Something I bet you didn’t know about the term “Page Rank”

I learned something new and amusing today about the SEO term called PR or Page Rank that you can use to win bar bets with. (no guarantees of course)  I always knew it was different than the term SERP rank which stands for Search Engine Results Page rank which means are you #1, #2 or #3 … in the search results.  Most people call this Page Rank.  However Page Rank has always meant the relative authority/importance of a particular page or website based on a Google algorithm that weighs things like number and importance of other websites that link to the page or domain and other factors.  What I learned today that was new and amusing was that Page Rank was named after Larry Page who cofounded Google and who came up with the concept of the Page Rank approach.

Continuum Introduces E-newsletter Remodeling Marketing Programs Enhanced for SEO

October 1, 2011  Great Falls, VA – Continuum Marketing Group president David Alpert announced that the company’s EasyPro Silver and above series of remodeler marketing e-newsletter programs have been enhanced to include SEO friendly e-newsletter options which can be used to support new or existing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) programs.  These services are available at no extra charge for remodeling contractors already using the Continuum EasyPro Silver series remodeler marketing e-newsletter program and Continuum’s SEO services.  Alpert said that for companies using Continuum’s remodeler marketing e-newsletters but are doing their SEO in-house or using another SEO service provider, the e-newsletter enhancement is available for a slight additional charge.

Continuum Marketing Group LLC is a full service marketing communications firm that specializes in providing remodeling contractors across the United States a wide range of traditional and digital/online marketing services including websites, search engine optimization, branding, sales literature, print and e-newsletters, direct mail, jobsite marketing and more.

Contact:  David L. Alpert
info@continuum-mg.com
703-759-0106
www.continuum-mg.com

What to Do about a Bad Online Consumer Rating

Remodeler Headache #52
Unless your company is near-perfect and lucky, one day you will have a dissatisfied client who will let the world know of their dissatisfaction with your remodeling company online via a bad or very poor rating. While in some ways this is worse than having someone bad mouth your company to their friends and coworkers, it is better than that in several respects:

1.   Once you know the homeowner is dissatisfied, you have the opportunity to contact them and see if there is something you can do to improve their satisfaction. Perhaps you didn’t even know they were unhappy and can easily remedy the problem. Once you have fixed the problem, you can ask them if they would consider adjusting their rating.

2.  Several good online consumer ratings will generally neutralize one bad online rating. Most people who see online ratings expect to see, even for the best companies, a small percentage of bad online ratings. In fact if you have only good ratings it can make your ratings look like they have been artificially influenced. So if you are lucky enough to have 10 online ratings with four and five stars, and one rating with one star or two stars, it’s not a big deal.

People will just assume that the bad review came from a malcontent. However, they may read the reason why the person was unhappy in the review and be concerned about that reason. In that case, you just want to make sure that you have a good explanation ready for why the problem occurred and how you tried to resolve the matter should any future prospect inquire.

If you have any questions about this post or other remodeler or contractor marketing questions, please contact us.

ESS: Educate, Sensitize, and Sell

Is ESS the New Model for Remodeler Marketing?
Even though more and more homeowners don’t like to be “sold to,” your job is to get homeowners to buy your remodeling services. What’s a remodeling company marketing pro supposed to do?

We suggest you remember “ESS,” “Educate, Sensitize, and Sell.” Homeowners today want help making intelligent decisions about what they buy and from whom. So the best way to sell is to help homeowners make the right decisions. You can educate them in all sorts of ways about remodeling, selecting a remodeler, design trends, green remodeling, and a whole host of other topics homeowners would be grateful to receive information about.

But beyond educating, you probably also want to help sensitize homeowners to things they should be concerned about so that they can weed out those remodelers who are less likely to provide them with a quality project and an enjoyable experience.

This does not mean bad-mouthing others in your industry. It does mean acquainting homeowners to the dangers and downsides of hiring unlicensed and uninsured remodelers, perhaps remodelers with lower qualifications, or remodelers that do not have a well-oiled team working for them, as well as a whole lot of other things that a homeowner should know in order to make a wise decision when they select a remodeler.

If you have any questions about this post or other remodeler or contractor marketing questions, please contact us.

Remodeler Marketing 101: Site Maps

Most remodelers nowadays know what a site map is when it comes to their website and remodeler marketing. It is a page that has hypertext links to all the pages on your remodeling company website. But did you know you really need two and possibly three types of site maps to do the most good?

The first site map, the one people use, needs to be simple, straightforward, and well-organized. The second site map, sometimes called an XML site map, is for search engines and search engine optimization. This site map tells the search engines what pages you think are most important, least important, and how often the search engines should check for updates on a given page. The last type of site map is of value, for search engine optimization purposes, if you have videos on your website. There is a special format for video site maps that tells the search engines what they need to properly index videos on your website. The fact that you have videos on your website also helps your site in search engine optimization by improving its ranking… At least as long as videos are not on all websites.

If you have any questions about this or other remodeler or contractor marketing questions contact us.

Online Consumer Ratings Update

Up until recently, Google Places would bring in consumer ratings from other search engines. So if someone looked you up and saw you had five reviews on Google Places, it could be that two of them came from a website like Yelp. This made it less important that homeowners provide you with good reviews on any particular consumer ratings website.

Now it is important for you to have a strategy for online consumer ratings relative to where people post their rating.
Since consumer ratings, both quantity and quality, help determine your ranking on rating websites such as Google Places, you may want to direct your satisfied clients to provide you a review on Google Places. Or, you may wish not to recommend where people review you, unless they have no idea where to provide a consumer rating. The theory behind not directing people to a specific ratings site is that your clients will go to the sites where they would normally go to seek other consumer ratings for other businesses. In some parts of the country, Google Places might be the dominant ratings destination, whereas in others it might be Yelp or Angie’s List or some other rating site.

Our suggestion is to simply ask people where they would likely rate you, and if they do not know, then you can suggest a source to them. Once you know you have good ratings at a particular site, you can suggest on your remodeling company website that people go to that source to find reviews about you.

If you have any questions about this post or other remodeler or contractor marketing questions contact us.

PPC versus SEO or PPC and SEO For Remodeler Marketing

PPC (Pay per Click) marketing and SEO marketing are often seen as competing marketing tactics. While it is true that some remodeling companies select one or the other, in an ideal remodeler marketing world, you would use both PPC and SEO and use their strengths in a complementary fashion. (In most cases this is also the most cost-effective strategy, although not cheap.)

The benefits of PPC for remodeler marketing are that it is highly localize-able, controllable, quick to roll out, and you only pay for clicks. However, you still have to do keyword research, write ads, create landing pages that are similar to what you need for SEO remodeler marketing, tweak and modify the program over time, and of course you could end up paying for a lot of clicks that generate no leads. Therefore, when doing PPC, it is extremely important that you also do website optimization to make sure that your landing pages and website make the best use of every click you pay for.

The benefits of SEO for remodeling company marketing is that it is long-term, you don’t have to pay for clicks (especially ones that don’t turn into sales), and it can be less expensive for similar or better results. Furthermore, remodeler SEO efforts build upon themselves so that the longer you use SEO, the better your results. SEO also lasts longer than a pay per click program which is either on or off. Perhaps most importantly, SEO results show up in organic searches, where most people prefer to click, rather than sponsored links and ads.

In that ideal world of remodeler marketing, one would kick-start an online marketing program with a PPC marketing program while at the same time developing and executing an SEO marketing program. If done properly, you will be able to determine which keywords yield high organic rankings via SEO and therefore for which you can stop using, and paying for, PPC. As the SEO program for your remodeling firm continues, you can build your rankings for many of your keywords with SEO and stop paying for those keywords in your PPC program.

Eventually, you may find that there are some important keywords that, no matter what you try, you cannot feasibly rank high in the organic listings using SEO. For those words, you can continue a PPC program and therefore get the benefits of each – SEO and PPC – most cost-effectively when marketing for your remodeling firm.

If you have any questions about this post or other remodeler or contractor marketing questions, please contact us.

Are Consumer Ratings Important?

Does a bear…? You Bet! And, consumer ratings are extremely important in today’s remodeler marketing environment because homeowners who research remodelers on the web look for consumer ratings that other homeowners have given a remodeler they are considering. In today’s market, a four or five star consumer rating carries the same kind of weight as a good reference or referral. Consumer ratings are your online reputation.

So where are homeowners rating remodelers? Angie’s List, Google Places, Yelp, and a whole lot of other online local business directory and search engine places. If a homeowner is looking up a remodeler, let’s say on Google, and they find seven remodelers, three of which have four and five star ratings, but your listing has no consumer ratings, it might be that the homeowner will consider calling the other remodelers, or at least go to their websites first.

It is accepted wisdom that the people most likely to rate a business online are those who are happiest or the most dissatisfied. An unhappy experience with your firm can lead to a bad online review. While only a percentage of people who are unhappy will write an online review, you can expect it to be a poor one. I expect having a poor experience with a remodeler is more likely to result in a bad rating than a good or satisfactory experience will result in a positive review. That is unless you encourage happy customers to write positive reviews about their experience with you on specific sites where consumers rate businesses.

For the record, it is illegal to incentivize a homeowner to write a review about you unless they disclose that the review was a compensated review. However, if you have a satisfied homeowner as a client, you can explain to them how important reviews are to your business and suggest a few places they may share their positive experience with others. While not a lawyer, I am not aware of any federal regulation that would make it illegal or unethical to provide a homeowner who gave you a positive review with a token gift of your appreciation after they placed the review, as long as they didn’t know they would get anything before they provided the review. In short, there can be no quid pro quo.

If you have any questions about this post or other remodeler or contractor marketing questions, please contact us.

The Pros and Cons of Jobsite Marketing For Remodelers

Without a doubt, jobsite marketing is one of the most cost-effective remodeler marketing approaches. At one end, jobsite marketing involves a well-designed and visible jobsite sign with your company name, logo, website, phone number, and perhaps a tagline and a “take-one” box with brochures. At the other end, jobsite marketing includes a jobsite sign as above plus trucks, vans, and trailers with company branding and information on them, branded dumpsters, postcard and/or letter mailings to surrounding homes, handouts or door hangers, or gifts and perhaps even an end-of-project party for your homeowners so they can show off their newly remodeled home to their friends and neighbors.
Jobsite marketing can also include a clean, safe jobsite, being a good neighbor to the project site’s adjacent homes, and generally ‘wowing’ your client with service and quality.

So what are the cons of jobsite marketing for remodelers?

The biggest problem with jobsite marketing for remodelers is your lack of control over where the jobsite is and how many jobsites you have going at one time. You might have a great project in an area that may not have many homes close enough to realize there is a remodeling job going on, or the home may be in an area that has poor visibility, like the end of the pipe stem or cul-de-sac. Or maybe it’s in an area where the other homes are not likely prospects for you. The other control problem with remodeler jobsite marketing, and you are all familiar with this by now, is that when the market slows, your cost-efficient jobsite marketing approach has fewer and fewer opportunities for use. Few jobsites means less marketing and less marketing means fewer jobsites.

There are also neighborhoods and buildings (if you work on condos) that do not allow the use of jobsite signs or the parking of commercial vehicles where they can be easily seen. However, you can still do direct mail and sometimes personal canvassing in these situations.

What you should take away from this post, is that you should have a good, multi-faceted jobsite marketing program that cost-effectively generates business when you can use it, but you should not rely solely on jobsite marketing because when you need it most you can use it the least.

If you have any questions about this post or other remodeler or contractor marketing questions, please contact us.