Mission Critical Marketing Best Practices for Residential Remodeling Contractors

So often, we read about how to do marketing right, or how to do SEO right, or how to do social media right.

But these articles are written with all small businesses in mind, when in reality, each vertical might be very different in how to best use marketing techniques and practices to achieve optimal outcomes.

I interviewed, David Alpert, President of Continuum Marketing Group LLC, a full service marketing firm that provides services exclusively to residential remodeling contractors nationwide. The interview was refreshing, to see both David's total focus, as well as a great example of how to apply marketing techniques to a particular vertical. Here's what David shared:

Q: Tell me about your focus.

Our focus is on a subset of home remodeling contractors that provide a full range of services like kitchens, baths, additions, major renovations, and may also provide design services. These are the remodelers I'll be talking about.

What's important to understand is that the marketing that works best for these firms is not necessarily the same as what works for other businesses or even other types remodelers.

Q: Has online marketing replaced traditional marketing approaches for these remodelers?

A: No, but it's radically changed remodeler marketing, with many new marketing opportunities.

Online marketing has become a major part of marketing programs for many remodelers. For some things however, traditional marketing is still highly cost effective and should be used. We find a strategic mix of traditional and online marketing delivers the best results and ROI.

We've used online analytics for 15 years to measure the impact of online and traditional marketing. Doing so, we can often gauge faster and more accurately a given marketing effort's impact versus waiting for the phone to ring, which could be months after that effort.

Q: What are some ways remodelers use online marketing effectively?

A: Online marketing like SEO, PPC, Social Media and specialty sites can be great for building brand awareness.

Online marketing helps build brand understanding, meaning the type of remodeling done, the staff, their process, what their projects look like and so on.

Building brand preference, prior to a first call or meeting, using online marketing is critical. Remodelers can also use their online presence to inspire, educate, and motivate homeowners thinking of remodeling. It can be used to get on a homeowner's radar long before they are ready to remodel. Homeowners go online when they start thinking about remodeling, sometimes more than a year before they want to talk to a contractor. Online marketing offers low cost ways to capture contact information at this early stage and to start engaging with homeowners. This engagement can take many forms: downloadable e-books and guides, e-newsletters, social media, etc. Online marketing can also be used to maintain strong relationships with past clients.

Ultimately what remodelers want from any marketing is to generate "qualified" leads with an upcoming project. They'd rather not deal with unqualified leads, because qualifying leads can be expensive. Online marketing, if done well, is good at both generating qualified leads and minimizing unqualified ones.

Q: What types of online marketing generally work best for remodelers?

A: Websites are a must for all remodelers. They must be professional-looking and competitive with other remodelers targeting the same market segment. I can't stress enough the importance of using the best photos a remodeler can afford, showing the type of work they sell and their market is looking for. Homeowners typically find more remodelers they think can do the job well than they want to contact. So the remodeler's website must stand out, offering distinctive reasons to put that remodeler on their short list.

All remodelers should integrate their various online marketing efforts together and also with their traditional marketing. Every remodeler can benefit from using online marketing analytic tools. Many cost nothing to use. Today, having a free listing on Houzz is also almost a given, though a paid Houzz listing is not.

A good number of positive online reviews on key websites, like Google, Houzz, BBB, Facebook and others is very important. GuildQuality, a homeowner satisfaction survey firm, can be useful for their members in getting online reviews and also can integrate with other online marketing efforts. But you still need reviews on other sites as well.

Beyond these "must haves" there are variables that dictate what other online marketing would be best. These include: the remodeler's size and sales volume, what services they sell, their average per project sale, their marketing budget, their market size, their competition, how long they've been in business, if they have a good number of past satisfied clients, etc.

SEO is generally cost effective for medium and larger remodelers but its value for small remodelers depends on their service area and type of remodeling they do. Pay per click marketing is useful in certain situations, but not all.

Social media can be useful and cost effective, helps SEO efforts, and how well it works is tied less to a remodeler's size, marketing budget and location than SEO or PPC.

E-newsletters help maintain and extend a remodeler's relationship with past clients, helping generate greater repeat and referral business. With prospects, e-newsletters help build brand understanding and preference. They integrate well with remodeler blogs, social media, and online reviews. This helps remodelers get even more value from their e-newsletter investment.

Q: What is the biggest marketing challenge most remodelers face?

A: To understand the top challenge it's important to keep these facts in mind.

Nationally, about 47% of remodelers gross under $1 million in sales and only 20% gross over $3 million. Most have 10 or fewer employees. They typically have small or modest marketing budgets and little to no trained marketing staff.

Remodelers are constantly pitched by sales reps from of all types of marketing companies. Many make compelling, but often questionable, promises of success. They often show metrics that sound good but may not be a meaningful indication of success.

Also, the generations buying remodeling include boomers through millennials. Each generation has different online use patterns, makes buying decisions differently, and responds to marketing differently. On a modest budget it's not always possible to effectively segment and optimize marketing efforts for each generation.

So the biggest marketing challenge most remodelers face is understanding enough about marketing to be a knowledgeable "purchaser" of marketing services. This includes understanding things like building brand awareness, understanding and preference, how integrating online and traditional marketing can benefit them, determining who and what to believe, how to properly assess what is working, and how to evaluate if something else will achieve the same results more cost effectively. And remodelers have to do all this with small marketing budgets that demand using the best, most cost effective mix of marketing.

Thanks, David!

You may or may not be a residential remodeling contractor. But the lessons are clear:

1) Focusing on a particular niche and specializing is extremely powerful.

2) Online marketing can work well for a small business, especially if you apply skills and techniques to a particular niche.

The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.

Source: Mission Critical Marketing Best Practices for Residential Remodeling Contractors

The Fundamentals of Marketing Scoring and Grading

Business

Marketing

The Fundamentals of Marketing Scoring and Grading

By Sangram Vajre

Before the internet, the buyer and seller relationship was skewed. Buyers had to trust marketing messages. The internet became the great equalizer. Sellers had to become more transparent about their products than ever. The buying process has rapidly evolved in the last decade because of the internet and the evolution of web-based marketing technology (MarTech). There is so much information available for buyers.

Marketing automation comes into play as it gives you, the seller, insights into what your buyer is looking at. It levels the playing field. Marketing automation removes the manual process of trying to determine whether your accounts are ready to move to the next phase of the purchase decision. Using data from their activities, you know whether your accounts are ready to buy. You know this through scoring and grading.

Scoring based on activities

Marketing automation has a tool to gauge the level of engagement for each of your contacts. This is called giving the contact a score. Scoring is done by assigning points to each of your marketing activities. Each marketing activity is worth a certain amount of points. You set scores to see how interested your contact is in certain content. This tracks buyer behavior with your marketing activities. Examples of marketing activities to score include

Time viewing your site

Pages viewed

Email opens

Clicks to content

Content downloads (completing a form to download a whitepaper, ebook, or case study)

There's a scoring system in your marketing automation system. Your "smarketing" team should agree on how many points are associated with each marketing activity. With scoring, you can track levels of engagement for all the contacts and accounts in your CRM, because it is integrated with your marketing automation platform. This figure shows scoring rules.

Negative points are associated with some activities. This is called scoring degradation. Score degradation is the process of lowering someone's score to make sure it's correctly portraying whether the account is ready to move forward. If the contact isn't ready to buy, you can downgrade their score in your marketing automation system to give them a negative score. If they're inactive for a certain period of time, you can also reduce their score in the MA system so you are only nurturing the most active contacts in your target accounts.

Using a negative score helps to ensure these accounts don't get forwarded as sales qualified accounts (SQA). If, for example, your SDR has just completed an initial discovery score with a marketing qualified account (MQA), and the contact wasn't ready to move forward, the SDR can downgrade the contact's score to remove them from future marketing activities.

Combining scores for a single account

With traditional lead-based marketing, you would look at the score of a single contact to see whether he or she was ready to move forward in the purchase decision. In account-based marketing, you're recognizing that more than one contact is involved in the purchase, so you need to look at scores for all the contacts in your target account.

You take these individual contacts' scores and aggregate them into a comprehensive score. If you were selling to other business-to-business (B2B) marketers, you would look for scores in marketing job roles in the account. By adding up the scores for all the contacts in the marketing team, you can see engagement within the whole account.

The following figure shows the scores of multiple contacts in an account.

Grading based on best fit

Scoring and grading are easily confused. A score lets you know whether the contact is ready for sales but the grade is used to determine how well the contact fits within your ICP and persona criteria. Grading criteria include

Company size (employees and revenue)

Industry (outside your vertical)

Job title (role and responsibilities)

Technology used

Giving a contact the grade of A means they're a perfect fit. Giving them a grade of D or below means you won't want them.

You have a list of Tier A, B, or C accounts. While the Tier B or C accounts technically aren't a perfect fit with your ICP criteria, if the score is high and they're demonstrating interest in your product or service, you can still attempt to do business with them.

Set up grading rules for specific personas. You created personas to identify the qualities of your best-fit users. You can match your persona criteria to determine what would qualify as a contact within a Tier A account. These contacts automatically would be added to a drip email program when they come to your site.

If you're using an account-based marketing platform for targeted advertising to your contacts, you can draw these personas into a specific landing page. Set your rule from there to add them to the email nurture program.

You can set up these rules so your competition can't access your content. "Block anyone from ACME Corporation from downloading the whitepaper." After you identify these competing companies, you should create a list and give all the contacts in these companies a grade of an F, because you know they will never purchase from your company.

Source: The Fundamentals of Marketing Scoring and Grading

AWeber vs Mailchimp: The Great Email Marketing Debate

Email marketing is one of the most powerful tools in a digital marketer's toolbox. It can help generate new leads and eventually nurture them into customers.

According to HubSpot, email marketing has an ROI of 4300%. But there's serious work needed to realize the ROI from email marketing.

If you want email marketing to succeed, you need to send your emails to the right people at the right time and build an email list that is constantly engaged.

As a result, having a reliable email marketing service provider (ESP) is of paramount importance. AWeber and Mailchimp are two of the most popular and reliable email marketing tools on the market and in this article, we will compare these two ESPs to help you decide which tool is a better fit for your requirements.

We recently published a detailed review of AWeber on our blog. It's now time to compare AWeber to one of the heavyweights of email marketing, Mailchimp.

Both AWeber and Mailchimp have their strenghts and unique characteristics which makes them so popular with seasoned marketers and professional bloggers alike. Moreover, both companies are veterans in the email marketing industry and boast of a leadership team that is always willing to innovate and provide the best solutions to their growing base of customers.

AWeber was founded in 1998 by Tom Kulzer and is now the preferred email marketing service for over 120,000 businesses, bloggers, and entrepreneurs across the world.

Mailchimp was founded in 2001 by Ben Chestnut. The company started as a side project funded by various web development jobs. It was originally going to be called Chimpmail, but was later changed as the company discovered that they couldn't get the name. Mailchimp began as a paid email marketing service and a freemium option (Forever Free Plan) was added in 2009. They now send over a billion emails every day.

In this AWeber vs Mailchimp comparison article, we will be comparing these two email marketing services on the following parameters:

Pricing

Features

Email Templates

Analytics and Reporting

Customer Service

User Feedback and Reviews

Pricing

AWeber's pricing is list-based. It offers a free 30-day trial for lists of up to 500 subscribers. Once the trial is over, you can choose any of the following plans:

Up to 500 subscribers – $19/month

Up to 2,500 subscribers – $29/month

Up to 5,000 subscribers – $49/month

Up to 10,000 subscribers – $69/month

Up to 25,000 subscribers – $149/month

Over 25,000 subscribers – Contact AWeber for pricing

Check out our detailed review of AWeber here

The best part about AWeber's trial is that they unlock all the essential features of their product. This means you can start using features such as autoresponders, A/B split testing, blog broadcasts, etc. right away.

Sign for a free 30-day AWeber Trial here

Mailchimp has a slightly different pricing structure. Unlike AWeber, Mailchimp doesn't offer a trial. Instead it offers a free plan (called the Forever Free Plan).

If you're using Mailchimp's Forever Free plan, you can send up to 12,000 emails to 2,000 subscribers. This is where Mailchimp has a slight edge over AWeber as the free plan doesn't have an expiration date and you don't need to input your credit card details. As the name suggests, it's free forever. The catch, however, is that you won't be able to use some must-have features such as email automation and email delivery by time zone under the Forever Free plan. Moreover, one of the best features offered by Mailchimp called Send Time Optimization is a paid feature.

If we were to compare the two ESPs on pricing, Mailchimp wins this contest simply because of the Forever Free plan. It's absolutely awesome. If you're an email marketing novice and need an email platform that's easy to setup and doesn't cost a dime, go with Mailchimp.

Winner: Mailchimp

Features

Both ESPs are loaded with features. Both Mailchimp and AWeber offer essential features such as sign up forms, list segmentation, campaigns or broadcasts, etc. Having said that, both platforms have their pros and cons.

Autoresponders (or email automation) are easier to set up on AWeber. AWeber also allows you to send emails to multiple lists at the same time. With Mailchimp, you'd have to replicate the campaign if you intend to send the same email to multiple lists which can get a little frustrating.

Having said that, Mailchimp has a brilliant feature called send time optimization, where Mailchimp automatically sends your email at a time at which it is most likely to be opened. This functionality is sadly missing on AWeber.

Here's a comparison of the best features offered by both ESPs:

Autoresponders – Both Mailchimp and AWeber allow you to create a set of automated email campaigns. This can be particularly useful while sending a welcome message to new subscribers. Autoresponders are easier to setupAutoresponders are easier to setup and execute on AWeber. If you're on the Mailchimp Forever Free plan, you can't use their email automation feature.

Sign up forms – Though both ESPs have multiple sign up forms to choose from, Mailchimp has sign up forms that are more professionally designed and easier on the eye.

Free Stock Image Library – AWeber provides 6000+ free stock images which you can use in your email campaigns.

Send Time Optimization – This is a paid feature on Mailchimp and it's quite nifty. One of the biggest challenges for email marketers is to decide on the best time to send their emails. You can leave this task to Mailchimp as Send Time Optimization allows Mailchimp to automatically send your email at a time at which it is most likely to be opened.

Reporting – We'll cover this in more detail later, but it's safe to say AWeber has better tracking and reporting capabilities.

Integrations – Mailchimp offers more integrations than AWeber. You can connect your Mailchimp account with hundreds of web services such as WordPress, Salesforce, Zapier, etc.

Customer Support – No contest here. AWeber is better than Mailchimp when it comes to customer service. Mailchimp doesn't provide phone or live chat support. Furthermore, the email support is only provided if your question is not answered in their resources or FAQs section.

Affiliate Marketing – If you're using an ESP primarily for affiliate marketing, then you should go with AWeber. Mailchimp is not too friendly with users promoting affiliate links. While they do allow affiliate links in email campaigns, they may deactivate your account if you're caught promoting an affiliate brand which is blacklisted by Mailchimp.

Blog and Resources: AWeber has a much better blog with a wealth of information on email marketing. They also seem to take social media much more seriously than Mailchimp. They also have tons of useful YouTube videos and do weekly webinars which you should definitely attend to hone your email marketing skills.

Mobile App: Both AWeber and Mailchimp have iOS and Android apps which you can use to send campaigns, manage your lists, add new subscribers, and view reports.

Winner: AWeber

Email Templates Sample AWeber Email Template

Both AWeber and Mailchimp offer a wide variety of predesigned email templates, which are tailored for different businesses and websites – generic, real estate, blog, consulting, travel, etc. All the email templates are mobile-friendly and easily customizable to suit your needs.

AWeber offers substantially more email templates than Mailchimp: around 700+ compared to Mailchimp's 300+ free templates. But Mailchimp has the upper hand when it comes to email design. Their predesigned templates seem more professionally designed.

It is difficult to choose a winner here as both ESPs offer easy-to-use, responsive email templates. AWeber has the quantity and variety whereas Mailchimp has better predesigned templates. So it's fair to say this is a tie.

Winner: Tie

Analytics and Reporting

Email Analytics is vital to email marketing success. Tracking email metrics helps you refine and improve your entire marketing strategy.

Both AWeber and Mailchimp have excellent tracking and reporting capabilities which allow you to get a deeper understanding of your subscriber base.

Both ESPs allow you to track the following important email metrics:

Open rate and click rate

Number of unsubscribes

Total opens and clicks

Unique opens and clicks

URLs clicked

Social performance

Other data such as subscribers with most opens and clicks, e-commerce tracking, etc.

While the analytics on Mailchimp is easy to understand, the analytics and reporting on AWeber is just phenomenal. This is because AWeber gives you targeting options for specific people for reasons around the emails they get. For those who haven't opened or clicked, AWeber allows you to send a modified campaign specifically for them. For instance, if you have included a specific offer in your email and your analytics report shows there are certain people who opened your email, but didn't click on the offer link, you can send these people a separate email prompting them to click on the offer.

Winner: AWeber

Customer Support

Mailchimp's customer support leaves a lot to be desired. This is because the company doesn't provide telephone support, citing cost control as the reason. They don't offer live-chat support either. Having said that, the email support is pretty good and most of your questions are addressed in the resources and FAQs sections of the website.

AWeber's customer support system, on the other hand, is excellent. The team is super friendly, prompt, and helpful in resolving the issues. The support services include email, phone, and live chat support. They are also active on social media and usually respond to all questions within a few hours. It's a more social media savvy company than Mailchimp.

If we were to compare the two ESPs on customer support, there is really no contest here. AWeber is better than Mailchimp.

Winner: AWeber

User Feedback and Reviews

The user feedback for Mailchimp is mostly positive. Majority of the users like the following features:

Ease of use

Friendly interface

Fantastic email templates

Powerful segmentation and A/B testing

Super fast setup

Forever free plan

The complaints on G2Crowd are mostly related to migration issues and confusion regarding the plans. Despite a few complaints, Mailchimp scores a pretty good 4.3/5 out of 332 ratings.

The user feedback for AWeber is overwhelmingly positive. Most of the complaints on review sites such as BBB.org and G2Crowd are price-related. There are several genuine testimonials on AWeber website itself. Most users applaud the following features and qualities of AWeber:

Easy to use

Autoresponder feature

Wide variety of email templates

Excellent customer support

Other features such as list segmentation, advanced analytics and reporting, integrations, etc. are frequently mentioned and praised

AWeber scores slightly higher than Mailchimp on G2Crowd with a score of 4.5/5, but has fewer reviews (175) compared to Mailchimp.

Winner: Tie

Final Verdict

Both AWeber and Mailchimp have their strengths and weaknesses.

If you have to choose between the two, it'll come down to your requirement. If you're just starting out with email marketing and growing your email list from scratch, then Mailchimp's Forever Free plan is probably better suited to your needs. If you need email templates that are well designed and easy to setup, then you'll probably be happy with Mailchimp.

Having said that, there will come a time when the Forever Free plan will seem inadequate for your email marketing needs. And when it's time to upgrade, you may have to look at other alternatives. If you need advanced analytics, go with AWeber. If you value exceptional customer support, go with AWeber. And finally, if email automation is important for your business, go with AWeber.

Hope you liked this AWeber vs Mailchimp comparison article. Below are some resources from AWeber and Mailchimp which you can download for free.

Sign up for AWeber's 30-day Free Trial

Sign up for Mailchimp's Forever Free Plan

Resources You Can Download for Free

AWeber

Mailchimp

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Source: AWeber vs Mailchimp: The Great Email Marketing Debate

The Content Marketing Cycle: What You Need To Know

If you do a search on the web for "content marketing cycle" you'll likely get several definitions. But essentially, it's the entire cycle from start to finish involving content from its reason for existing to the results you get. Each part of this cycle gives you, as an entrepreneur, different pathways for creating a profitable business.

Research

Ideally, this should take place when you start your business and create a marketing plan. You need to understand your audience, who your customers are, what customers you want to attract, and how to create a useful and relevant content for that audience. This will take knowledge of how keywords work, and how search engines work to help drive traffic.

Many entrepreneurs start with creating audience personas for their customers based on the research. They use that information along with product knowledge to create a publication and marketing plan for their business. This plan will include titles of articles, plans for videos and more related to your business, depending on what type of content your client is searching for. A mixture is best.

Create

Once you have the information garnered through research and a plan of action, you may create the content yourself or outsource it. Once you have a good plan and a content calendar created, it's easy to outsource. You'll provide the writer or other creative persons, such as audio, video and graphic designers with the information and a deadline, and they will provide you the end product that you'll then use for your business

As an entrepreneur, consider outsourcing a lot of this, because you'll be able to take on more clients if you outsource the creative parts of the work. Otherwise, you'll need to ensure that you have enough time to create the amount of content you need.

Recommended for You Webcast, September 7th: 3 Ways to Speed Up Your Marketing Review and Approval Process

Optimize

It used to be that content optimization was all about keywords. Today, it's much more focused on ensuring that the content is created for a specific audience because you want to ensure that trust is built between you and your audience. That means that you'll want to have titles that include keywords but aren't clickbait. In other words, every headline you create should not trick the audience into clicking. Understating the intent of your audience helps.

In addition, you want all the content created to be well-written, using proper grammar, spelling, formatting and so forth. You want it to be easily digestible so that the reader can stay focused and understand the information you're trying to relay while establishing authority for your business. Also ensure that you create a call to action for every piece of content whether that's read more, sign up now, buy now or something else entirely. Finally, today a highly optimized piece of content also includes important visual elements such as images that help explain your story.

Notable Stat: Kissmetrics found that content with relevant images gets 94 percent more views.

Publish

Once the content is created, you'll need to have a plan for publishing it. Most of the content that you create (or have created) should be published on your online real-estate, such as your website, blog or social media platforms. But, some content will also be published in other places such as Amazon Kindle, YouTube, Slideshare.net or LinkedIn and as guest blog posts on other people's sites.

You'll want to establish a good mixture with the most important pieces always being published first on your blog or website. Outside of the blog you'll need informational pages on your website, newsworthy pieces, shareable social media content, video content, infographics, eBooks, and more that all start with being promoted on your website or blog.

Promote

In some ways, this part of the content marketing cycle should be all in bold because it's one of, if not the, most important aspect of your marketing plan. This is what is going to get you the most bangs for your buck. Every single piece of content that is ever created and published must be promoted. The days of just publishing and sitting back to wait for traffic are over.

The way in which you promote content starts with creating content that is specifically made for your audience, is optimized with appropriate keywords, images, and titles, but then is also made available for them to read by promoting across all online channels via social media marketing. If a blog post is published, it should then be shared on every social network with a blurb and an image that inspires your audience to click through to consume the content.

Measure

Your job, or the job of your content and social media manager, is to keep tabs on the metrics. You'll use various products to do this, but it usually starts with Google Analytics and native analytics in your social networks. Each time you publish anything, check at least quarterly for the results. You'll start seeing a pattern after time with content that is getting better results than the others. Aggressively promote the content that gets higher results.

For example, if you discover that your audience engages more with video, start doing more videos. This is the perfect time to understand the 80/20 rule, which states that 20 percent of the work you do gets 80 percent of the results. When you identify that 20 percent that's getting the results, you will want to do more of that and less of the other things to improve your statistics even more.

Reuse/ Repurpose / Repeat

All this content creation can become overwhelming at times. But the more you learn about content marketing and social media marketing, the more you'll realize that you can reuse and repurpose content across all channels. For example, if you have a blog post that is getting a lot of attention why not repurpose it into a YouTube video or vice versa?

If you work this hard to create the right type of content, and market it, you'll soon become a thought leader in your niche and receive huge returns for your business. Not only will you feel good about what you're doing, but your target audience will come to depend on you for your knowledge and skills.

Author: Karen Repoli

Karen Repoli, is a successful entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience in office management, internet marketing, and business systems. She holds a Bachelor of Science Degree from the University of NC, Greensboro and is VACertified. Karen launched her company, HIT Virtual Assistants in 2007. As a professional team including... View full profile ›

Source: The Content Marketing Cycle: What You Need To Know

topseos.com Unveils SEO Brand as the Best Web Design Agency for the Month of September 2016

topseos.com Unveils SEO Brand as the Best Web Design Agency for the Month of September 2016

SOURCE: topseos.com

September 03, 2016 03:00 ET

NAPLES, FL--(Marketwired - September 03, 2016) - The independent authority on internet marketing, topseos.com, has named SEO Brand the best web design company for September 2016. SEO Brand was selected due to their impressive performance in the meticulous evaluation process. Thousands of services are considered while only the 100 top are showcased in the rankings.

These companies are put through the topseos.com genuine evaluation process in order to identify which companies offer the best overall solution. Companies are selected based on their performance in a benchmarking and analysis of their core services. This process consists of the use of a set of evaluation areas, interacting with client references, and performing various market and industry research projects.

The ratings are revisited each month based on the assumption that the online marketing industry changes over time. Agencies are evaluated based on the latest trends and developments most important to buyers. Often times the research team at topseos.com spends time discussing with clients of competing agencies for a more thorough look.

Customers of search engine marketing solutions often turn to topseos.com when looking for effective web design companies. The independent research team has named SEO Brand as the top service based on the results of the investigation process. topseos.com strongly believes in SEO Brand's continued dedication towards excellence.

About topseos.com

topseos.com is an online provider of independent reviews and ratings. The recommendations of the top internet marketing firms are released monthly to assist businesses in connecting with web design firms which feature a history of effective solutions. Thousands of internet marketing firms are put to the test while only the absolute best firms are featured in the recommendations.

Those interested in applying for the rankings can visit:

http://www.topseos.com/apply-for-rankings-research/

For a better experience using this site, please upgrade to a modern web browser.

Source: topseos.com Unveils SEO Brand as the Best Web Design Agency for the Month of September 2016

Content Marketing & SEO for Local Businesses

This article is part of an SEO series from WooRank. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.

According to the Content Marketing Institute, content marketing is the "strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience – and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action." While it's not exactly synonymous with SEO, the two are closely related, and thanks to Panda, you need to produce quality content if you want to rank highly in search results.

For small and medium businesses, it may seem like a laborious task to take on with big brands in search engine results. Fortunately, there's a place where you can not only compete, but actually get a leg up on the giants: local search results.

Since the Pigeon update, Google has been giving preference to local businesses when a searcher's keyword indicates local intent. In this piece we'll go over how to create great content that will help your site rank well in local search results and will also help boost positive brand awareness and sales.

Local Keyword Research Find Keywords to Target

Just like traditional SEO, local content marketing starts with local keyword research. Come up with a list of seed keywords as a jumping-off point. Think of these as different topics that your website covers, categories of products or services that you offer or short descriptions of what sort of business you own. For example, a business that sells above ground swimming pools based in the Boston area could come up with topics like:

Above ground swimming pools for sale

Above ground swimming pool installation

Above ground swimming pool maintenance

Above ground swimming pool cleaning

Brainstorm a few ideas for each topic. This is where you'll start to localize your keywords. Add your geographical area at the end of each keyword. Keep your customer base in mind here: how would they search for a company that does what you do? For our pool company's pool cleaning topic, your local keywords might look like:

Pool vacuum boston

Above ground pool vacuum ma

Pool filters in boston

Automatic pool vacuum boston

Robotic pool vacuum eastern ma

Not sure exactly what comprises your target location? Check your analytics location report and, depending on the size of your business, filter by state, city or metro. Your main sources of traffic are the areas where your demand is greatest.

There are lots of tools you can use to help with your keyword research. Both Google Adwords and Bing Ads each have Keyword Planner tools. Enter your list of keyword ideas or, if you exported a list from one of the free tools like Ubersuggest, upload it as a .csv. If you still want to find more keywords to target, search for new keywords. Otherwise choose to get search volume and data trends.

Use this tool to weed out any keywords that don't get enough monthly searches to be worth targeting. Avoid targeting overly competitive keywords as well; they might get a lot of searches but you'll spend too much time trying to rank for them. Make sure you check local traffic as well. A keyword that gets a lot of traffic globally might not be that popular where you live. There's no real ideal number when it comes to search volume. It really depends on the nature of your industry.

Competitor Research

Do a quick bit of competitor research to get the lay of the land, starting with your most valuable keywords. When doing a Google search, use AdWord's Ad Preview and Diagnosis tool. Search history and geography could be skewing the search results you see, so this tool gives you a view of the true first page of search results.

Go through the first few results and note how they use the keyword. What are their title tags and meta descriptions? Look at section and category names as well as blog topics and titles. These will likely contain the keywords they are trying to rank for.

Creating Local Content

Writing local guides is a great way to generate content for your pages that associates your site with both the three most important factors in local content marketing:

Keywords: This is pretty obvious. Guides, top 10 lists, how-tos and other types of content allow you to use your keyword several times naturally throughout the page.

Niche: Using synonyms and latent semantic keywords will help search engines learn that your site is related to not just a keyword, like pool vacuums boston, but the entire topic: Above ground swimming pool cleaning supplies.

Locale: You want search engines to learn to associate you with your specific area so they know that your pages are relevant to anyone searching for swimming pool supplies in the Boston area.

A good place to start looking for content ideas is your customers' questions. What are the most common things they ask before, during and after a sale? Check local forum discussions and question-and-answer boards online for the most frequently asked questions. Searchers are more likely to click through to your site, and convert, if you're able to address their questions and concerns from the very start.

The type of articles you write will depend on your niche, but there are a few basic formats you can mold to fit your needs:

Local 'Best of' Lists

If you've ever searched for a local product or business, you probably used a keyword a lot like "what is the best (company) in (my city)?" If you haven't, your customers are. These can be lists of people who do the same thing as you, or offer products/services that are tangentially related to yours. For our swimming pool company these could be businesses that sell and install swimming pools, but they could also be lists of companies that make and/or sell hot tubs, diving boards, ladders, pool toys, covers, cleaning supplies or swimwear.

This may sound counterintuitive, but don't shy away from listing your competitors. Reviews are incredibly important for local: 88% of consumers read reviews to determine the quality of a business. You can encourage your customers to leave reviews on a site like Yelp, which helps your off page SEO, but leaves control in the hands of outside parties.

Use this as an opportunity to differentiate yourself from the competition by explaining services or product features your provide that others don't. This establishes your brand as knowledgeable while, at the same time, guiding customers through the conversion funnel. Making the decision process easier will result in more sales and better chance at attracting return customers.

This sort of content is great linkbait: people are eager to link back to sites that compliment them. Plus, as a sneaky bonus, you could even start ranking for your competitors' branded keywords.

Local Guide

This one really depends on what sort of business you own, but is very important for anyone who sells a product that needs any sort of permit or other legal approval. This provides you with a great local ranking signal, since each city, county and state could have different regulations for your products. In our pool example, every customer has to follow laws governing where they are allowed to put their pool, or even if they are allowed to have one at all. So our guy in Boston needs to create a guide to zoning laws for jurisdictions he services.

Write the guide in clear, informal language that a lay person can understand, and include links and contact information to the appropriate government offices (studies have shown that Google likes outbound links, and links to government and educational domains are best). Use the locale and words like "laws", "ordinances" and "rules" in the title. As mentioned above, informing and guiding customers through the entire buying process is instrumental in converting them.

Keep this content up to date. When laws change, update your content to reap the SEO benefits of evergreen content.

Seasonal Guides

Every region experiences seasons differently and people are always looking for ways to make the most of each season. So even if your business isn't seasonal, your content should be. The obvious ideas are to tailor your content to major holidays such as Thanksgiving, Christmas or Memorial Day. These are great ways to highlight any seasonal deals you may offer. Tie seasonality into your evergreen content — if you have a restaurant, write a piece about cooking for holiday parties while a boat dealership could publish a guide to winterizing your boat. Keep track of recent events and pop culture news to mine for relevant references. This likely won't end up as evergreen content but that's ok, not everything can.

Make your seasonal content local by tying it into local or regional events. For the hypothetical pool company in Boston, they could leverage events like the Boston Polar Bear Plunge in winter and the Sharkfest Swim in late summer. Consider publishing a local calendar of events.

Local business owners, and their businesses, tend to be active in their local communities and support local causes, charities and associations. Aside from the obvious community benefit, small business philanthropy improves employee engagement and morale in the business. Your blog is a great place to promote the charitable efforts of your business and employees.

This content double dips: it benefits a good cause, charity, etc, and also helps raise positive brand awareness by associating your business with a positive local story. It can also help expand your audience by capturing searches for a trending topic. You can also create content promoting local business or trade associations like the chamber of commerce.

Local Landing Pages

If your business services multiple cities but only has one storefront, it can be difficult to rank in local search results for the cities where you don't have a physical presence. The solution to this, once you've determined which areas you want to target, is to create a dedicated landing page for each one and optimize them for your highest volume keywords. Do a little extra keyword research to find out if people mostly search for your keywords at a city, county or state level. It won't do you much good to optimize at a county or state level if everyone searches at the city level.

Next, optimize your pages to appear in local search results:

Include your business name, location (or NAP information) and keyword in your title tag and metadata. If our pool guy just includes his business name in title tags, it will be hard for search engines to figure out that the landing pages are meant for people searching for pool services in Waltham, Cambridge, Newton or Quincy. The ideal title tag would include location and business information: <title>Mass Bay Pool | Above Ground Swimming Pools | Waltham</title>.

Use the city and state in the landing page URL, body text and alternative text for images when appropriate. If you find yourself really forcing it, stop and rethink your approach. Unnatural keyword stuffing will make you look like spam and do more harm than good.

Don't use the same content for each landing page, you'll end up losing ranking due to duplicate content. The local content we discussed earlier is great for local landing pages. Here are some other types to consider:

Customer reviews/testimonials from the city you're targeting. Use Schema review markup to boost your chance of appearing in Google's rich snippets.

Produce videos specific to the city. Publish a transcript of the video, including the page's keywords and city, since search engines can't crawl video.

Showcase any projects you've done or customers you've helped in each city. A realtor, for example, could write about helping a local home buyer, including the keyword and city several times in the page text and as alt text in the images.

Profile local sales and support staff for each area. For example, if you have different maintenance workers for each city, introduce them to your customers by giving their background, experience and if they have any sort of specialization or professional certifications.

If you have separate NAP information for each city, include it on the appropriate local landing page. Use the LocalBusiness Schema markup to tell search engines what the information on your page means. This will also make your page more likely to appear in Google's Knowledge Graph.

Beyond SEO

Content marketing is great for local SEO, but you can use it for your other marketing channels as well. Your local 'best of' lists, how-tos and local guides make for great updates on social media. Share your latest blog posts on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to expand your reach without having to pay for a campaign.

Good local content marketing will not only make your site rank well in search results, but will also help convert visitors into sales no matter how they get onto your site. Keeping your local audience informed about what's going on with your company and the local community will keep your audience informed and engaged with your business.

Source: Content Marketing & SEO for Local Businesses

Top 10 Youth Marketing Blogs to Follow in 2016

Millennials and Gen Z are the first generations to be constantly connected, and their lifestyle is driven by staying on top of the latest social trends. Companies that want to make a meaningful connection with the younger generations need to have a comprehensive understanding of what's in and what's not with young consumers. An easy way to do this is to read blogs dedicated to the mindset of today's youth.

However, that does not mean finding just any blog written by a teenager. Companies should seek out blogs written by young people, but that nevertheless contain credible, well­-researched content. Here are the top 10 publications dedicated to youthful content that everybody who deals with youth audiences should look into: ​

1. YouthLogix

YouthLogix, the vibrant new online publication founded by 17 ­year ­old entrepreneurs Deep Patel and Connor Blakley, explores and dissects the mind of young consumers. The publication is written by young, highly qualified staff members. YouthLogix reports on almost every trend, strategy, and development of the next generation of consumers. Luminaries such as Jay Abraham, Daymond John, Adam Toren, Brian Solis and Cameron Herold have praised YouthLogix, bolstering the publication's credibility.

2. ​YPulse

YPulse is a well­ established publication, having begun its operation in 2004. Run by president Dan Coates and COO Tracy Tomasso, YPulse prides itself on presenting high­quality content with verifiable data that accredits their material. Their intricate survey network produces genuine responses and explanations. While much of the content is free, YPulse operates on a "subscribe for content" strategy, so a subscription is necessary to view the best content.

3. ​Youth Marketing Connection

Youth Marketing Connection is a youth marketing and content agency that connects companies with student influencers to better represent a brand. YMC is not strictly a content provider, though their blog offers insights on how to connect with young consumers. YMC primarily focuses on building relationships between influencers and businesses to convey a company's brand in the most effective way. With its highly valued campus relationships, YMC has a large pool of potential influencer partners.

4. ​Voxburner

Voxburner is a classic content provider with deep insights into youth marketing. Its mission is to maintain awareness for young consumers. Much of the staff is comprised of students and young thinkers, and the site is rather loosely structured. It has a more laidback tone than those mentioned above. Voxburner offers reports on statistical behaviors of youth consumers, which businesses can purchase to study the behaviors of today's youth.

5. ​Millennial Marketing

Millennial Marketing, the publication ­powered by Futurecast, is another upbeat content provider. They experiment with format quite a bit, and have set up several web series to give readers insight into the mindset of young consumers. Millennial Marketing sets itself apart with a vast amount of downloadable content. The articles and blog posts are insightful, but the reports they offer may be the most valuable to businesses.

6. ​Immersive Youth Marketing

Immersive Youth Marketing participates in almost every facet of marketing to connect businesses with the next generation. What sets the company apart is Youthvine, its proprietary online community. Youthvine is a forum driven by young administrators. It is coordinated to allow owners to communicate with next­generation buyers. IYM's agency establishes the relationships, but Youthvine creates a unique experience to engage the new age.

7. ​Total Youth Research

Total Youth Research, a publication run by veteran marketer Graham Brown, takes a classroom approach to educating its viewers. Brown has an instructional setup, offering purchasable ebooks, e­courses and a specialized "Academy." Though TYR hosts blog content, the most unique aspect of the site is the learning opportunities it offers. TYR has one of the most informative platforms on youth marketing, and if you want access to experienced professionals in the business, it should be first on your list.

8. ​The Influential Marketing Group

The Influential Marketing Group is a brand consultancy agency run by Rohit Bhargava, an experienced brand manager. IMG is Bhargava's personal website, specializing in concierge marketing, which is more practical than regular consulting. It produces exceptional amounts of content. Bhargava's site conveys a professional image dedicated to the understanding of consumer behavior. IMG provides viewers with the opportunity to invite Bhargava to speak at events. Alternatively, he can coach branches on brand management and trend research.

9. ​Millennial Branding

Millennial Branding specializes in providing relevant research and insights for marketing to Millennials. Founded and operated by Dan Schawbel, Millennial Marketing focuses most of its efforts on consulting and informing businesses rather than publishing content. Millennial Marketing separates itself from the pack with sponsored research and case studies designed to aid readers in understanding their interactions with Millennial consumers.

10. ​YouthBeat

YouthBeat focuses its attention on Generation Z. The company explores the minds of young teens, but also has a section called YouthBeatJr that is devoted to understanding the mindset of today's toddlers. Like YPulse, Youthbeat requires a subscription for access to the best content. It may be worth the expense, however, as the content is some of the most genuine you will find, with information based on surveys from over 5,000 young consumers.

What youth marketing blogs do you follow?

The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.

Source: Top 10 Youth Marketing Blogs to Follow in 2016