3 Tips To Spring Forward In 2015

As we get into the spring season, it is important to make sure that your digital marketing plans are set up to help you convert more business.  Below are three important tips for any small business to be successful here in 2015.  Spring time in Philadelphia is a wonderful time for business to engage with their clients and to ramp up their marketing efforts.

TIP #1 – Mobile or Responsive Design Website:

•     Google announced that on April 21st, that their ranking algorithm is going to factor mobile design.   This means that on mobile searches, if your website is not mobile friendly or responsive design, it will get punished.  Most small to medium sized businesses know that they need a mobile site but may not have moved to update their existing design.  Below is an example of one of my clients that we moved to responsive design.  You can see the before and after in the screen shot.

• From the outside in, there might not look to be much of a change, but look at how the site responds to mobile visits.  You can see below the before and after of mobile visits. For those that visited the old site on their mobile phone, they were having a terrible user experience.  Now that they have updated the site, it is seen better by users and Google will not penalize the site in mobile rankings.

Tip #2 – Localized Mobile Marketing

• Once you have a site that is updated for mobile users, the next step is to make sure that you are getting traffic to it.  It is important to understand that the search engines want small to medium sized local businesses here in Philadelphia to invest in mobile marketing.  The site is not going to show up for every term and ads on the search engines will enable your site to target local users.
• Below is an example of a mobile search ad.  Ad placement is bid on and the highest bidder wins.  Bids on mobile searches are much more aggressive due to the limited space.  There are only two spots so make sure to allocate higher maximum bids on mobile searches.  If you are not sure how to do this, higher someone that knows.

TIP #3 – Track Return On Mobile Investment

• Now that you’ve spent the money to update the site and allocated resources to the search engines, it is vital that you monitor how well you are converting these marketing dollars into revenue.  
• Tracking conversions is something that websites, like the one above, can help you with.  When we develop sites, at ReachLocal, we incorporate a tracking software that shows us the calls that are generated from the site.  We can track it down to how the person got to the site.  If someone searches on Google, we can see if that person clicked on an ad and called the business.  We can also see if the lead came from a social site, a directory site or from the organic position.
• Below is a sample of what the tracking looks like.  As the business user monitors the leads, they are able to push those leads into contact, to a lead and finally into a new clients.  As they move them through the decision making process we can see how much revenue is generated.

To learn more about digital and mobile marketing, feel free to call Eric at 610-664-4595 or email him at elaylon@reachlocal.com