Small Business SEO

In my last post I talked about some of the pros and cons of using free local classified ads like Craigslist to market your business. Today, I’ll talk about how to write a Craigslist ad that gets good results.

This is important for more than just conversions. Writing a really good ad will help customers see you as legitimate even though you are choosing to use Craigslist to market your business.

Write a Strong Headline

Use a strong headline that communicates the benefits of clicking on your ad. For example:

Get Your House Sparkling Clean, Today!

or:

Let Me Finish Your Honey Do List.

For a cleaning contractor and a handyman respectively.

Resist the urge to use a zillion exclamation points, to shout in all caps, or to surround your headline with hearts and stars. It just makes you look desperate and untrustworthy.

Use Photographs

People who don’t put photos on Craigslist look like they’re hiding something. Photos increase conversions by building trust.

Don’t upload your logo. Your logo doesn’t really tell your customers anything.

Instead, show a before and after picture of a carpet that you’ve cleaned. Or put up a picture of yourself, fixing a sink.

You’re trying to create a visual of the benefit that you’re trying to communicate to your customers.

Use Prices

People on Craigslist are usually on some kind of a budget. It’s okay to list a price range for your services, or to use an average price, explaining that it’s subject to an estimate and that your averages are based on a certain square footage or whatever.

Just give people an idea of what to expect. Don’t be coy.

As a bonus, people won’t call you if they can’t afford you.

Add Your Website

You might as well get SEO benefits from being on Craigslist. And people might want to know more about you before calling you.

So add your website. Besides, it makes you look far more professional.

Tell the Whole Story

Don’t make people wait to find out what they need to do. Your ad should state what you do, why you do it, why it’s unique, and how it solves your target customer’s problem.

Then you need to add all relevant contact information such as your phone number and your address.

Be careful about adding your email address. You don’t need a lot of spam, and if people want to email it’s probably better to let truly interested parties grab that information from your website.

Keep Your Expectations Low

If your Craigslist ad generates a sale or two every month then awesome! If not, you haven’t really lost anything.

You can come back and post a new version of the ad once a month. If people are searching for your type of business they’ll find it, so in my opinion there’s no need for you to post multiple times unless you have multiple products to sell (like specific cars). It’s just annoying to come across the same ad over and over again.

Have you used Craigslist? Did it work? If so, what did you do to make it work? Let me know in the comments section below!

Several people on various small business forums that I’ve spent some time on have asked whether or not free local classified ads like Craigslist are helpful for lead generation.

Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren’t. Locally-focused businesses that sell real products and services can indeed pick up some good leads to this medium.

So I thought I’d take a moment to discuss some of the pros and cons of using Craigslist.

The Pros of Craigslist

Free local classified ads have an unbeatable ROI. And unlike other “free” internet advertising methods, they really don’t take too much time since you’ll look like a spammer if you post them too often.

Craigslist ads are searchable too. That means that you could appear at the top of a highly targeted local search even if you aren’t at the top of a chronological list of category results.

Craigslist ranks very well in Google. Individual ads do sometimes come up in the search results. So Craigslist can give you a little SEO boost.

And people who are searching ads on Craigslist are usually there to buy and not to window shop or do research. That means you’re much more likely to make a sale.

These pros are true for just about any free local classified ads site that you can think of.

The Cons of Craigslist

Craigslist nevertheless carries quite a few noteworthy pitfalls.

First and foremost, the site’s got a scuzzy reputation. This reputation can impact you if you aren’t mindful of the way that you present yourself.

Second, people often jump on Craigslist because they are looking for some kind of deal. This means you’re likely to run into a lot of tire kickers, lowballers, and bargain hunters.

In some cases, Craigslist is not a good match for your target market or customers. If you sell interior design services to high-end clients you may as well market yourself elsewhere – your customers just aren’t looking for you here.

It’s also very easy for trolls and competitors to bock and flag your ads. And a lot of spammers lurk around the site, looking for email addresses.

Finally, it’s easy and free, which means that there’s a real danger that you’ll want to rest on your laurels instead of pursuing stronger marketing methods.

These cons are true of just about any free local classifieds ads site that you can think of.

Who Does Craigslist Work For?

Do you rent property? Craigslist is an awesome place for you as it’s often people’s first stop when they’re looking for a new place to live.

Craigslist is also a good place to sell cars and furniture. It’s very popular for these things.

If you’re a local contractor, it all depends. Handymen and cleaning services do well.

Plumbers, electricians, painters, and roofers do okay, too.

Higher-end specialty custom contractors or products should look elsewhere.

In my next post I’ll talk about how to write a successful Craigslist ad so that you can get great results if you decide that this is a good venue to add to your overall marketing mix.

Bad reviews can fee like a crushing blow. It’s easy to feel defensive, panicked, and angry when you get one.

Breathe. I’m going to teach you how to respond to bad reviews in a way that lets you come out of the situation smelling like roses.

Note that nearly every review site lets you do two important things. First, they let you flag fraudulent reviews, such as the nasty fake reviews that a jealous competitor might leave. Second, they let you respond to bad reviews.

You should also be aware that a few bad reviews can actually help you make more sales. Why? Because customers trust all the 5 star reviews a lot more when there are a couple of disgruntled customers out there.

A real business is imperfect and is expected to make mistakes. So a bad review or two lets the customer know that they’re getting a real picture of what your business is like.

Now that you know that bad reviews can be a positive, you just have to know what to say in order to turn them into an even stronger selling point.

First, thank the customer for giving you feedback. Good or bad, the customer took time out of his or her day to alert you to a problem rather than simply going to someone else.

Second, apologize that the customer had a bad experience with you. Avoid the urge to get defensive about it. Every business has a bad day – maybe the customer caught you on one of yours.

Then, you can explain your position and/or propose a solution. For example:

“We’ve addressed this slow service complaint by hiring additional wait staff. Give us a call. We invite you to stop and see the difference this has made!”

This shows that you are interested in improving your business and that you care whether or not your customers have a good experience.

That specific customer may or may not return. But every other customer who visits your page will know that you run the type of small business that actually cares about customers.

This is so rare that this demonstration alone will make you look great to anyone who is thinking about working with your business.

Remember, nobody expects you to be perfect. They just expect you to deliver the best service you possibly can and to keep improving all the time.

When you improve, something else happens too. You’ll probably generate even more positive reviews, which means that a bad review will eventually get pushed lower and lower in the review results. That’s all the more reason not to treat bad reviews like they’re the end of the world.

Every business struggles to generate enough leads. And many businesses are operating on a tight budget, which means plenty of people are hoping to find free lead generation methods which can help them get more customers.

Fortunately, free lead generation is pretty easy if you’re already devoted to good internet marketing. Note that internet marketing itself isn’t free, but once you’re doing it correctly you can get some of the “freebies” I’m going to talk about below.

1. Acquire Social Proof

80% of all customers are jumping online to find businesses, and they’re sifting through a lot of competition. Positive reviews help you stand out from the crowd, generating phone calls from qualified leads.

In the old days, the only way to get a referral would have been through a network of people who know each other. Effective, but slow.

Now, you can get word-of-mouth advertising and referrals from people who just live in the same city, people who have probably never even met one another.

It takes some small effort on your part. You need to send out a simple e-mail to customers after they’re done doing business with you. Of course, you’ll need a way to get the customer’s email address before they leave your establishment.

Doing that will be different for every business. Some will need to do it at the start of the selling process.

This is also the best way to generate reviews that don’t disappear. Read more about review filters if you’d like to know why some of your reviews evaporate, and what to do about it.

2. Build Referral Partnerships

In a previous post I talked about the fact that social media makes it easy to create a very large referral network very quickly. This post was aimed at contractors, but the method could work for just about anybody.

You just have to think about every business that caters to the same niche that you cater to but which does not compete with you.

For example, if you are a cardiologist your patient may well need a dietician, a weight loss center, a pharmacist, and a personal trainer. Your patient may also need other doctors who serve different problems.

And someone who goes to the weight loss center may well need a cardiologist. None of you compete, but you all serve the same customer. Therefore you can work together to send one another leads.

3. Run Offline Events

People love doing things and they love learning things. Just about every kind of business can benefit from running some sort of class, workshop, event, or seminar.

If you decide to do something like this make sure you take full advantage of an event’s potential. They can be amazing avenues for online link building. Events play well on social media, too.

When people attend events you can usually capture their e-mail address and opt-in on paper forms. You can also schedule appointments or sell your goods right on the spot.

In this case, all of your leads are going to be right in front of you, so don’t waste the opportunity.

Stay Focused!

Lead generation takes focused, consistent effort. If you give that effort, the calls will start rolling and keep rolling in.

One of the reasons that small business owners are drawn to internet marketing is a perception that internet marketing offers one of the last free advertising methods. Certainly, internet marketing is one of the most cost-effective advertising methods, but it might be a good idea to rethink whether or not it’s actually “free.”

After all, because you are in business you already know that there’s “no such thing as a free lunch.” You also know that time is money.

You know there’s such a thing as an opportunity cost, too. For example, you know that you’re likely to lose customers if you’re internet marketing efforts aren’t as professional as they could be.

What Goes Into Internet Marketing?

You start with a core website and a blog. Your website forms the hub of a wheel which drives all of your other marketing methods.

To make that wheel turn correctly, there are an awful lot of things you have to do.

• You need to register a domain name and choose a web host.
• You need to put together a unique, branded web design that looks eye-catching and professional.
• You need to maintain the back end of the website on a regular basis so that it delivers a good customer experience.
• You need to make sure that the website is set up in a way that supports your business.
• You need to offer blog updates at least twice weekly – and once you start you can’t stop since an abandoned blog looks highly unprofessional.
• You need to learn how to use keywords effectively and you need to conduct successful keyword research.
• You need a dedicated back link building campaign.
• You need periodic SEO updates and adjustments, an ongoing effort to keep track of Google’s persistent changes.
• You need to create and maintain your Google Places account.
• You need to launch a dedicated campaign to clean and correct citations.
• You need to maintain an e-mail list so you’re not losing the leads that you capture online.
• You need to participate with social media channels on a weekly basis to grow your web presence and create social signals contributing to effective SEO.
• You need to launch a good PPC campaign in the early stages of your internet marketing efforts to get some traffic flowing to your site as you build on slower, more organic methods.

As you can see, this is a long list. Quite a bit of time and energy is going to go into all of these efforts.

For example, building back links requires hours of focused work. You need to find places to comment on blogs and places to guest post.

That means taking the time to locate those opportunities, to read the content and respond to it, and to pitch guest post ideas.

How about on-site SEO? There’s a lot that goes into that, including stuff the customer never sees.

Just check out this infographic from Search Engine Journal. It shows the 200 ranking factors that Google uses to analyze a website. People who get to page 1 pay attention to all or nearly all of those factors on some level or another.

It’s true that there is no out of pocket cost for most of these efforts. Posting to your blog is “free.” Twitter is “free.”

However, if you really want to reap the benefits of online marketing you will have to devote nearly 40 hours a week to these efforts, especially since these things are probably not your area of expertise.

So it’s time to ask yourself. What’s your time worth?

I Don’t Have Time for Marketing!

Most business owners will tell you that the just don’t have the time to make internet marketing happen, even if they aren’t fully aware of how much effort internet marketing demands. So they don’t even get around to evaluating their time costs.

They just say, “I don’t have time.” It’s a pretty common complaint.

It’s also a very understandable complaint. You’re a business owner. You need time to actually run your business.

But as a thought exercise, ask yourself if your time is worth more than $6.25 per hour.

Let’s say good internet marketing takes 160 hours per week. And you’re trying to DIY this entire list of tasks because you want to save money.

The low-end monthly cost for SEO services is around $1000. Some charge more, way more, but we’ve got $1000/monthly packages here at TVS Internet Marketing so that’s what I’m going to go with.

That means when you pass on ongoing SEO services you’re valuing your own time at just $6.25 per hour. And that’s just crazy. Because $6.25 is less than minimum wage.

Depending on your business model you might make $100 an hour or more serving your clients.

No wonder business owners say they “don’t have time” for internet marketing! You instinctively know that you could be getting paid a lot more for your time than that.

Did you go into business to value your time at $6.25 an hour?

Evaluating Ad Budgets

Let’s do another thought experiment. I’ve met tons of people who think $1000 per month is too much but think nothing of spending ad money on other methods like radio advertising (at $3000 to $6000 per month), Yellow Pages advertising (at $2000 per month), and billboards (at $600 per month).

So now it’s a question of what you’re getting for this kind of advertising budget.

Of course, it’s nearly impossible to calculate the impact of radio ads or billboards. So if you’re getting calls from these sources that’s great.

No, let’s just pick on outdated and expensive Yellow Pages ads instead. At $2000 per month these ads cost twice what you’d pay to get some qualified SEO help, but…

The Yellow Pages are dead.

But you don’t have to take my word for it. You can just ask Forbes Magazine. Forbes believes the internet is a better buy.

“Multiple studies confirm that consumers report using the Internet first (80% of the time) when they need a new product or service, and the printed Yellow Pages only second or third (about 50% of the time). And even if the consumer does reach for the printed Yellow Pages, your ad still has to stand out (size, graphics, color) which ups the expense of being in the book. The convenience of “set it and forget it” is now trumped by the more labor intensive but productive SEM [Search Engine Marketing] option.”

So there you have it. You could dump your Yellow Pages ad, get professional SEO help, save money and still get more leads.

And if you’re worried about losing the senior segment because you get out of the Yellow Pages, don’t be. The Slide Share presentation below says that Seniors are using the Internet just fine, and en masse.

And since customers do their searching when they want to buy something you can imagine that the number of leads you get from internet marketing is eventually going to trump the leads you get from interruptions like radio ads and billboards, that reach customers whenever they reach them, regardless of the customer’s needs or state of mind at the time.

The Bottom Line

Internet marketing isn’t free, and it isn’t easy. People who have told you that it’s either one or the other have been doing you a disservice.

However, it is a good use of your marketing dollar so long as you take the time or spend the money to make sure the job’s done right.