. Begin the process of analyzing your ideal audience by identifying the specific characteristics that can be attributed to your audience. If your most worthwhile customers have a net worth of over $100,000, that drastically shrinks potential audience. Sometimes you should be targeting families with children in elementary school. Again, we’ve shrunk your potential audience. Doing this over and over will help you to build what’s called your “buyer persona,” which is the person you need your marketing to reach most effectively. Throw assumptions out the window, because they may cause you to miss out on opportunities – for example, YouTube currently reaches more 18-49-year-olds than any cable network in the US on its mobile app alone, with an average viewing session of over 40 minutes… if you thought that running ads on ESPN would give you the best reach to those ages, you clearly shortchanged yourself and limited your reach. RECOMMENDATION: Digital Advertising is excellent for reaching an audience that’s well-defined. If your audience is active online, or if people seek your service on-demand (like a lawyer, a tow truck, or something else you Google), there’s no more budget friendly and ROI-optimized option than digital. YOU DON’T HAVE TIME TO LEARN It’s easy to understand why your business is still advertising like it’s 1999. Ultimately, you do what you are familiar with, and if you’ve always advertised on the radio, it can be really easy to just keep going with that. Sometimes, you’re just doing what you do because it’s how your parents or grandparents advertised when they were running the show, and you just don’t have time to figure out what else you could do with your marketing budget. First off, you need to account for all of your current marketing efforts. You can’t improve anything until you’ve effectively figured out what you’re actually doing. Once you have a full accounting of your current efforts, it’s time to actually take the time to learn. There’s no way to hack this – to improve your marketing, you need to invest some of your attention. It could be helpful to ask some of your peers what they do and why. Make sure you’re seeking advice from those people who clearly are with the times and have dabbled in modern advertising techniques (you don’t take money advice from people who are broke, so don’t take marketing advice from people who don’t know what’s out there today). There are numerous audiobooks that are full of wisdom that will help you get a better understanding about what you can do to grow your business today, and self-educating yourself will help you astronomically. RECOMMENDATION: A little shameless self-promotion here… We’re from a background of not only marketing, but business development consulting. We love to teach, and we clearly know a lot about online marketing. We also stay abreast of all the developments that are always happening in this field, so we are always current and have a good feel for what’s in store for the future. The FASTEST and EASIEST way for you to learn about digital advertising is by talking to us. Let us answer your questions and help you figure out what, if any, new methods of advertising could be wise for you to explore and utilize. YOU’RE SKEPTICAL A lot of people look at digital marketing as voodoo magic. You’ve maybe been burned in the past by snake oil salesmen making empty promises, or perhaps it makes so little sense that you can’t place any confidence in it. The thing is, YOU’RE RIGHT. Yes, there are oodles of so-called “experts” out there that are really as smart as a box of rocks, and they just happen to be good salesmen that have no idea how to actually deliver results for you. We’ve seen enough horror stories to know that not all digital marketers are created equally. And yes, if digital marketing doesn’t make sense, you certainly can never be confident in investing in it. The best way to overcome your skepticism is by learning. As detailed earlier, there are tons of ways you can gain a more in-depth knowledge of social media, digital video advertising, PPC/SEM, SEO, etc. The more you educate yourself, the better you’ll be able to evaluate potential marketing opportunities in the future. RECOMMENDATION: A huge difference between us and other digital marketers is that we employ no sleight of hand and strive to ensure you know what we’re doing. We want you to understand what we’re doing, so we teach you and answer every question to make sure you truly get it. We also are transparent in our efforts. You don’t have to rely on anecdotal evidence to know if things are working – we show you the data and show you everything we are doing. In a sense, we’re terrible poker players because you ALWAYS see the cards. You don’t even have to pay a dollar to know if we will work out for you – we will dig into the data before doing anything to see if and where opportunity exists, then explain what we’d do and what would be the likely result of our efforts. You can talk to our current and past clients to see what their experiences were like, and surely they’ll be raving fans too, because we go out of our way to ensure that every concern is addressed and every effort is optimized. We’re disrupting the field of digital marketing by telling our clients what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and what will come of it, from the very first moment we connect with them. No recommendation could be as strong as this: talk to us, and soon you’ll know more than you ever have and you’ll trust us so much that you’ll go out of your way to refer all of your acquaintances to us. About us: Level 11 Online Marketing is a fast growing digital advertising agency that is becoming known for disrupting the status quo. We specialize in digital advertising, video production, SEO, SEM, advanced analytics, custom web solutions via website design & implementation, social media strategies and conversion optimization. Headquartered in Utah, you will find Level 11 team members in Utah, Washington, California, Idaho, and Colorado. We have the best creative minds in the industry backed up by the most talented software developers and video production teams which leads to powerful, efficient advertising campaigns. If you have questions, comment here or email us at info@level11.io today!  Our marketing firm is rather close with a local accounting firm. By "close", I mean we've known each other for decades, and by "local accounting firm", I mean the most significant accounting firm in the region, handling the accounting functions for businesses both large and small in several surrounding states.
THE ACCOUNTANTS I was thinking about what purpose an accounting firm serves: to provide a business or organization with the tools and expertise required to function properly and in a financially responsible and optimal way. For some businesses, this may mean that the accounting firm needs to be handling everything from bookkeeping and quarterly taxes to 1099's and succession planning. However, there are some businesses that handle some of those functions in-house. With a full-time AP/AR staff, a business certainly wouldn't be looking for bookkeeping help first; instead, such a business may only want to start with help filing taxes and performing third-party audits. Most business owners understand finance from a high level, but are too busy to stay apprised of the ever-changing tax code. And most businesses (yes, even large businesses with immense capacity for payroll) can't financially justify maintaining an entire accounting department in-house that is capable of performing EACH and EVERY accounting task that will arise throughout the year. The conclusion here is simple - an organization seeks outside help with critical tasks when it recognizes the cost effectiveness of doing so and/or the lack of in-house talent to accomplish the critical tasks. Why is it then, that while the vast majority of business owners see the logic in retaining the services of an accounting firm, while they fail to see the same logic in retaining the services of a marketing firm? THE MATH When all is said and done, hiring a marketing firm nearly always is better for a company in terms of managing costs, as well as ensuring optimal performance of marketing budget. It's very common for a company to have either at least one employee dedicated to marketing full time, or to have someone such as an administrative assistant handling marketing in addition to office administrative tasks. The math is pretty simple: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median salary for administrative assistants is $32,410, with a total range between $20,230 and $48,520. Add in benefits (15% of salary) and payment for time not worked, such as sick or vacation days, and the median ends up around $40,000, with a range of $28-56k (just ballparking here). We'll just run with the *employee cost of $40,000. **A brief side note: remember all that talk about the accounting firm and how businesses hire accounting help because they realize they don't have the in-house talent required to file taxes, etc. as well as the accounting firm can? Well what makes you think that your administrative assistant or that guy that just got his marketing degree have all the skills you need for marketing? How long have they managed marketing? How many millions in Ad spend have they managed? Do they know not only social media, but SEO, PPC, analytics, display advertising, web development and design, and video and graphic design and production? Who knows, maybe they actually know all that stuff at a really high level. Which would then beg the question... why in the world would they accept $40k/yr to do it? Someone with a high aptitude in all of those fields would easily command 6 figures, and frankly, those people are rare... more often than not, digital marketers and marketers in general become experts in one specific field, not all of them. And more often than not, if you opt to have your buddy/brother/neighbor/friend-of-friend make your website, make your video, or "handle" your marketing, you'll quickly recognize how much actual skill they lack. Avoid buyers remorse and use a professional. End of brief side note.** Circling back to our example, we now have to account for the actual money spent on advertising (such as buying Ad space online, on TV, or on radio, for example). The SBA (Small Business Administration) recommends that businesses with less than $5 million in annual revenues spend 7-8% of gross revenue on advertising. A CMO survey published by the American Marketing Association and Duke University, showed that companies with less than $25 million in revenue spent an average of 11% on marketing, and $25-$99 million in revenue spent an average of 9% on marketing. So, a business with a million in revenue will spend somewhere around $70k on advertising in a year. A $5 million revenue business will spend around $400k. A $25 million revenue business will spend around $2.25 million in marketing. Simply based on even the low end, a million dollar revenue business with a single lowly employee managing the marketing, you're already over $100,000 in cost for marketing (compensation package + advertising cost). The smaller clients we have (single location with maybe a handful of employees), never break into the 6 figures range in their budget with us. So what does that tell you? For less than the cost of having an inadequately trained employee who might not even stick around for more than a few years (25-34 yr old workers average 3.2 yrs in a job - yeah, we haven't even discussed the cost of employee turnover, which is about 40% of the annual salary of a position) plus the cost of advertising, our clients not only get their marketing managed by experts, but our clients have access to not one person, but an entire team comprised of experts in an array of fields. Literally, a client is deciding whether to spend more on one person who knows they're in over their head, or spend less on a team of all-stars. Needless to say, it's a pretty easy decision. THE EXAMPLES Here are a few case studies, to illustrate our fit in a variety of situations: A car dealer with a very full staff and budget retained our services. They had at the time a minimal marketing presence and an automated PPC campaign. In lieu of hiring a full time marketing manager, we were brought in to fix the PPC account, of which we discovered approximately 99% waste, and establish a marketing presence. They're making at least $6-10 for every $1 spent on marketing now, setting sales goals regularly. A university department with a full marketing staff retained us for SEO, video, and digital advertising help. Enrollment is up and the marketing paid for itself several times over, while the university avoided adding a position in the wake of a hiring freeze being lifted. A retailer (brick and mortar store) with a full sales staff retained us to establish a presence online with video. The retailer is now expanding and is shifting even more responsibilities to our firm. A civic leader responsible for promoting community events is always incredibly busy, so we were retained to take care of everything. Now she has time to cultivate important relationships and partnerships that bring people from near and far to the community, while we handle literally everything from a marketing standpoint for her, saving her from needing to add a full-time position, for a fraction of the cost that that would've been. An engineer wanted to retain us for SEO help for his one man operation. We analyzed his website and it's performance, along with the rest of his online presence, and determined that all was well. In this situation, we simply gave him a few ideas for incremental improvement and left without taking a cent (we don't recommend unnecessary surgery). An attorney couldn't find an administrative assistant that was capable of handling marketing as well (not surprising, as those unicorns don't exist). We were brought in to handle the marketing efforts for less than the cost of a few months of employee salary. THE CONCLUSION The ultimate indication of whether it's justifiable to hire outside marketing help is money. ROI. Profit. Does performance improve with outside help? Not always. Just like with anything else, there's bad Ad agencies out there. We've seen businesses get fleeced too many times by agencies trying to push one go-to product to everyone, essentially trying to fit a square peg in a round hole, forgetting that every business is different and needs a unique approach to optimize their marketing efforts. However, with digital (online) marketing, everything is trackable. There is a wealth of analyic tools out there that allow us to track the impact of every little thing we do. With this ability, we can not only be transparent in our efforts, but we can continually refine and improve our work. This is how we consistently get 500-800% better traffic from our online marketing efforts versus ALL other online marketers in the world. I rely on numbers and hard data to make decisions. It could be assumed that most businesspeople would say the same; they'd say that if the numbers indicate that they should do something, they will. However, what's more common is businesspeople simply doing what they understand. If they've been advertising in the same magazine for 20 years, and they have a strong indication that online Ads would significantly increase their ROI, they'll often just stay the course and continue the magazine advertising. Because of this risk-averse mindset, which is completely understandable (I'd never invest in something I don't understand, just like Warren Buffett, nor would I ever want anybody to do so), many businesses literally leave money on the table. With this in mind, I wrote this brief analysis to help get your mind thinking a little more of the financial impact of your marketing decisions. We're happy to personally talk with you more about your specific situation to help you decide what would be best for you to do, so feel free to reach out to us today. About us: Level 11 Online Marketing is a fast growing digital advertising agency that is becoming known for disrupting the status quo. We specialize in digital advertising, video production, SEO, SEM, advanced analytics, custom web solutions via website design & implementation, social media strategies and conversion optimization. Headquartered in Utah, you will find Level 11 team members throughout Utah, Nebraska, Arizona, California, Idaho, and Colorado. We have the best creative minds in the industry backed up by the most talented software developers and video production teams, resulting in powerful, efficient advertising campaigns. If you have questions, comment here or email us at info@level11.io today!  Search Engine Optimization - or SEO for short - is the process of improving your website for better search engine results, allowing customers and future customers to find your site faster. Implementing good SEO practices onto your site doesn’t happen overnight. It is a process. A process that takes trial and error.
Although the process works best through trial and error, there is no need to try something we all know doesn’t work. Today we are sharing with you the six steps to successfully implementing smart SEO practices onto your site. #1 Web Analytics & Insight Begin by setting up web analytics. These analytic reports will help give you insight into your traffic, the most popular content on your site and may even explain your customers buying behavior. This knowledge will help you strategically frame your SEO strategy. #2 Keywords Based off of your analytics and strategy, begin selecting a few keywords to populate your site with. These keywords should be chosen based on relevance, search volume and competition. The purpose of them is to begin driving traffic to your site and to improve your page content. #3 Content Your website has many SEO-friendly features that allows you to keep your content updated and relevant. Some of these on-page elements are keywords, alt tags, anchor text and formatting. #4 Usability Is your site user and mobile friendly? Does it provide your customers with the features necessary? If your customers can’t find what they are looking for or feel overwhelmed when entering your site, they are more than likely going to do business elsewhere. #5 Google Your SEO results will be directly impacted by what Google thinks of your website. Search is sacred to Google, so Google will keep you off the search results page if your site isn't optimized for the device someone is searching from. You will also be penalized for "spammy" content (over-use of keywords, etc), and for having bad coding on your website (all the behind-the-scenes architecture that only nerds like us really notice). We have a really awesome tool to quickly "grade" your website for SEO so you can figure out where you can make improvements. #6 Site Optimization This is where trial and error come in. Improving your website's SEO takes time and strategy. You must continually be tweaking your strategy. You simply cannot walk away after reaching this final step. As you go through these steps, you will begin to have a better understanding of your target audience and what your customers really need and want. Your strategy will evolve and as a result, you will begin to see better search engine results. Thanks so much for coming to LEVEL 11 Online Marketing to learn more about the awesome world of digital marketing! LEVEL 11 Online Marketing is the exclusive online marketer for businesses and brands of all sizes across the country, providing an array of services that have led to clients' revenues increasing by millions of dollars. If you have questions, comment here or email us at info@level11.io today! Reference: http://devlin.ca/main/deliver/seo Today is the birthday of the man himself, John Wayne. As a legend of the silver screen, The Duke was equally known for his grit as well as his spoken word. Few actors have the timeless quotability of America's Cowboy, and there's so many classic quotes that apply perfectly to business and online marketing in general. Here, we'll reminisce on 11 of John Wayne's greatest quotes! Happy birthday, John!
TOP 11 JOHN WAYNE QUOTES (ABOUT ONLINE MARKETING!) 1 - "That'll be the day." — Ethan Edwards in "The Searchers" (1956) Yeah, it may be hard to imagine how some of the crazy, complex, new ways of marketing can help you grow your business. But as our clients can testify, we take online marketing to a new level, where you finally see that return on investment you've always dreamed of from your marketing budget, and you no longer have to put off your goals 'til "someday." 2 - "Well, there are some things a man just can't run away from." — Ringo Kid in "Stagecoach" (1939) Believe it or not, this internet thing is here to stay, and it's time to stop being threatened by it and start treating it like an asset - a true full-time salesman. Unless you're optimizing your online presence and using all the awesome tools available to market your business, you're missing out on huge growth opportunities. 3 - "Young fella, if you’re looking; for trouble I’ll accommodate ya." — "True Grit" (1969) Face it, your competition would love to win every head-to-head battle against you. There are so many battlegrounds online - websites, social media platforms, search engines, etc. - so there's immediate need to have someone working for you that can not only go toe-to-toe with your competition, but who has the expertise to win for you every single time. 4 - "Whoa, take 'er easy there, Pilgrim." — Tom Doniphon in "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" (1962) We often see businesses who really overdo it. Success comes with consistency and a high degree of excellence in execution, and those who try to run a marathon on day one will undoubtedly burn out quickly with nothing to show for their effort. We take a methodical approach that will best serve your business in the short term as well as the long term. 5 - "Where I come from we don't shoot horses when they get ornery; we tame 'em." — John Drury in "Ride Him, Cowboy" (1932) There's no doubt you've had marketing blunders in the past, or you feel like there's a challenge in marketing your business that you can't quite get your arms around. What we want to do is saddle up and help you get the control that you need to not only avoid wasting your precious marketing dollars, but making the most of the ever-evolving opportunities that online marketing can offer businesses of all sizes. 6 - "Slap some bacon on a biscuit and let's go! We're burnin' daylight!" — Wil Anderson in "The Cowboys" (1972) The answer to the question of when a business should be marketing, is YES! There are things that you can do by yourself today to grow your bottom line tomorrow. And of course there are tons of things we can do to help you get your business where you want it to go. Procrastinating your online marketing leads to costly missed opportunities - string together enough "I'll-do-it-tomorrows", and you'll just be left with a lot of empty yesterdays. 7 - "All battles are fought by scared men who’d rather be someplace else." — Captain Rockwell "Rock" Torrey in "In Harm’s Way" (1965) We get it - most people have put off tackling their digital marketing so long, simply because they don't understand it or are scared of losing precious time and money. Our personal, consultative approach will give you instant confidence and will get your mind spinning with all the awesome things you can do to grow your business. 8 - "Don’t say it's a fine morning, or I'll shoot ya." — George Washington "G.W." McLintock in "McLintock!" (1963) Your audience is looking for a specific message, and simply putting your finger in the wind won't be enough to determine which direction things are going. There's so much data available to make online marketing incredibly efficient that you never have to worry about whether you're getting the right message to the right audience. There's a reason typical online advertisements only get 2-4% of the clicks that ours get - we put your brand in front of your ideal audience and communicate the perfect message to them. That makes your new potential customers happy, and that makes you more money! 9 - "Hey, stupid! Where do you think you're going? Get back there with the herd, you muttonhead!" — John Wyatt in "Westward Ho" (1935) Being analytical and precise is the only way to begin marketing. Deviating from your goals, or not having goals in the first place, will leave you in no-man's-land and will cause disarray in your overall branding. Know what you want to do before you start doing it, and if adjustments need to be made along the way, you'll already have a goal that's worth striving towards, making your marketing efforts far more efficient. 10 - "You left a boy out there to do a man's job!" — Cole Thornton in "El Dorado" (1966) Here's some shameless self-promotion... we're the best at what we do. Abraham Lincoln once said "whatever you are, be a good one", and we are the best dang strategic marketers anywhere. From local businesses to national brands, our team has seen it all, and our experience is what leads us to cleaning up the messes that other marketers cause (messes that lose businesses thousands of dollars). The long-term success is certainly not child's play, so it pays big time to bring in the heavy hitters. 11 - "Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It’s perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we’ve learned something from yesterday." —Interview (1971) Effective, aggressive marketing requires vision and agility. A "set-it-and-forget-it" mentality is what causes many failures in marketing. Don't fall into the failed line of thinking that your past success will lead you to future success. WHAT GOT YOU HERE WON'T GET YOU THERE. If you're not learning from the past and improving in the future by taking advantage of new tools and techniques, past failures and marketing blunders will simply be sunk cost. Let's turn the past into an investment, and take all the data and knowledge available to us, combine it with our years of experience, and take your business to an entirely new level. Level 11 Online Marketing is the best tool you can find to make the most of tomorrow. Thank you so much for coming to LEVEL 11 Online Marketing to learn more about us and how we can help you succeed in growing your business through the awesome world of digital marketing! Questions? Comment below or click on the contact tab. Search engine optimization is a constantly evolving practice. As one variable is assumed to retain more value by search engines that variable soon becomes exploited by poor SEO’s. So, how do you approach SEO? Often times it ends up being a well balanced portfolio of various fulfillment tactics. At other times, “slow and steady” with establishing proper structures within your website never seem to go wrong.
1 – Diversity By far, the biggest issue that SEO’s face is diversity. All too often, a website utilizes the same keywords and phrases too many times. What this results in is Google (or other search engines) flagging the website as being spammy, which means your website won't show up when a search would otherwise result in your site being deemed relevant. 2 – Title Tags Title Tags have been through some serious trends. Found many times throughout any given website (they tell search engines what each page is about), Title Tags have been over- and under-emphasized over the years. Amazingly, during consultations, we'll often find both extremes: attempts to cram too many words in, and even completely empty Title Tags. Our recommendation is to approach Title Tags as if they were an abbreviated, one sentence summary of what the page is about. That way you focus on what is most important to represent in the Title Tag, which helps limit saying too much. While Title Tags play a huge part in search engine algorithms currently, advances in technology may render them less meaningful over time in terms of importance in search rankings, but they can still help generate clicks. By displaying a summary of what the page is about, it increases the possiblilty that someone will click on that text if your page shows up in the search rankings. 3 – Fluff Unnecessary fluff is everywhere on websites. From the excessive title tags mentioned above and unnecessary meta tags, to scraped content and old Flash, websites are going through a rebirth. Stuff from a few years ago is now often considered tacky. Much more importantly, a lot of the items from years ago use outdated and slow processes. How does this impact SEO? As older things like Flash is slowly overtaken by HTML5, and other coding improvements come along, a lean, mean, quick-loading-website machine is what search engines want to see. User experience means a lot to Google, so if your site loads slower than a competitor whose site has the exact same information, your site will lose because your competitor's load time is better. 4 – Scaled Images A big issue with pages loading slow is that the images are often not served at proper size. A good example would be if a business owner wanted to display a 500px x 500px sized image of their storefront. They'll take their own picture, download the pic to their desktop, then upload it to their website and scale it to 500px x 500px. However, they didn’t resize it - they just scaled it. Now their website has to load a 3500px x 2500px picture, but display it at 500×500. Even though it is displayed smaller it still has to load the full size image. Why not resize it before loading so the website can quickly serve the smaller image instead? 5 – Compressed Images Another fix for images is to take advantage of lossless image compression. This method of compression retains the quality of an image while downsizing the actual file size by as much as 90%. Either compress images individually or use available plugins for popular Content Management Systems, like WordPress. There are also API’s available from popular compression tools for those that would like to integrate compression into custom website backends. 6 – Search Engine Friendly (SEF) URL’s While it may be true that dynamic url’s/pages should get indexed with no problem, that doesn’t mean that pages with search engine friendly url’s won’t rank higher. All popular Content Management Systems like WordPress these days have the ability to enable search engine friendly url’s. Use it. 7 – .htaccess The .htaccess file is a text file that is in the root of a website’s hosting directory. This is pretty technical stuff that only those who deal in the nitty gritty of web dev will totally follow, but it's still important to be aware of. This small, single file can literally make or break a website. With just a line or two of code it can help you add redirects when necessary, set caches and expires headers for quicker page loads, mitigate hacking, block IP addresses, all sorts of goodness. Or, it can crash you entire website because someone accidentally left an extra comma on a line. Use the files when you feel comfortable doing so, but don't push it. 8 – Understanding your own site’s structure This is basic housekeeping, but is often neglected. You need to keep up on what's actually in your website. Running a thorough audit with a program like WebMeUp will help webmasters know how many pages their website has, what pages have gone missing, where broken links are, what pages have empty Title Tags, etc. The simple task of understanding (or better yet, fixing) a websites structure can be one of the easiest to fix, because you can run audit programs, but is often one of the most rewarding for search engine gains. Treat this like Spring cleaning - occasionally take the time to check on the state of your site. 9 – Content Unique content isn't just a fad. In fact, it’s always been important. The issue that website owners face is knowing what to write about and how frequently. There is no right answer that applies to everyone. We'd be happy to help you figure out what's right for you, so feel free to reach out for a little guidance. Creating compelling content to generate returning visitors is more important than keyword stuffing. 10 – Outreach Now that you've got an awesome website and you've began to generate content, how do you spread the word? Outreach. Outreach is one of the slowest, yet most rewarding parts of SEO. Get involved in the local community. Go to business conferences. Offer free tutorials. By getting involved you will generate outreach without all of the awkwardness. Plus, you usually end up feeling good about getting involved with your peers. Be wary of those so-called SEO experts touting getting you backlinks quickly. It's usually just garbage you'll end up with. Developing mutually beneficial connections with partner websites (businesses with similar clientele as you, against whom you don't directly compete) will go a long way for you. 11 – Buyer's Remorse We've talked a lot about this here, but just know that there's a lot of snake oil salesmen out there, claiming to help you conquer SEO instantly and with little effort. There is no "secret sauce" to SEO, and there certainly is no shortcut to awesome organic rankings. Don't believe in the hollow promises of these fly-by-night agencies. Summary While SEO methods and tactics will always change, it seems that many of the most impacting variables are the same as years ago, and will continue to be so well into the future. To be successful in SEO, focus first on the important website variables that don’t change so that you establish a solid foundation for your other efforts. Once you have the foundation in place, you can test the waters with other search engine optimization methods to increase your website’s exposure. About us: Level 11 Online Marketing is a fast growing digital advertising agency that is becoming known for disrupting the status quo. We specialize in digital advertising, video production, SEO, SEM, advanced analytics, custom web solutions via website design & implementation, social media strategies and conversion optimization. Headquartered in Utah, you will find Level 11 team members throughout Utah, Nebraska, Arizona, California, Idaho, and Colorado. We have the best creative minds in the industry backed up by the most talented software developers and video production teams, resulting in powerful, efficient advertising campaigns. If you have questions, comment here or email us at info@level11.io today! It’s critical that you know whether or not your website is adequate (i.e. generating maximum value for your business). If there’s improvement to be made, every effort should be made to get your digital house in order as quickly as possible (we're right HERE to help!). This list will help you to do a decent high-level evaluation of your current website situation, of course keeping in mind that there’s many more things that should be considered and evaluated to really optimize your web presence.
1 - PURPOSE What do you want to get out of your website? There needs to be a clear purpose to your web presence in order to make everything about it make sense. Whether you want to sell product directly through the site, provide information, generate leads, or some combination of those, everything about your site needs to work towards a specfic end. 2 - AUDIENCE Understanding the type of person that you want the website to be tailored to is essential in mapping out everything on your site. Literally everything on your website needs to be very focused on your audience. It sounds simple, but often we come across websites that provide irrelevant information, or have a design that isn't conducive to the type of person that would frequent such a site. 3 - BRANDING Your brand is bigger than your website, but there needs to be a homogenous branding of your business anyway. Ensure that your site has the look and feel of your business as a whole. If your brand is very loud in a way that is over-the-top for a website, you may need to find ways to neutralize your primary brand just a bit in order to not scare people away from exploring the rest of your site. 4 - DESIGN Having an eye for design is huge. A website that is aesthetically pleasing is more likely to engage potential customers for a longer period of time, and the longer someone is engaging with your product, the more likely they are to convert into a paying customer. 5 - LAYOUT A successful website involves much more psychology than one would think. Consider how someone stumbling onto your site for the first time will engage with it. Is it easy for them to find out what you do? Can they find what they're looking for easily? Is the interface clean enough that they don't get bogged down in information overload? A naturally-flowing layout is essential for conversion rate optimization. 6 - CODING This may be a bit too nerdy for some to care about, but the coding of your website matters a lot. Not only can it have a huge effect on the buyer's experience, but your site's coding (the architecture behind what the commoner sees - think about the power in your home... there's far more wiring than you'd think) has a huge effect on SEO. Our SEO tool can help you figure out how you're doing. 7 - RESPONSIVE Your website needs to look good on any device. To see how it looks, open your site on your desktop or laptop. With the window open from the top to the bottom of your screen, slide one side of the window left to right. As you make your browser window as narrow as a tablet, your site should look functional and good still. And most importantly, given how important mobile is, make your browser as narrow as a phone screen. If your site doesn't look right, you've got issues with the architecture that need to be addressed. This too will impact your SEO, as Google will not allow non-mobile friendly sites to rank high in search from a mobile device. 8 - CONTENT Your site needs to have enough quality, relevant content. You're getting traffic to your website, to give the people a chance to engage with your site. Content is what makes your website a salesperson that sells 24/7. This content can be product descriptions, biography content, blogs, video content, etc. 9 - MORE CONTENT The value of content cannot be understated. Give your audience everything they need. If you provide value to them, they'll be more likely to convert to a customer, so give them value! Give it away for free, and your chances for conversion are better immediately. 10 - GOALS Goals make your efforts measurable. Put a system in place to make sure you can measure things such as shopping cart abandonments, requests for information, contact forms, successful purchases, etc. 11 - E-COMMERCE We always say, don't make it hard for people to give you their money. This isn't to sound shallow, but how many of us have left a buying situation because someone kept asking for more information, or the process was too long, or it just was hard to find exactly what you were looking for? Everything, from the design and layout of your site, to the content and buying process, work together to determine your success with e-commerce. There's also plenty of little things that can help make the transaction go smoothly, such as using a tool from Amazon where people can pay on your site using their Amazon credentials (then they don't have to enter all their info). Whatever you can do to eliminate steps and make the process easy will lead to more conversions from your website. About us: Level 11 Online Marketing is a fast growing digital advertising agency that is becoming known for disrupting the status quo. We specialize in digital advertising, video production, SEO, SEM, advanced analytics, custom web solutions via website design & implementation, social media strategies and conversion optimization. Headquartered in Utah, you will find Level 11 team members in Utah, Washington, California, Idaho, and Colorado. We have the best creative minds in the industry backed up by the most talented software developers and video production teams which leads to powerful, efficient advertising campaigns. If you have questions, comment here or email us at info@level11.io today!  Google Analytics is easily the most robust website traffic analysis tools you can find, and it's super simple and free to install on your site. You don't need to be a coding genius or anything to get going either. Google walks you through the steps really efficiently. If along the way you run into some hiccups and need some help, feel free to contact us and we'll give you a hand!
Don't delay installing Analytics on your site. The sooner you begin collecting data, the better. This is because Analytics will give you insight into valuable things such as where your traffic is coming from and how people behave on your site. To start collecting basic data from your website:
It's a pretty simple process really. Once your accounts are created, you'll simply be given a small section of code to copy and paste onto your website, and that's it. With Google Analytics installed on your website, you'll be able to not only track traffic, but can also set goals. The goals will allow you to track when site visitors see a specified amount of pages, spend a specified amount of time on your website, and other things. This information can also be used in marketing - you can target remarketing efforts on those people who met specific goals, so marketing is going towards those people who have met certain qualifying criteria. You'll also be able to add and manage users on your Analytics account. This will allow other employees, or someone like us at Level 11, to keep track of your on-site activity as well. It's very simple to do so: when prompted, you simply enter the Google account of the party you wish to grant some degree of access to your analytics. If you would like our opinion of your website and what could be improved, feel free to add analytics@level11.io to your Google Analytics, and we'll happily take a look at things for you! More knowledge can be found here: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1008015?hl=en About us: Level 11 Online Marketing is a fast growing digital advertising agency that is becoming known for disrupting the status quo. We specialize in digital advertising, video production, SEO, SEM, advanced analytics, custom web solutions via website design & implementation, social media strategies and conversion optimization. Headquartered in Utah, you will find Level 11 team members throughout Utah, Nebraska, Arizona, California, Idaho, and Colorado. We have the best creative minds in the industry backed up by the most talented software developers and video production teams, resulting in powerful, efficient advertising campaigns. If you have questions, comment here or email us at info@level11.io today!  Phones are used at an incredible rate today. You may have been putting off getting a presence set up on social media because you don't have time, or because you don't think it's worth your time. Well, it's no longer just a "good idea" for most businesses to be on Facebook - with well over a billion people actively using Facebook every day, it's become a go-to part of almost any marketing strategy. At least having a Facebook page, even if you are not actively posting content there, will help your business.
To help you get serious about your social media presence, we're sharing a few insights for you to get your house in order. For more hints on creating and maintaining a profitable, worthwhile social media presence, go here, here, here, and here to learn more. Step 1: Classification To begin, go to https://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php. This page will showcase six different classifications to choose from (they'll each provide more relevant fields for your desired page):
Once you've selected your desired classification, you'll be asked for an official name for your business page. Be very careful in selecting your name - even though Facebook allows you to change your name and URL once, it's not a walk in the park. Step 2: Basic Info Facebook will automatically take you through the following four basic sections to complete the fundamental aspects of your Page. Finish "About" Section The "about" section will be the main short description of your company. It will appear on your main page, so make it descriptive but to the point. Make sure you include a link to your company website as well (if you don't have a website, or your current site needs an update, let us know). Also ensure that this section makes you stand out, so you attract new visitors. This is also where you can select your unique domain (that, as mentioned above, can only be changed once). For example, we at Level 11 Online Marketing chose to use the domain https://www.facebook.com/Level11marketing/ and we love it. Upload Profile Picture Your profile picture will serve as the main visual icon of your page, appearing in search results and alongside any comments you publish. While any perfectly square image will work, Facebook recommends that the size be 180 x 180 pixels. Add to Favorites Each and every individual Facebook user has a vertical navigation bar to the left of their News Feed. You can add your page as a "Favorite" item here for easy access. Reach More People You'll be prompted to create an advertisement to draw attention to your Page. Whether or not you intend to do any paid marketing at this point, it's best to not run any ads at this stage because there's no compelling content on the page yet that would convince them to ultimately "Like" your page or go to your website. Step 3: Admin Panel With your page now live, Facebook will ask if you'd like to "Like" your page. You probably should avoid doing so at the moment because doing so will appear in News Feeds of those you're connected to personally to on Facebook. Without any content on the page, we want to save that action for when you're really ready for people to view the page. In the top bar, you'll see the "Settings" tab. Click that, and along the left side you'll see a vertical navigation bar with different sections should appear. We'll focus on three important ones for now:
Step 4: Content Now you can finally get to adding content. There's much to be said about what to do and say on your page, so get started by going here. Content is king, so don't post for the sake of posting. Have a clear purpose in everything you do. Let us know if you could use a few ideas on where to start. Posts The rest of your page will fill up over time as you post more updates. Facebook currently allows you six different posting options: Plain text status Photo with caption Link with caption Video with caption Event page Location check-in Keep in mind that statistically, videos have the highest rate of engagement, followed by photos/graphics, and lastly plain text or links. Cover Photo This is the large, horizontal image that spans the top of your Facebook page. This is usually a branded image, but can be whatever you think will help to attract people to your page. The official photo dimensions are 851 x 315 pixels. Invite Others Now that there's content on the page, we can start strategically inviting users to Like it. It could be helpful to proceed in this order:
Step 5: Measure Impact To measure your efforts to ensure you're making valuable decisions, click the "Insights" option in the top navigation to see the following:
About us: Level 11 Online Marketing is a fast growing digital advertising agency that is becoming known for disrupting the status quo. We specialize in digital advertising, video production, SEO, SEM, advanced analytics, custom web solutions via website design & implementation, social media strategies and conversion optimization. Headquartered in Utah, you will find Level 11 team members throughout Utah, Nebraska, Arizona, California, Idaho, and Colorado. We have the best creative minds in the industry backed up by the most talented software developers and video production teams, resulting in powerful, efficient advertising campaigns. If you have questions, comment here or email us at info@level11.io today!  A huge part of your online presence should be ensuring that you are easy to find. Setting up your Google My Business page should be one of the first things you set up as a business. We're often asked by business owners how it was that other businesses get "listed" by Google... yeah, you set up your own listing! Creating your page, and that your information is accurate, will be a huge step towards being found and generating business online.
The steps are simple: you'll simply go to the link below, and fill out your general information. Everything from your address, phone number, business hours, and description, can be put into your page. If your business is home based, and you don't want your address listed, you still need to enter your address (more on why later), yet you can hide that so the public doesn't see it. Once all of your information is in the system, along with perhaps your logo and some photos you upload, the process is nearly complete. Make sure all of your information is correct and accurate. As with any business, things will change for you in the future, so it's easy to edit your business details anytime and they’re automatically updated on Google Search and Maps, all from a single dashboard. The final step in your setup is verification. Through a phone call, or more commonly, a post card from Google sent to your physical address, you'll be able to verify that you are indeed you, and your business listing will be complete. With your Google My Business page completed, you'll be able to instantly gain more insights about the people that are looking for you and talking about you. You'll be the first to know when people are talking about your business (leaving reviews) so you can respond to them as the business owner, and track your ratings over time. You'll learn about your customers and how they’re interacting with your business, how they found you, and where are they coming from. With Google My Business, the answers are right there. Go here to get started, and feel free to contact us if you have questions along the way! About us: Level 11 Online Marketing is a fast growing digital advertising agency that is becoming known for disrupting the status quo. We specialize in digital advertising, video production, SEO, SEM, advanced analytics, custom web solutions via website design & implementation, social media strategies and conversion optimization. Headquartered in Utah, you will find Level 11 team members in Utah, Washington, California, Idaho, and Colorado. We have the best creative minds in the industry backed up by the most talented software developers and video production teams which leads to powerful, efficient advertising campaigns. If you have questions, comment here or email us at info@level11.io today!  Search engine optimization is a constantly evolving practice. As one variable is assumed to retain more value by search engines that variable soon becomes exploited by poor SEO’s. So, how do you approach SEO? Often times it ends up being a well balanced portfolio of various fulfillment tactics. At other times, “slow and steady” with establishing proper structures within your website never seem to go wrong.
1 – Diversity By far, the biggest issue that SEO’s face is diversity. All too often, a website utilizes the same keywords and phrases too many times. What this results in is Google (or other search engines) flagging the website as being spammy, which means your website won't show up when a search would otherwise result in your site being deemed relevant. 2 – Title Tags Title Tags have been through some serious trends. Found many times throughout any given website (they tell search engines what each page is about), Title Tags have been over- and under-emphasized over the years. Amazingly, during consultations, we'll often find both extremes: attempts to cram too many words in, and even completely empty Title Tags. Our recommendation is to approach Title Tags as if they were an abbreviated, one sentence summary of what the page is about. That way you focus on what is most important to represent in the Title Tag, which helps limit saying too much. While Title Tags play a huge part in search engine algorithms currently, advances in technology may render them less meaningful over time in terms of importance in search rankings, but they can still help generate clicks. By displaying a summary of what the page is about, it increases the possiblilty that someone will click on that text if your page shows up in the search rankings. 3 – Fluff Unnecessary fluff is everywhere on websites. From the excessive title tags mentioned above and unnecessary meta tags, to scraped content and old Flash, websites are going through a rebirth. Stuff from a few years ago is now often considered tacky. Much more importantly, a lot of the items from years ago use outdated and slow processes. How does this impact SEO? As older things like Flash is slowly overtaken by HTML5, and other coding improvements come along, a lean, mean, quick-loading-website machine is what search engines want to see. User experience means a lot to Google, so if your site loads slower than a competitor whose site has the exact same information, your site will lose because your competitor's load time is better. 4 – Scaled Images A big issue with pages loading slow is that the images are often not served at proper size. A good example would be if a business owner wanted to display a 500px x 500px sized image of their storefront. They'll take their own picture, download the pic to their desktop, then upload it to their website and scale it to 500px x 500px. However, they didn’t resize it - they just scaled it. Now their website has to load a 3500px x 2500px picture, but display it at 500×500. Even though it is displayed smaller it still has to load the full size image. Why not resize it before loading so the website can quickly serve the smaller image instead? 5 – Compressed Images Another fix for images is to take advantage of lossless image compression. This method of compression retains the quality of an image while downsizing the actual file size by as much as 90%. Either compress images individually or use available plugins for popular Content Management Systems, like WordPress. There are also API’s available from popular compression tools for those that would like to integrate compression into custom website backends. 6 – Search Engine Friendly (SEF) URL’s While it may be true that dynamic url’s/pages should get indexed with no problem, that doesn’t mean that pages with search engine friendly url’s won’t rank higher. All popular Content Management Systems like WordPress these days have the ability to enable search engine friendly url’s. Use it. 7 – .htaccess The .htaccess file is a text file that is in the root of a website’s hosting directory. This is pretty technical stuff that only those who deal in the nitty gritty of web dev will totally follow, but it's still important to be aware of. This small, single file can literally make or break a website. With just a line or two of code it can help you add redirects when necessary, set caches and expires headers for quicker page loads, mitigate hacking, block IP addresses, all sorts of goodness. Or, it can crash you entire website because someone accidentally left an extra comma on a line. Use the files when you feel comfortable doing so, but don't push it. 8 – Understanding your own site’s structure This is basic housekeeping, but is often neglected. You need to keep up on what's actually in your website. Running a thorough audit with a program like WebMeUp will help webmasters know how many pages their website has, what pages have gone missing, where broken links are, what pages have empty Title Tags, etc. The simple task of understanding (or better yet, fixing) a websites structure can be one of the easiest to fix, because you can run audit programs, but is often one of the most rewarding for search engine gains. Treat this like Spring cleaning - occasionally take the time to check on the state of your site. 9 – Content Unique content isn't just a fad. In fact, it’s always been important. The issue that website owners face is knowing what to write about and how frequently. There is no right answer that applies to everyone. We'd be happy to help you figure out what's right for you, so feel free to reach out for a little guidance. Creating compelling content to generate returning visitors is more important than keyword stuffing. 10 – Outreach Now that you've got an awesome website and you've began to generate content, how do you spread the word? Outreach. Outreach is one of the slowest, yet most rewarding parts of SEO. Get involved in the local community. Go to business conferences. Offer free tutorials. By getting involved you will generate outreach without all of the awkwardness. Plus, you usually end up feeling good about getting involved with your peers. Be wary of those so-called SEO experts touting getting you backlinks quickly. It's usually just garbage you'll end up with. Developing mutually beneficial connections with partner websites (businesses with similar clientele as you, against whom you don't directly compete) will go a long way for you. 11 – Buyer's Remorse We've talked a lot about this here, but just know that there's a lot of snake oil salesmen out there, claiming to help you conquer SEO instantly and with little effort. There is no "secret sauce" to SEO, and there certainly is no shortcut to awesome organic rankings. Don't believe in the hollow promises of these fly-by-night agencies. Summary While SEO methods and tactics will always change, it seems that many of the most impacting variables are the same as years ago, and will continue to be so well into the future. To be successful in SEO, focus first on the important website variables that don’t change so that you establish a solid foundation for your other efforts. Once you have the foundation in place, you can test the waters with other search engine optimization methods to increase your website’s exposure. About us: Level 11 Online Marketing is a fast growing digital advertising agency that is becoming known for disrupting the status quo. We specialize in digital advertising, video production, SEO, SEM, advanced analytics, custom web solutions via website design & implementation, social media strategies and conversion optimization. Headquartered in Utah, you will find Level 11 team members throughout Utah, Nebraska, Arizona, California, Idaho, and Colorado. We have the best creative minds in the industry backed up by the most talented software developers and video production teams, resulting in powerful, efficient advertising campaigns. If you have questions, comment here or email us at info@level11.io today!  Your website needs to be mobile responsive. Amazingly (or perhaps this shouldn't come as a surprise by now), people are five times more likely to leave a mobile site that isn’t mobile-friendly (that's a direct-from-Google stat, as are the other ones here).
All too often, we encounter websites that were built before cell phones, and specifically, smart phones, were as common as they are today. This means that websites were built to look and function properly on a desktop computer, but are not constructed in such a way that allows for other screen sizes, like tablets and phones, to display the same imaging in a convenient way. Due to the dated nature of many websites, visitors on phones need to zoom, squint, and stand on their heads in order to find what they're looking for. For this reason, so many visitors will simply leave a website instead of trying to navigate to what they're looking for. Bounce rates (a bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page) for these non-responsive websites are consistently in the 90%+ range. Your visitors are simply walking away without giving you a chance, simply because of the design of your website. Additionally, nearly half of all visitors will leave a mobile site if the pages don’t load within 3 seconds. The content and construction of your website will impact load time, and there are a lot of seemingly small things that can improve your load time drastically. We often encounter websites that have individual images that are larger (in terms of space... you know, kilobytes, megabytes, etc) than the entire website should even be. And finally, if you think that having a website that only looks and works good on a desktop is adequate, think about this: 9 out of 10 people say that they use multiple screens for such tasks as booking a flight online or managing their personal finances. Nearly everybody online is completing some part of the buying process not only on one device, but on any combination of a laptop, a desktop, a computer, a phone, etc. To lose such a huge portion of your sales funnel simply due to a poor mobile experience is forfeiting easily-attainable revenue unnecessarily. You can go to https://testmysite.withgoogle.com/intl/en-gb to test out your website's mobile responsiveness, then you'll have a good idea for what about your site could use improvement. The world’s gone mobile. Now, it’s your turn. Contact us now to get a free full website analysis. We'll show you a list of everything that can and should be done to begin increasing the business you generate from your website, and we'll kindly guide you throughout the entire process so you can focus on what you do best. About us: Level 11 Online Marketing is a fast growing digital advertising agency that is becoming known for disrupting the status quo. We specialize in digital advertising, video production, SEO, SEM, advanced analytics, custom web solutions via website design & implementation, social media strategies and conversion optimization. Headquartered in Utah, you will find Level 11 team members in Utah, Washington, California, Idaho, and Colorado. We have the best creative minds in the industry backed up by the most talented software developers and video production teams which leads to powerful, efficient advertising campaigns. If you have questions, comment here or email us at info@level11.io today!  Berra-isms (colloquial expressions that lack logic) are now countless, and many of them are just attributed to Berra, even if he never actually said them. As he so perfectly put it: “I never said most of the things I said.” Here's how 11 of his quotes apply to marketing!
1. When you come to a fork in the road, take it. Marketing (and all things online) is evolving so quickly that opportunities will always be coming along. The awesome thing about some online marketing strategies is you can actually TEST something before you do it. So no, it's not impossible to take the fork in the road - you can actually try multiple options without even risking anything. 2. You can observe a lot by just watching. The problem that many marketers have is they don't actually watch. They don't watch the campaigns they're running (gotta watch to make adjustments along the way to refine the approach), they don't watch their clients (how is the marketing impacting the client's business?), and they don't watch the customers (you cannot effectively market without intimately understanding the decisions buyers are making and why they're making those decisions over other options). We're watchers - always observing and always refining. 3. It ain’t over till it’s over. Don't give up. If something isn't working, make adjustments and keep trying. The beauty of online marketing is the ability to refine the process continually based on actual DATA about your efforts and their results. 4. It’s like déjà vu all over again. When you find something that works, do it again. Also, it should be noted that before we do any marketing, we dig into the data to determine where opportunity actually lies. When we do this, then deploy our marketing efforts later, we already have an idea of what will happen because we've already seen the numbers. It really is like déjà vu all over again. 5. No one goes there nowadays, it’s too crowded. Don't think that just because everybody else is marketing in some way that you need to follow suit. Let the numbers (analytics) determine where you market. Don't just assume that because your main competitor is on some fancy new social media platform that you need to be there too - every aspect of your marketing should be justifiable in your ROI. 6. Baseball is 90% mental and the other half is physical. Sometimes the numbers just don't add up. To make sure your numbers are accurate and to make sure you know as much as possible about your audience, make sure you have Google Analytics installed on your website. It's easy, it's free, and it's the most robust traffic analysis tool anywhere. Any marketing without analytics is running on partial power. 7. A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore. Marketing is not a commoditizable industry. There are countless agencies out there; some agencies are amazing (like Level 11 Online Marketing!), while others make promises they can't deliver on and end up declaring bankruptcy 3 times in 7 years (like Dex... please, if you're with Dex, call us now. You'll be blown away by how much better life can be!). Simply put, all marketers are not created equal, so be thorough in vetting. 8. You wouldn’t have won if we’d beaten you. You can control your destiny. Your marketing efforts are 100% within your control, so you CAN win every time, if you do it right. Don't allow yourself to be beaten by being mediocre. 9. We made too many wrong mistakes. Winners don't fail, they learn. A wrong mistake is one that you learn nothing from. 10. Congratulations. I knew the record would stand until it was broken. Your progress as a business or brand will stop and begin to decline the moment you think you've "arrived." Complacency is the enemy to progress. Once you reach a goal, set another and get back to work. 11. You better cut the pizza in four pieces because I’m not hungry enough to eat six. Problem solving sometimes simply requires a new perspective of the same problem. With something as dynamic as 21st century marketing, constant change require constant education and evolution. We always bring a fresh perspective to our clients' challenges and problems. ... and now the bonus quotes! 12. Always go to other people’s funerals, otherwise they won’t come to yours. 13. I usually take a two-hour nap from one to four. 14. Never answer an anonymous letter. 15. Slump? I ain’t in no slump… I just ain’t hitting. 16. How can you think and hit at the same time? 17. The future ain’t what it used to be. 18. I tell the kids, somebody’s gotta win, somebody’s gotta lose. Just don’t fight about it. Just try to get better. 19. It gets late early out here. 20. If the people don’t want to come out to the ballpark, nobody’s going to stop them. 21. We have deep depth. 22. Pair up in threes. 23. Why buy good luggage, you only use it when you travel. 24. You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you are going, because you might not get there. 25. All pitchers are liars or crybabies. 26. Even Napoleon had his Watergate. 27. Bill Dickey is learning me his experience. 28. He hits from both sides of the plate. He’s amphibious. 29. It was impossible to get a conversation going, everybody was talking too much. 30. I can see how he (Sandy Koufax) won twenty-five games. What I don’t understand is how he lost five. 31. I don’t know (if they were men or women fans running naked across the field). They had bags over their heads. 32. I’m a lucky guy and I’m happy to be with the Yankees. And I want to thank everyone for making this night necessary. 33. I’m not going to buy my kids an encyclopedia. Let them walk to school like I did. 34. In baseball, you don’t know nothing. 35. I never blame myself when I’m not hitting. I just blame the bat and if it keeps up, I change bats. After all, if I know it isn’t my fault that I’m not hitting, how can I get mad at myself? 36. I never said most of the things I said. 37. It ain’t the heat, it’s the humility. 38. If you ask me anything I don’t know, I’m not going to answer. 39. I wish everybody had the drive he (Joe DiMaggio) had. He never did anything wrong on the field. I’d never seen him dive for a ball, everything was a chest-high catch, and he never walked off the field. 40. So I’m ugly. I never saw anyone hit with his face. 41. Take it with a grin of salt. 42. (On the 1973 Mets) We were overwhelming underdogs. 43. The towels were so thick there I could hardly close my suitcase. 44. Little League baseball is a very good thing because it keeps the parents off the streets. 45. Mickey Mantle was a very good golfer, but we weren’t allowed to play golf during the season; only at spring training. 46. You don’t have to swing hard to hit a home run. If you got the timing, it’ll go. 47. I’m lucky. Usually you’re dead to get your own museum, but I’m still alive to see mine. 48. If I didn’t make it in baseball, I won’t have made it workin’. I didn’t like to work. 49. If the world were perfect, it wouldn’t be. 50. A lot of guys go, ‘Hey, Yog, say a Yogi-ism.’ I tell ’em, ‘I don’t know any.’ They want me to make one up. I don’t make ’em up. I don’t even know when I say it. They’re the truth. And it is the truth. I don’t know. About us: Level 11 Online Marketing is a fast growing digital advertising agency that is becoming known for disrupting the status quo. We specialize in digital advertising, video production, SEO, SEM, advanced analytics, custom web solutions via website design & implementation, social media strategies and conversion optimization. Headquartered in Utah, you will find Level 11 team members in Utah, Washington, California, Idaho, and Colorado. We have the best creative minds in the industry backed up by the most talented software developers and video production teams which leads to powerful, efficient advertising campaigns. If you have questions, comment here or email us at info@level11.io today!  "Can you make this go viral?" Yeah, never ask this question. It shows a glorious lack of understanding. What it means to "go viral" is that something is being read, viewed, or shared online at a higher than normal rate. Essentially, something is catching fire on the internet for some reason. The result of something going "viral" is generally a temporary spike in page views. While the small victory is nice, something else will inevitably come along and push your content off people's screens and into obscurity again.
So is it worthwhile to aim for this type of result? Can/should you craft your campaign around the objective of "going viral"? Probably not. This is why we, your advertisers and social media managers, focus on other goals - ways that marketing and social media can help achieve your overall business and marketing goals. TAKEAWAYS Learn about which goals on social media are worth your while. Having clearly defined objectives (beyond simply accumulating page likes) will help you stay on track. Talk with us about how you can measure your success and how social media can help your business achieve what "going viral" is truly all about: awareness. About us: Level 11 Online Marketing is a fast growing digital advertising agency that is becoming known for disrupting the status quo. We specialize in digital advertising, video production, SEO, SEM, advanced analytics, custom web solutions via website design & implementation, social media strategies and conversion optimization. Headquartered in Utah, you will find Level 11 team members in Utah, Washington, California, Idaho, and Colorado. We have the best creative minds in the industry backed up by the most talented software developers and video production teams which leads to powerful, efficient advertising campaigns. If you have questions, comment here or email us at info@level11.io today!  Something to keep in mind regarding social media: planning is essential for sustained success. Everything your social media manager is doing, from posting to interacting with followers, is (or certainly SHOULD be) planned.
You should rarely if ever need to ask your social media manager to "post about this right now." Why? Because your social media manager shouldn't just be sitting around thinking about what to say that day. What they post/share, post frequency, follower engagement, and the purpose of all of that, should be very strategically planned. Asking them to post something immediately and out of the blue shows a lack of understanding about the true strategy and skill they bring to the job. Remember - an overall strategy is crafted with the long term in mind, so random, spur-of-the-moment alterations to the strategy could very well throw the entire social media strategy off its optimal path. TAKEAWAYS Social media managers: Make sure people in your organization know what you're doing and why. Explain your social media strategy so as to clarify your objectives and methods. Everyone else: Plan! Early on in your project or campaign, bring in the social media folks so they can incorporate your needs into their overall social media strategy and work on creating high-quality content for it. Your success will be magnified the more your social media is in harmony with your other efforts. About us: Level 11 Online Marketing is a fast growing digital advertising agency that is becoming known for disrupting the status quo. We specialize in digital advertising, video production, SEO, SEM, advanced analytics, custom web solutions via website design & implementation, social media strategies and conversion optimization. Headquartered in Utah, you will find Level 11 team members in Utah, Washington, California, Idaho, and Colorado. We have the best creative minds in the industry backed up by the most talented software developers and video production teams which leads to powerful, efficient advertising campaigns. If you have questions, comment here or email us at info@level11.io today! |
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