Why Social Media Is Essential To Your Business

May 9, 2022 By SEO Houston Pros Leave a Comment

5 Reasons To Invest In Social Media Marketing

It has become widely known that social media can have a tremendously positive effect on any business. Here are some of the best reasons to leverage social media to ensure business growth.

1. A Great Return On Investment

What business owner could ignore an opportunity to make their lives more rewarding – and delivers an excellent return on investment? Social media ticks those boxes. In fact, it needn’t place your business under any sort of financial strain at all. It’s free, from the moment you establish your social media account to the time that you make your first post there simply is no cost – that is true for all the top social media sites. Of course, you can choose to place paid advertising to promote your business brand or your products and services.

2. It’s Extremely Engaging

It’s difficult to think of a more effective way to communicate with your current and potential customers. It provides a business with an opportunity to showcase their brand and just how they differentiate themselves from the competition. It creates what marketers call ‘talk value’. In other words, those who visit your social media channels share the information you post with others, including your services and products before you know it your messages have gone viral.

3. It Raises Brand Awareness

Research has shown that customers trust brands that have a social media presence. In fact, they trust those brands around 90% more than those that are not active on social media. That is the power of social media – and why businesses are leveraging their reach and power to promote services and products.

4. It Supercharges Website Traffic

It may take some time – but social media drives traffic to your company website. It takes work, focus, and analysis but when you get it right you may see a spike of up to 90% in the number of visitors your site receives.

5. Lead Generation

Social Media leverages vanity to make visitors look good. They want to share how unique they are. Try a quiz that encourages social sharing, then post the results on your Facebook page or on your Twitter feed. Then watch the sharing begin and your messages reach a multitude of potential and current customers.

Call or contact SEO Houston Pros today for the help you need with your social media marketing. Visit our blog for more tricks and tips for Houston SEO!

What Is A Public Blog Network?

April 8, 2019 By SEO Houston Pros Leave a Comment

Comprehensive Guide To Private Blog Networks

In this comprehensive guide, we will be taking a very close look at private blog networks.

Beginning with the absolute basics, we will guide you through the process of how to set up, use, and manage a private blog network in 2019

With thousands of words of step-by-step training, even advanced and intermediate SEO can learn something new from our guide.

Let’s get started.

What is a Private Blog Network?

A Private Blog Network (PBN) refers to a network of authoritative, established websites that are used for building backlinks to your money website(s) to rank higher within the major search engines like Google.

A money website is s site you are intending on ranking. It is the one that will earn money for you. These sites are also sometimes referred to as the client website.

PBSNS is short for a PBN Site, which refers to a website that is part of a private blog network.

There is one very important detail to note, which is each of the individual PBN websites is not linked in any way to each other. The concept behind a private blog network is these websites appear to be unrelated to one another, so that links appear to be natural ones, instead of somebody linking to their own websites from other websites that they own.

Is this against Google’s guidelines?

Yes, absolutely.

The only time that Google will tell you exactly what you need to do to rank is when they advise you to use Google AdWords. However, for ranking in the organic results, Google is the worst possible source for information.

If I were them I would do the same thing. Why tell people how to rank for free, when instead you can earn over $40 billion a year from your ad revenues?

Does this work?

If it did not work, then I am sure that Google would not be trying to target PBNs and trying to scare people away from using this strategy.

Yes, it is basically just a scare tactic, but there are people still continuing to build networks and are ranking just as easily as they ever have.

Why does this work?

The top ranking factor is links.

When Matt Cutts was asked about backlink relevancy being excluded from the algorithm, he replied that although there is lots of spam and some noise, it turns out that backlinks are still a very big win when it comes to the quality of the organic search results.

What makes the strategy so effective is that the websites that make up a PBN are considered to be authoritative by Google. You are not getting links from a spammy, untrustworthy site, or a brand new one. Instead, you are getting backlinks from a popular website that is loved by Google’s algorithm.

Here is an illustrative example to help you understand how it works.

In 2011 there was an initiative that was launched to help clean up Chicago’s streets. They set up a website under the name of cleanchicagostreets.com.

This initiative got a lot of publicity. It was featured on local news websites and local government websites.

Enough money and publicity were raised to follow through with the plan. They did so within one year.

Now that they no longer need the website, it has become an unnecessary cost to renew their domain and hosting. So they just let it expire.

The domain has links from local news websites and local government websites. And because the site has links from highly trustworthy websites, Google assumes this is a trustworthy website as well.

Fast forward to the present, and this domain is found by an SEO. The person can look up the site’s metrics to see how authoritative and trustworthy it is perceived to be, and the buy it from a domain registrar and use it as part of their PBN.

That is basically how domains are located.

Every day, 30,000 to 50,000 domains expire, with many of them having good metrics to use as a PBN site.

Introducing Metrics

There are four major metrics that can be used to measure domains. All of them can be used at the same time, however often 1 or 2 is sufficient.

They are:

Citation Flow (CF) by Majestic.com
Trust Flow (TF) by Majestic.com
Page Authority (PA) by Moz.com
Domain Authority (DA) by Moz.com

I don’t have enough technical knowledge to know exactly how they all work. However, here are the basics:

CF measures the power of a website’s links
TF measure the authority and trustworthiness of a website’s links.
PA measures how authoritative one page on a site is, based on its links. It is influenced as well by the website’s DA.
DA measures the authority of the entire domain, based on its links.

The following is a quick guide on what you should look for:

CF – 15+
TF – 13+
DA – 18+

I have purchased weaker domains than this many times, but it is the general guideline that I try to follow. You don’t have to worry about following this guide exactly.

The metrics represent the domain’s power that you are reviewing. However, there are a couple of more things that you should check before you buy a domain.

Referring Domains – This metric shows how many websites are linking to the domain that you are researching. Anything over 30 will be good enough.

Backlinks – This is how many links that a website has. If a website links to another site 2 times, that is 3 backlinks but just 1 referring domain. So be sure to check them before you buy a domain.

Anchor Text – The text that is used by people when linking to their website. See if a brand name is contained (which is normal), but avoid sites that heavily target keywords or have large brand names frequently associated with selling counterfeit goods, and some other obvious things such as adult-themed or viagra.

Metrics Checking Tool I recommend:

Ahrefs – Biggest and more reliable live backlinks index.

The only important metrics in 2019

Is Domain Authority BS? Is Trust Flow BS? Those comments have been trending within our community for quite some tie now, but who can you believe?

The real answer is:

What Google thinks is all that matters. Not Ahrefs, Mox, Majestic or anybody else.

From the time that Google announced that they didn’t have any plans to do more updates to PageRank, there hasn’t been any way of knowing precisely how domain quality is measured by Google.

This is where the metrics above come into play. They are not ideal, but they are third-party algorithms that measure domain quality, that are based on the tool’s theories of what Google considers to be important.

At times they provide great analysis, while at other times they are inaccurate.

Manually checking the backlinks is the most important thing you need to do. If the backlinks come from mainly directory listings, thousands of different blog comments, Chinese anchor text, or an automated backlink building tool, then that is not a good domain.

To take things further, the following is break down of metric checking:

Do the metrics meet your requirements?
(If no) Are there any links coming from super authority domains. Those may be worth buying anyway sometimes. I.e. BBC.co.uk backlinks
(If yes) Are the site’s backlinks low quality or spammy?
(If no) Is it indicated by the Wayback Machine that the domain was used for spam?

Using the Wayback Machine enables you to see precisely how the website looked in the past so that you can verify whether it has been used for spam.

Where To Locate Domains

Knowing what you should look for in a domain is just one part of the game. You also need to know where you can find them.

Before we discuss that, it is important for you to understand the kinds of domains that can be found.

Expiring Vs Expired Domains

Expired Domain – This is a domain that has been fully dropped and can be registered at any registrar at the standard registration cost for a domain.
Expiring Domain – This is a domain that has reached its expiration date but the registrar has held onto for selling or auctioning off. Those domains retain their age. So, for example, if the domain was registered 5 years ago by its previous owners, then it is still considered to be a domain that has been registered for 5 years.

There isn’t any conclusive data on which kind of domain does better. There are some individuals who think that more power is provided by expiring domains. However, many of them are biased due to the fact that they sell expiring domains.

The only thing that I can tell you for sure is that both kinds of work. However, you are a lot more likely to find an expiring domain that has high metrics, than you are an expired one. However, you will also have to pay for that privilege.

In terms of finding domains, there are several different strategies that can be used;
Locate a broker – Easy
Scraping – Not viable any longer
Auctions – Easy and Time-Consuming
Backordering – Advance and Time-Consuming

1. Find a Broker

The following are several broker websites that you can purchase domains from, either in bulk or 1 at a time.

Note that I haven’t used all of the brokers myself, but I’ve at least heard some good things about them from others.

TBSolutions
HighPADomains
PureQualityDomains

Lion Zeal Market Place – join this 4,000+ person FB group for purchasing and selling SEO-related items

2. Use Auction Websites

Most people used to purchase domains from auctions before scraping became popular. They are expiring domains that keep their age since the registrar is selling the domain off because the owner did not renew it.

Usually, you can find domains that are more powerful at auctions compared to scraping since the dropped (expired) domains are picked up quickly by the competition – if they are not bought already during the auction stages. The drawback to auction is you have to pay extra in order to get first dibs.

The following are some auction sites that you can check out:

NameCheap Auctions – Has thousands of domains available in its marketplace
GoDaddy Auctions – In the past was THE place for purchasing PBN domains
NameJet – Good potential for finding high-quality domains

3. Backordering

The last strategy for buying domains is the most advanced one. However, for the cost, it is the best domains that you can buy.

A back ordering company is a service that you pay to grab a domain for you as soon as its registration is dropped.

We discussed this early when we said that whenever a domain expires it actually does not expire. The registrar frequently keeps it, sometimes it is sold or auctioned, and usually isn’t dropped for about 2 months.

Scraping tools look for really old websites and try to purchase domains that are missed by individuals who are back ordering. However, the advent of selling and scraping domains as a type of business, and with the industry buying millions of dollars in domains each year, it is really hard to scrape high-quality domains these days.

However, with backorder, you can ask for domains that are expired but not yet dropped by using a backorder service. They check repeated to see if a domain may be registered yet. When it can be, they will try registering it for you. That is referred to as drop-catching.

How successful you are will depend on your competition ultimately. If everybody is attempting to get the domain, you might miss out. Also, some of these services are of high quality than others.

In order to increase your odds, it is possible to use multiple services to backorder, depending on how much you want a certain domain.

If somebody else has back ordered a domain using the same service, and this service catches it, then it will go into auction between the other person and you – and that can get expensive.
The following are some of the top back ordering services you can use:

Pheenix
NameJet
SnapNames
DropCatch

Many of the services above will give you a pending delete list, which is a list of domains about to drop that can be back ordered.

The following are some links that can help you:

SnapNames
NameJet
Dynadot
ExpiredDomains

This strategy is for advanced users and is definitely not simple. Also, you will need to have some tools to check the metrics of the domains in the above list to check their quality. However, that is the way you should do if you want to buy the best-expired domains.

Important Things To Be Aware Of When Buying Domains

The first word of PBN is Private.

You cannot hide from Google, and you will need them to crawl your websites in order to see the links and then pass the power on. However, you do need to ensure that there are no associated between your websites. They need to appear to be independently owned.

Whenever you are purchasing domains, that means you should mix up your registration dates and domain registrars. Don’t purchase from the same one all of the time. And don’t have your information and name in Whois on all of your domains.

You can try out the following domain registrars:

GoDaddy (beware of expensive renewal fees)
Dynadot (they show your name even when you buy whois protection)
Name
Internet.bs
NameCheap

How To Find Hosting For Your Domains

Once you have a domain(s) in your possession, hosting will need to be set up so that your websites can go live.

In order to avoid Google (or anybody else) knowing that you own all of the websites, they each need to be placed on different hosting accounts.

If you host them all on the same server, then it will be obvious that they are associated with one another.

The need for having separate hosting providers is what fueled the popularity of using SEO hosting services.

However, the problem that “SEO hosts” have is most of them come with footprints that show all of them are the same provider.

The best thing that you can do is hide them all in plain sight.

The way to do that is to use popular hosting services that real websites use.

The following are some examples:

Incapsula
CloudFlare
Amazon Web Services (technical)
DigitalOcean (technical)
HawkHost
GreenGeeks
HostGator
BlueHost
ASmallOrange
Premium Shared Hosts

When compared to cheap shared hosts or SEO hosts, most of them are expensive, but it is worth it to reduce the risk of losing your entire PBN network.

Fortunately, there is a less expensive option that is available.

My friend Kevin has purchased reseller accounts from all of the leading shared hosting companies and will host all of your PBN websites on them at a much lower rate (starting at just $1.82/month per website).

Learn more about the services offered by Kevin here

There are costs associated with getting all of this setup, and for beginners can be scary. However, the overall ROI to having top rankings for multiple websites can justify the costs easily.

Later in this guide, I will be covering clustering, which is an advanced strategy. That will enable you to host multiple PBN websites on the same hosting account without any risk. However, you can only do this if it is allowed by your hosting plan. So be sure to purchase packages that allow MySQL databases and multiple domains.

For now, just realize that the safest method is to just host 1 website on each host, and to always use high-quality hosts.

Call us or contact us today for your free consultation. Visit our blog for more related articles on how to execute the best SEO in Houston!

Google Securing Search For Ad Clicks

August 14, 2017 By SEO Houston Pros Leave a Comment

Recent Changes To Google Search

Google announced last week that they are moving to secure search on paid ad clicks and that all searches were being switched to encrypted searches. AdWords advertisers until recently were provided with complete access to keyword data, either through Google itself or via a third party tool that uses the API for the data. In the future, you can expect that even paid search keyword data is going to be blocked and you will see “Not Provided” instead.

What Do These Changes Mean?

What this means is that keyword data will no longer be passed on to website owners. The change eliminates a website’s ability to track its users based on keyword searches. This makes it harder for organic searcher marketing professionals to have the ability to which keywords are driving traffic to websites. That is why it is essential to have a reputable Houston SEO company to work with to adjust to these important new changes. Specifically, what this will mean is that the search query that is typed in by a user before they click on now will get passed through using a Google redirect over to the destination URL without the data being passed on to Google Analytics or any other software except for Google AdWords.

Why Is Google Doing This?

According to Google Adwords’ Product Management Director Paul Feng, this change is mainly due to security.

Feng said in an announcement that they worked hard for a long to keep searches secure on Google. Since 2011 SSL encryption has been provided for signed-in searches and that has been rolled out to searches made in the Chrome browser from the Omnibox. Feng added that they were extending their efforts for keeping search secure by removing the query from the ad click refer the originates from SSL searches at Google.com.

Advertisers will still have access to a lot of useful data for optimizing and improving their landing pages and campaigns. For example, detailed information can be accessed in the AdWords search term report along with the Search Queries report in Google Webmaster Tools.

The aim of this move is to homogenize search query referrer data from organic clicks and ad clicks. Last year when search terms in organic searches were encrypted by Google, it leads to claims of the hypocrisy of advertisers continuing to get access to the terms while others did now. Now that there will be across the board secure search, Google is effectively closing those claims of hypocrisy when it comes to paid and organic search terms.

How Are Users Affected?

Advertisers still will have access to paid search query data through utilizing the search terms report inside of the Google AdWords dashboard. Those advertisers who don’t utilize third party management tools might not notice any difference either, other than maybe needed to have access to AdWords tags.

Google is effectively removing the referral keyword string in order to prevent keywords from being displayed in website logs and providing secure search. All data, however, will continue being stored in the AdWords dashboard and advertisers will still have access to it.

Call or contact SEO Houston Pros today for further information.

PPC Is Getting A New Wardrobe in 2017

July 10, 2017 By SEO Houston Pros Leave a Comment

The Most Significant Changes in PPC for 2017

From changes in targeting to the latest products available, following are the need-to-know changes in PPC this year from your expert SEO company in Houston.

2016 was the year that brought mobile advertising to a new level when it surpassed the searches completed from desktops and increased search spend by $6 Billion. Since we know that mobile will be even more important this year, let’s take a closer look at the most significant news, trends, and launches seen from Google AdWords and Bing Ads. We’ll begin with this key: Machine Learning.

Machine Learning

Frederick Vallaeys, the former Google technician and founder of Optimyzer mentioned in his column, Adwords 201 is all about dealing with an artificial intelligence. Today machine learning is behind every significant revolution in search marketing.

One good example would be the earlier announcements for smart display campaigns from Google. These specialized campaigns depend on the capacity for machine learning to automate each feature of the campaign.

In March 2017, there was another important development on the machine learning frontier. Google has announced that it will be expanding the meaning of “close variants” for exact matches. In the future, word order will be ignored and functions words in exact matches can be added or ignored as necessity demands.

Here is a short story about how this industry will be such a great place to be right now. This all happened on a Friday before the SMX West was launched. I had the pleasure of hosting a last-minute conference session with fellow moderators Matt Van Wagner and Brad Geddes. The previous night we were wondering if we would spend the session talking amongst ourselves, but at 7:55 on the following morning the conference hall filled and we were the center of a lively discussion filled with important questions and tips, you can hear parts of the conference in this podcast. Sometime after the conference, I learned that an important project manager from Google had also arrived to hear about feedback. The feedback showed that over 100 people had risen early to talk shop and cross-cultivate many ideas a true testament to the nature of this important industry.

In May, there was an important update made for the AD Rank thresholds that works to determine the context of a query, for example, if this relates to a recent news article or a specific product.

Conversion Tracking & Attribution

Another important event in the first half of the year was the advent of AdWords Converted Clicks and the initial presentation of Google Attribution. This was the biggest product launch mentioned at Google Marketing Next. Search marketers have had some experience with Google attribution data in the Analytics and Adwords, but the latest introduction pulls in more data from across different channels and makes this essential data available for bespoke bidding strategies.

Another important addition was that of the Maximize Conversions tools that were added to the suite of automated strategies sometime near the end of May. If you regularly use the offline conversions tools you can schedule these Adwords imports today.

These new releases and tools have a host of different advantages to lend. Google can now track and provide reports on visits made to store that come in from a large selection of YouTube campaigns.

Google launched another important pilot and dubbed it “Ads Added by AdWords”. Over 2000 accounts were invited to participate in the campaign that adds ads which are tested in each different ad group.

The green outline featured in the Google ad label became an official symbol at the end of February. Those interested can see the entire history of the Google ad labeling at his exclusive trip down memory lane.

Then in March, expanded text ads can begin receiving support through Dynamic Search Ad very own page feeds. This means that headlines can now be generated in a dynamic way, and the extra characters are all available to the advertisers in a unique type of description.

Not long back Google decided to test a second description line for text ads. So far it’s only a limited test. Price extensions are available on all devices. You’ll find those extensions in carousels that are swipeable on mobile. Google is in experimental mode with that format and experiments include the extensions found in a carousel.

There’ve been a number of announcements by Google concerning call ads. Headlines for the call only ads where the default and the extensions are set at the account level. These are the kind of issues that a quality local SEO Houston service can help out with.

Ads with AMP are ramping up and Google is testing AMP enabled landing pages. Mr. Vallaeys recently wrote a column expressing the value of using AMP landing pages. That column was entitled ‘The Best Kept Adwords Secret: AMP and your landing pages.’ An e-commerce company has decided to develop a full AMP experience for their audiences on mobile search. They made the decision to do so after testing the landing pages orf mobile using AMP. You can find where I profiled about that test case.

In mid-May Google open things up so that when someone buys from PLA’s they can do so faster. In addition to that, they also added extensions for automated calling and those additions are rolling out to more and more advertisers. For those advertisers that don’t have call extension set up, Google actually pulls their phone numbers into the ads. These actions came after Google had announced that they would automatically display any local phone numbers instead of using a central number.

Audiences

From this year forward targeting specific audiences will be a major action. During the first half of 2017 Market audiences for search and shopping became available in AdWords. Bing ads followed up by allowing marketers to exclude list and their retargeting campaigns and is testing custom audiences.

Shopping

Bing ads can now query reports for products. It’s also added promotions for shopping in the US and now allows merchants to show special offers in any product Ads they have. Anyone who is not able to do so can fill out a form and apply. It’s now possible to find shopping ads on the Display Network And Google is experimenting with home design and fashion sites to show shopping on display.

Google made the choice to include all advertisers in that test program. Any advertiser who wants can opt out but it’s not possible to set up any type of separate shopping campaign because the volume is still low. Google shopping was also the main reason for the record fines applied against Google by the EU for being in breach of antitrust laws. It’s my opinion that the ruling against Google is outrageous. If you’re interested you can read more at Crealytics.

UI Changes

It is now finally possible to view a company’s historical quality score information inside of Adwords. You’ll also find that the interface for bidding inside the UI will show suggestions for bids and a variety of page positions. Adwords Next is rolling out, and recently a million advertisers gained access to the new interface. It is scheduled to be released to everyone before the end of the year.

Bing ads now have more device targeting. This allows advertisers to create mobile-only campaigns. All advertisers on the Bing Network now have access to the new ads editor for Mac. When you need help with these changes you can contact your local SEO Houston expert to get the help you need.

Class Is Now In Session: Content Management for SEO

July 10, 2017 By SEO Houston Pros Leave a Comment

Manage Your Content Using These 4 Enhancements

Building Your Brand Using A Blog

Anyone who has a business in Houston Texas is looking for that edge to set them apart from the competition. If you have found yourself trying out every strategy you can find and feel that you’re just spending good money after bad without getting the promised results, then you might consider getting a Houston SEO consultant to help you create a working plan. It may appear that managing content is a small piece of the puzzle but using a blog for your company is a simple but powerful way to enhance results. We will explain how important content is when it comes to SEO or your businesses online exposure.

How Content Management Works

In the recent past, it wasn’t especially difficult to build your brand and market it. It was simply a matter of having great products and services and a professional commercial that would catch viewers attention along with enough budget to schedule air time. Whenever your target market would watch TV they would see your commercial and a percentage of them would respond to it. But technology has changed and along with it the way in which people engage and consume information has also changed.

Invasive marketing such as the commercial that would interrupt the TV show worked fine until recently. But now when consumers are asked if they were given a choice, they say they don’t like invasive marketing. They want more control over when and what they watch. But of course, you will still need to get your message in front of as many people as possible. That’s how and why you need to have a company blog that promotes your brand while giving the viewers the type of content they want.

The Benefits Of A Company Blog

One of the benefits of a company blog is the ability to start conversations with customers and those who might become customers. It’s one of the best chances your company will have to build rapport between you and your clients. The blog is available for viewing by your target audience around the clock so even when it’s past normal business hours you can be engaging with your audience.

Your articles should be entertaining when it’s appropriate and they should always be useful and interesting and in most cases, those articles shouldn’t try to sell anything. You can use the blog as an opportunity to establish yourself as an expert and allow the audience to see your special knowledge and skills in your industry. It’s also a great place to give related insights on various areas of interest.

You will want to be consistent with the delivery of your content. Here you will not be selling, only connecting with your audience. They will feel a connection to you when they see that you’re giving them value. Then, when they’re in need of what your business offers, they will think of you first when they’re ready to buy.

Anytime you introduce new staff, use that opportunity to show your values and cultural interest along with community awareness and any charitable activities you’re involved in. Allow your audience to meet your team and see them in action. Let people know why you do what it is that you do. When people trust and believe in you, they will remain a loyal customer for life.

If you need help with exposure consider getting SEO Houston Pros to help you gain likes, shares and client referrals. People enjoy sharing the things they find valuable and interesting. Anytime someone finds your post to be particularly useful or entertaining or if they find it highly interesting they will gladly share it with their family and friends. They will actually help you to market your business because they like your content. Using a professional consultant in Houston can help you understand how to tweak your content to get the results you’re looking for.

Build Relationships

Although you’ve likely heard this before it’s worth repeating that people buy from people they like. A company blog is an ideal opportunity to make and build relationships with customers, clients, and those who could become a customer. The effective use of content management gives a company the opportunity to engage with their audience in a way that they never could through other venues.

One of the major keys to successful content management is consistently posting content that is of high quality and that engages the audience in an interesting and entertaining way. SEO Houston Pros can help you with putting together the type of quality content management services that you need to produce blog articles that are compelling. Simply contact us today to start getting the help you need to generate content that can connect with your audience from your company blog. Feel free to call with any questions that may have gone unanswered here.

Let Our Team Handle Your Online Marketing On Every Outlet

July 5, 2017 By SEO Houston Pros Leave a Comment

Marketing Automation Is Thriving And Growing But Often Misunderstood

Many people have the misconception in 2017 that marketing automation is declining when in fact, it’s a growing trend for businesses and will continue to be so going forward. The biggest issue with marketing concepts is the misunderstandings related to automation and how to use it effectively. If you have been using marketing automation or you are thinking about using it, you want to be aware of the ways in which it is often misunderstood. This is where a Search Engine Optimization Company Houston can help.

1. Only Marketers Use Marketing Automation

The fact is that marketing automation gets its best results when sales and marketing are used together as a tool. List building along with email marketing and nurturing those leads account for only half of what’s possible. The results that can come from the sales department using these tools to analyze prospective customers along with sending them messages that are specifically personalized to their behavior and with designing sales campaigns that are based on the information gathered are just some of the possibilities.

2. It’s Too Complicated

Many people get overwhelmed when they first see an automation process. But it’s not as difficult as it might first seem if you simply get some quality training and guidance when first learning the software. Anyone needing help can call on a Search Engine Optimization company Houston. Everything is customizable, from workflow options to email automation and even contacting leads. With a little practice, it’ll be simple.

3. Marketing Automation Is Just Another Name For Email Marketing

At first glance, they may appear to be the same but there is a considerable difference. The reason why so many people have this misconception is simply that it’s the only part of automation that they’re familiar with. The fact is, however, there are many moving parts that make this type of tool a substantial powerhouse that goes beyond just email marketing. Obviously, using email is an essential ingredient but there are other aspects such as tracking the behavior of your leads which allows you to personalize the emails by defining exactly who they are.

4. Is Marketing Automation Spam?

In no way is it spam and in fact, it is highly personalized email marketing. Tracking the behavior of leads allows you to see the best way to contact them and interact with them on your website. Some of these interactions can include the type of page that’s being viewed along with the time of day and even the date that they view it. For some of your leads, you will have information from forms that they filled out and from links that they clicked or videos that they watched.

All of that information can be used collectively to better understand your leads and make a very personal email campaign and workflow. You will get their attention because of the highly personalized messages in the email. It will resonate with them and they will begin to build trust in your company which increases the opportunities to change the lead into a customer.

Don’t Delay, Begin Your Marketing Automation Now!

Are you ready to grow your business using this powerful tool? If so, call or contact the SEO Houston Pros right now. Our team of dedicated staff will help with each step of the process. You get the platform setup along with email templates and the workflow process. Our business is to help your business thrive!

Google Fined $2.7 Billion Dollars For Manipulating Search Results

June 28, 2017 By SEO Houston Pros Leave a Comment

Google Fined An Astounding $2.7 Billion By The EU For Manipulating Searches

The European Union has fined Google a record $2.7 billion (2.4 billion in euros) fine for skewing search results in favor of Google’s own shopping site. But that may be only a fraction of the ultimate costs of the EU’s demand for Google to cease and desist.

Although Google has plenty of cash to keep it afloat, it may lose much more than the $2.7 billion due to a potential loss of ad revenue along with a regulatory backlash against Google’s other services, including restaurant reviews, maps, and more. This, in addition to the EU’s threats for more penalties.

The decision, brought by Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s antitrust chief, brings a 7-year investigation to an end. The investigation came in the wake of accusations from both small websites and well-known sites like News Corp., Microsoft, and Springer SE. While politicians in Europe have called for sanctions against Google, or even demand that it be broken up, U.S. critics challenge the accusations by claiming that EU regulators are deliberately targeting successful American companies.

A binding order from the EU demands that Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company, must “stop its illegal conduct” and start giving equal treatment to competing price-comparison services, and notify the EU of its plans to do so within 60 days. It’s up to Google how it wants to accomplish this.

The ultimatum was issued by Vestager, imposing a 90-day deadline to incorporate the changes and give smaller price-comparison competitors a chance against the Google shopping ads that appear alongside search results. The EU states that it plans to monitor Google over the next five years and “may impose stiffer fines in the future” up to 5 percent of Google’s daily revenue if the demands aren’t met.

Kent Walker, Google’s general counsel, shared that the company disagrees with the EU’s findings and may decide to seek an appeal.

According to the EU, Google has promoted its own comparison-shopping service as far back as 2008, putting its own services at the top of search engine results when shopping for a new item. Comparison-shopping rivals only have results popping up on page four, putting them at a distinct disadvantage, since the first page garners 95 percent of all clicks.

A lawyer at the Parisian Firm Simmons & Simmons declares that it’s normal for a private company to favor its own services. But the EU’s decision imparts obligations to Google that one might expect for a water or power company. Such companies were once considered a state monopoly.

The fines levied on Tuesday may only be the first in a series of heavy penalties aimed at Google by EU antitrust committees. This comes at a difficult time for Google, which is already fighting for its Android phone software and its AdSense internet advertising service. Vestager hinted that she may also look into Google’s travel, maps, and restaurant reviews, which have also engendered complaints.

In spite of the recent record-breaking penalty, Google is unlikely to be fazed by the $2.7 billion fine when it holds a cache of $90 billion. More concerning is the way EU regulators are trying to force Google to change its online shopping search results, one of the biggest revenue sources for the internet giant, and one of the greatest weapons in its arsenal of online competitors.

At SEO Houston Pros our SEO Experts in Houston confirm that although this ordeal with Google may seem like a bump in the road, we have addressed similar issues in the past. We take pride in keeping ourselves ahead of the curve and by doing so are able to keep ourselves up-to-date on all new algorithm changes. More importantly, SEO Houston Pros spends rigorous hours studying those changes brought to Google’s search engine platform.

We at SEO Houston Pros are incapable of taking on every client, as we only work with 1 client per niche in any given area, but to see if you are a good fit for our services, contact us now by filling out our contact form, or to expedite the process for consideration fill out our discovery application to see if your business qualifies for our service, and one of our executive SEO architects will be back with you promptly.

Is Your Website Outdated: SEO Houston Pros Explains

June 28, 2017 By SEO Houston Pros Leave a Comment

5 Signs That You Need To Have With A New Website Design

Your website needs to reflect your brand in the best possible light, especially considering that most likely it is the first place that a prospective customer will learn about and see your business. If your website design is outdated and either is not responsive or looks like it from the 1990’s, then it is definitely time for you to upgrade! When a visitors lands on your website, the individual will determine within a couple of seconds whether they want to leave or stay. Frequently, this decision will be based on the way your website navigates, feels and looks. On your home page, do you have a video or music auto-playing? Is your home page lacking engaging images and full of large blocks of text? Does your site have pop-ups on it? If your answer to any of the questions is yes, then you should definitely consider getting your business website design revamped.

Should Your Website Design Be Updated?

If you are wondering whether or not to hire a professional web design company, then you should consider the following tell-tale signs that your site needs to be re-designed right today!

1. Your Website Is Not Mobile-Friendly

Take your phone out and type your website URL in one of the major search engines. What does your website look like? Is it easy to navigate? Is your site easy to view? Take the time to look around and think about these questions. If you discover that it is slow, time-consuming or difficult to move around the website that you have currently on a tablet or mobile phone, it’s time for something new! Most people who are visiting your website will be coming via a mobile device and those numbers will only continue to grow over time. If people are not able to navigate your website easily on a mobile device, then they will leave immediately and get the information they are looking for from your competitor. So don’t allow this basic conversion to prevent you from getting new customers and leads.

2. An Outdated Appearance

Basically speaking, if your website has an old appearance individuals won’t take the time to really review it and check it out. If your website has an old appearance, that means that it is outdated and most likely it is difficult to navigate. Everybody wants to quickly and easily locate what they are searching for when they land on a website. Your site should have plenty of graphics that point to your major products and services, and the main navigation tabs need to highlight your business’s key areas, and every page of your site needs to have a call to action. As a general rule of thumb, get your website redesigned every three years at least. Given how fast technology changes and consumers needs change, this will help to ensure your website stays current.

3. Slow Loading Speed

One of the major components of website design is usability. Are the images on your home page loading slow? Does it take longer than two seconds for the pages on your site to load? In general, people will leave a web page after they only wait three seconds for the page to load! As a society overall we are going to increasingly become more impatient. However, we have the technology as well to meet those demands – so take advantage of this and use it! There isn’t anything users hate more than when it takes a website forever to load. By having a professional company do a new website design for you, they will make sure the loading speeds for you site meets industry standards.

By getting a new website design done by a professional company, they will ensure these loading speeds stay within industry standards.

4. Your Website Is Not Optimized For Search Engines

If your website pages are not optimized, how can new users find your business? Keep in mind that most new customers will learn about your business online. That means that you need to appear within the search engine listings whenever phrases that are relevant for business are being searched. For example, if you are a Houston real estate agent, the best way that you can be found online is optimizing your web pages for some of the main key phrases like “Houston realtor” through using search engine optimization in Houston. By working on your organic marketing on a consistent basis, you can get your business found on Google for the relevant phrases that are relevant to your business.

5. Your Social Media Accounts Are Not Linked And Integrated

Social media offers a huge opportunity. Getting on Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook will allow you to encounter new prospects that you have never met before. If your point is to acquire new prospects and customers, then you need to have your social media accounts integrated and linked with your website. With assistance from an experienced brand management and web design company, you can get easy access to all your social platforms using just a click of one button.

We Are Web Design Experts That Can Help You!

Do any of these concerns relate to your current website? If you are ready for your website to get a new design, then give us a call today! We can provide your business with a customized solution that will improve the website experience for your users.

The Houston SEO Pros Give You Our Tips To Mobile Marketing

June 20, 2017 By SEO Houston Pros Leave a Comment

Top 7 Mobile Marketing Tips

No matter what we might think of it, our mobile devices are increasingly becoming a more significant part of our daily lives. There are some studies that are predicting that by 2018 more than one billion individuals across the globe will be using smartphones.

Marketers need to view this as an excellent opportunity to come up with real-time, personalized and unique ways to engage and connect with their customers, like taking advantage of using Google My Business for example.

But what are the things that are most important to know about mobile marketing?

Our Houston search engine optimization team has put together the following tips to cover the most important things you need to know when it comes to mobile marketing for 2017:

1. Mobile Isn’t Just About Phones

There is more that mobile marketing covers than just reaching individuals on their smartphones. It actually encompasses a wide range of different technologies and devices that you will want to consider. It is important to think about the various operating systems, sizes of device and types of activities individuals are doing on different tablets and phones. For example, a recent study conducted by Forrester showered that 66% of smartphone users use their device while they are in the store, but only 9% of tablet users do this.

2. Fundamental Marketing Principles Are Still Applicable

Whether you are using mobile, print or radio advertising, the small fundamentals of marketing are still applicable. Ultimately, it is all about conveying the right message at the right time to the right customer. Working under the assumption that the initial way that your brand is experienced by customers is via mobile, and utilize tools such as Google Analytics in order to learn as much as you can about their behavior, device, and location.

3. Mobile Marketing Is Constantly Changing

Although it is always a good idea to have a plan, when it comes to mobile marketing one of the most important things that you need to know is that your marketing plan needs to reflect the constantly changing nature of the industry. New operating systems, apps and devices will all come and go and impact the mobile marketing efforts that you do in some way. Your mobile marketing plan should have periodic reviews built into it to help you assess whatever changes are occurring and then making the appropriate adjustments to it.

4. Your Focus Should Be On Responsive Design

When you have a responsive website it means your online content is optimized at all times for viewing on numerous different devices. Not only will this help to ensure that users have a positive experience no matter what device they are using, but it is also important to have a responsive design due to the latest Google algorithm that ranks pages according to how mobile-friendly they are. Those who don’t make the effort to optimize for mobile will be penalized and have lower search rankings.

5. Don’t Be In A Hurry To Develop Apps

It is often expensive and time-consuming to develop your own app, and depending on your business it might not actually be necessary. If you are able to achieve the functionality that you need for your website, then it may not be necessary to spend a lot of effort and time on web development. The key to getting all of this is work is understanding what your visitors need the most from your business (location, phone number, hours, promotions, etc) and then provide that to them on your responsive and optimized website.

5. Video Is Becoming Increasingly Popular

Social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have been integrated seamlessly to be able to watch video content easily as part of the mobile experience. Utilizing video to advertising on mobile is in its infancy still, but it is among the fasting growing methods. A recent study by Google suggests that individuals who watch videos on their smartphones are 1.4 times more likely to view ads compared to people who watch videos on televisions or desktop computers. In addition, when it comes to sharing videos, smartphone viewers are 1.8 times more likely to do this compared to individuals on personal computers.

7. Listen Carefully To Your Customers

Although you might be very eager to use mobile to get the word out about your products and services to your customers, remember that mobile is an extremely personal type of communication. Trying to blast your way through to customers will likely provide you with negative or subpar results. It is very important that you listen carefully to your customers to be able to establish a connection with the correct audience and communicate the right message to them at the right time. A recent survey conducted by PWC found that users say they prefer a more conversational approach instead of an impersonal one when it comes to mobile advertising.

If you keep these fundamental mobile marketing principles in mind when developing your mobile strategy, it will allow you to attract more customers as well as engage with them over the long-term, effectively. Mobile marketing is rapidly and constantly evolving, so if you can stay up to date on all of the newest technologies and techniques, you will be able to leverage mobile successfully as a key component in building your brand.