Sarah: All right, good morning everybody, welcome to Marketing Mix! We have got a question for you. When you Google your business online, how does it show up? Do you know how it shows up? Today, we're going to show you why having your correct business listing is so important, and how it can hurt you if you don't.

Glyna: Good morning!

Sarah: Good morning, Glyna!

Glyna: I love this new background, I told you that last time. It's just so lively! I like all the bright colors. Welcome to Marketing Mix, everybody. Every week, we will have different segments to highlight all kinds of different marketing topics. We're just going to mix it up a little bit, and I think you're really going to enjoy today's broadcast.

Sarah: Yes. And don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube page, we stream live on Twitter, on YouTube, and on Facebook. And don't forget about our podcast, Marketing and a Mic.

Glyna: Yes!

Sarah: Let's talk about this. Do you know how your business shows up online? And, are you showing up where your potential customers are looking for you? That is so important! Obviously, online visibility is everything. If you have incorrect listings, or if you have errors or any type of inconsistencies in all the online directories, it can really hurt you. And, it could be one of the main reasons why potential customers don't find you.

Glyna: I mean, I always tell everybody I'm on a mission to make sure that businesses know, number one, you'd better be on the internet because if you aren't, you're just missing out today. Number two, if you are on the internet, how well are you doing? Do you have errors? I mean, are your business hours showing up correctly, is your location correct? I don't know about you, Sarah, but there's been many times when I've Googled a place that I've never been before, and I go to try to find them and it's the wrong address, or it's the wrong location, or it's not where they say they are on the internet. So, all of those things, if they're not correct, can really hurt your business and your reputation. In the end, and your revenue. Because you know what? All your competitors have their stuff lined up and correct on the internet.

Sarah: That's so true. That actually just happened a couple weeks ago. We were trying to take our son to dinner for his birthday. Well, the hours of the restaurant weren't correct. And, guess what? We didn't go there. It was open, but it showed up online that they weren't open. I mean, it really matters.

Glyna: Yes, it does.

Sarah: So, let's talk about what a business can do if they see inconsistencies in their business listings. What do you have to do to set it up correctly?

Glyna: Okay, there's so many things. Even if you can just do the basics correctly, it's going to make all the difference in the world. When you put yourself on the internet in all the search engines and all the directories, you want to make sure that you are putting the same information all across the internet in those locations. What I mean by that is you want to make sure that your ... We call it "NAP", name, address, and phone number. You want to make sure that your name, address, and phone number is the exact same all across the internet. You can even get down to if you're spelling out the word "street" versus have "St." for street. You don't want it to show up street spelled out on one of the directories or search engines and then do it differently on another one. Be completely consistent. Another thing that people don't realize is they forget that they've had several different types of phone numbers. I'm sorry, but my cat wants to be on the show, apparently. I'm not what she's ... I was like, "What's up?"

Sarah: We have a special guest joining us today!

Glyna: We might. She's being very noisy, so I apologize for that. All right, basically you want to make sure that it is showing up correctly. And if you change phone numbers, change addresses, make sure that you go back through all of those places and switch that up and make sure it's correct. And, what's really cool is there's a lot that goes into this, and a lot of people may not know where to start to even see if they're on the internet, and how well they're doing. But, we have a tool, it just so happens ... We have a tool available that anybody can use, and we really encourage you to use this tool. I'll pull it up, and Sarah can show you where to go. You can go to our website, it's actually a hidden page, FusionOneMarketing.com/DBA, and check your business. It's really, really simple. Let me see. I'll show you, and I'll pull it up here.

Sarah: That's how you can scan your business FOR FREE, and see what it looks like!

Glyna: Good point, for free! So you just go to that URL, and this is the page that will come up. This is what it'll look like, I'll get my little chat lady out of there, that I love so much. Here, you can check your business, and it's called a Visibility Scan. Again, like Sarah said, it's free so what does it hurt? Over here in the box, you're going to simply put your business name and your ZIP code, and hit Check My Visibility, and you will have ... It's magic because I already have one ready to go here.

Sarah: This is one where it's like the cooking show where it's like, "Fast forward."

Glyna: It usually takes a few minutes, or it can, so I didn't want people just to sit there and be watching this thing spin. This is what it looks like when it's completed. Let me go back up to the top, here. This is just a company that we were throwing in, a pest control company that we wanted to check and see how they're doing on the internet. So you guys, this is important information. If you look at the very top, where it says Visibility Score, this is a score of how you look on the entire internet so this is a very important score. As you can see here, 31% out of 100, I would say that they probably need a little help.

Sarah: Yeah. I have a question with that. When you say that's how they look on the internet, where is that? What does this report, where all is it scanning?

Glyna: Yes, that's a great question. If you look below this, it's scanning Google, Yelp, Bing, all the directories. It's even scanning all the voice search areas, to see if you're there, to see if you'd show up. And, if you show up, how complete is your listing and how are you looking on the internet? Is it confusing, is it straight forward? This is a really awesome tool. Again, if you see this, in this situation Google My Business is only 50% complete. You see this, you can go on your Google My Business and, guess what? Make it 100%. You can run the scan as many times as you want to see how well you're performing, and how well you're doing. This company doesn't have anything on Yelp, which is important. Bing, their directory score ... Now, this is a big one, Sarah. A lot of people will say, "Hey, I'm on Google." Well, that's good, and that's your number one step. But, you need to go out and make sure that your company is in all the top directories that search engines give scores to for their algorithms. So directories feed into your overall internet presence. I mean, it's pretty easy, you can Google the top directories to put your business in. Then, voice readiness is a huge thing right now. We all have Echos, we all have Alexas, all of that. This is a big thing. My Alexa just turned on, we'll see ...

Sarah: She's ready.

Glyna: We want to make sure that your business is there because that's becoming more and more popular.

Sarah: Wow.

Glyna: I mean, they're even putting it in cars these days. That gives you your baseline. Now, I'm going to go ahead and scoot down just a little bit. Now, it's going to talk to you and break it down a little bit more, we won't go over all of these things. But, everybody knows that green is good, yellow is eh, and red is easily you need help, or red is not good. That's how they rate all of these things. If you have a good listing presence, you'll have a checkmark in a green box. If it's not listed or you have some issues, big issues, I would say that you're not listed, you'll have red. And if action's required, like you haven't completed it or you haven't done it correctly, then yellow will appear. As you can see, in Google, again NAP is the number one thing. If you don't take anything else out of this, remember your name, address, phone number need to be exactly the same on the internet. They did that really well here, their NAP shows up, it's consistent. There's not any other information on Google to fight with this information. You'd be shocked, Sarah. When we first start working with customers, they can't remember how many different things they've put on the internet. There's usually a lot of cleanup that we have to do, to get this to turn out really well for them. Again, it just shows against Google. Here, fill it out completely. You have categories, yeah they didn't put in their categories, they didn't even put their website, didn't put their hours of operation, no photos. And, they do have some reviews. So it even gets down to the pieces that you need to go back and correct. So that's just, again, really good tool.

Sarah: Essentially, in a way, this is the criteria that these search engines need.

Glyna: Yes.

Sarah: That's where it's going to hurt you. It's not just maybe it's not correct, maybe I didn't spell street correctly. You might think well, it's still going to show up. It's criteria that has to be met with these search engines, and they'll ding you if you don't. That's where it hurts you because it hurts your visibility. Is that correct?

Glyna: Yes, that's exactly right. They all have their own algorithms of how they judge you, but they all have common things, too. Which is, again, what we've talked about. Make sure everything's complete. We're going to say NAP for the fifth time or sixth time. Make sure your name, address, and phone number is exactly the same.

Sarah: Yes.

Glyna: And delete listings. If they're old, delete them.

Sarah: Okay. Yeah. Or, duplicate listings, if they've got the same thing twice, that could probably be an impact.

Glyna: Yes. That's huge. I'm probably jumping ahead, but yes, that's a huge thing, duplicate listings. You have to think of it this way. Let's just use Google for example. If Google comes out and sees two different listings, they have no idea which one to use. And when Google gets confused, they just punt you. They will punt you to the side, they don't want to mess with you!

Sarah: No.

Glyna: They don't want to mess with you, and they're going to go over to this other Mr. Businessman who has all his stuff correct and it's not confusing. And guess what? They're going to get the ranking.

Sarah: Right. Well, because these search engines, they're looking for what's going to fit the exact search of what that customer's looking for. If it's not meeting it, then yeah, you get booted out. You're not going to get ranked.

Glyna: Yes. All the search engines, especially Google, they're all about user experience. That's why they come up with an algorithm that they say, "This is what you have to do to make the user experience the best it can be. If you're not doing that, we're not going to give you any favoritism, at all, in the search engines." Now, this company did really well with Bing, which is very important. Let's go down, voice readiness. Again, we have Alexa which everyone's heard of, Google Home, Siri, all of that. Again, you can go down this yourself, I'm not going to go through the whole thing. But, as you can see, it's a great tool to tell you where to start. It has all the main directories. You can see, they're not being found in a lot of them, so somebody that has filled out everything correctly is going to show up before they do.

Sarah: So, if I'm looking at this, I'm seeing all the red, I'm seeing where the problems are, how do I fix it? Is it something that I could go in there and just fix it real quickly? Or, is it really time-consuming? Should I contact another company like us, Fusion One perhaps?

Glyna: Perhaps.

Sarah: We've got our own tool.

Glyna: You know, you can do it. I mean, somebody could do it themselves. But, I'll tell you the pitfalls of when that happens. Okay, you can get all gung-ho. I can tell you this because, when we first started, I'm the one that had to go complete all these directories. They're a pain in the rear end, I'll just be honest with you. You have to get Google to be verified, you have to have them send you a card. Sometimes they feel like it, sometimes they don't. The directories, some of the directories also need verification where you go fill them out, but then they want to send you codes to input, to make sure you're who you say you are. You can go fill them out, but each directory has different things that they're wanting. What I mean by that, they want to make sure okay, first of all, you have your address, your NAP again. You want to make sure that you have optimized pictures. Some of them will take 10, 20 pictures. I mean, almost as many as you want to put in there. You also have to video, you want to make sure you have a video, that's a big deal. Again, these are all things that search engines give you points for.

Sarah: Yeah, okay.

Glyna: You want to make sure all that's filled out. Now, this is the key, and this is the pain in the rear end as well. Once you've done that, you can just leave it alone forever. What the directories love to do is flush out old listings, or listings that haven't been visited, that kind of thing. You have to keep visiting these regularly, especially the directories not so much the search engines, and make sure that your listing is still there, and it's still correct.

Sarah: Okay. It's consistent, you've got to continually update it. Okay.

Glyna: You do. It's just a lot of work. Not to say you can't do it.

Sarah: Right.

Glyna: It's very possible. But, I'll give you an example, I think probably most of our customers are in over 300 different directories.

Sarah: Wow.

Glyna: So, you can imagine that's what we do, and that's what our monthly fee is for, among other things, but is revisiting those and make sure that they're all straightened up and ready to go.

Sarah: Wow. I feel like there's another piece of this, which would be let's say I'm trying to find a business by a keyword search. Let's say I'm trying to find any keywords that are related to the industry, and their business doesn't show up. What does that mean?

Glyna: Oh yeah, that's a ...

Sarah: I know, it's a really loaded question.

Glyna: That's a different segment. No, I'm kidding.

Sarah: It really could be.

Glyna: Well, you have to think about what your business does. I mean, I know that sounds ridiculous. But, a lot of these places give you categories and places to put in keywords that have to do with your business so that you're covering everybody the way they search. I may search one way, you may search another way, but we're looking for the same exact product and service. For instance, if I'm searching for a BBQ restaurant, I may put BBQ restaurant in. You may put BBQ restaurant near me. So you need to make sure that you have the optimization for all of those things going on. The first thing you can do if you're like, "I don't know what all the keywords are that I need to be optimizing for." When I say optimizing, we're talking about on your website, and also the other places on the directories and things that you can optimize.

Sarah: Mention your keywords on your website, making sure that they're sprinkled throughout.

Glyna: That they're on your website in the front end that everybody can see, but there's also ... People laugh when I call it a backend, but there's a backend of your website that that's what we're most concerned about. We can make a pretty website, but if we don't have the backend loaded with your keywords, optimized ... your pictures, that's the other thing, you have to have your pictures optimized. You want to tag all your photos and videos. These are all of the things that you can do. If you don't know what your keywords are, which I'm sure most of you do, you can go to the Google Keyword Planner, again, you can Google that, and they can help you out. They will give you suggestions based on your main category, of keywords and phrases that you could use. Then, of course, you want to ... This gets into another thing, but you also want to have high ranking backlinks to your site.

Sarah: Okay.

Glyna: All of these things can be done, but they get a little bit difficult and hard to do if they're not your full-time job, like us. It's what we do all day long.

Sarah: You have to know what you're doing; you have to have done your homework.

Glyna: Yeah, exactly. There's a lot of things. Can you do it on your own? I'm sure you could try, but it gets very cumbersome.

Sarah: Yeah, okay. There's some other best practices that you can do that will help your local search. Some of them would make sure it's mobile-ready and that you have a responsive website. So make sure how your website looks, it needs to look well on both your mobile and your website. That's huge, some people forget about it. Use keywords, but don't overstuff. What do you mean by that, but don't overstuff?

Glyna: Well, back in the day ...

Sarah: Don't overstuff in any area of your life, but ...

Glyna: Back in the day, when we first started this, there was actually people, they would make the website white ... This is hilarious. They would make the website white, and they would type in keywords in all the white spaces, in white. I know that sounds really weird. And stuff keywords on that website. It actually worked for a while, until Google figured it out and they're like, "No." That's one way to overstuff, is putting it in the margins, and stuff that you don't need to be doing. Also, when you're writing just write naturally. You're going to need to use your keywords, but you're also using them in headings, you're using them in tabs, you're using them all over your website. Well, when you're writing the content, just don't keep putting keywords in. One of my pet peeves is going to a website and seeing a whole huge space taken up on the website. Let's say pest control, pest control Birmingham, pest control Chelsea, pest control Homewood, pest control Vestavia, pest control ... I mean, you don't need to do that.

Sarah: Right.

Glyna: If you know how to do SEO correctly ... That should be a red flag if your SEO company is doing that.

Sarah: Yeah, right. Right. Oh, gosh.

Sarah: Don't duplicate content, that's another one. Churn content consistently. This is so important. We talk about being consistent every single segment that we do, but really and truly, you need to put blogs out there, you need to be on social media, you need to have stuff coming out consistently. A blog, we just talked about that, make sure you have a blog. And, do video, make sure you do videos. Optimize your videos as well, everything that you do you need to optimize it. Make sure that all your keywords are in there, just put quality content, putting quality content, it's so important.

Glyna: Yes. Content, I know a lot of people, even a lot of SEO businesses talk about doing SEO through content. I mean, content is very, very important, but it is a very tiny piece of the whole pie when you look at SEO and all the ingredients that go into the pie. But yet, it is very important. People are always like, "What's duplicate content? What does that mean?" Well, you want to make sure that you're obviously not plagiarizing somebody else's website. You want to have original content. You can rewrite blog posts, but again, you want to make sure you're rewriting them ... I forget, Rob always tells me the percentage of ... maybe it's 50? I shouldn't even throw out a percentage, but of how different it needs to be not to be considered duplicate content. That's huge, that's very, very important. Churn it, like you said. You have to have new content. Some of the ways that we do that, we do that through video because we're doing these lives, so that's new content. Our blog posts are new content. Also, if you have a Twitter feed, that brings in new content all of the time. And, another thing that we've done, which I love this tool on WordPress, is our review page. We actually have a review feed coming in from Google and Facebook. I think you can choose any of them, though, those are just the ones we chose, that are constantly when somebody leaves us a review, is putting it on our website. Again, we're really, really ranking well on the content side of things. Anyway, just my two cents. But, that's basically it. To review, again, just make sure that you're putting your business online, in as many places as you can. Make sure you're consistent with your NAP, your name, address, and phone number. Make sure that you're doing all these little tips that Sarah mentioned. And, make sure that your content is fresh, and that you have new content going all the time. I think that's a lot.

Sarah: Yeah. If you want to do this, it's going to keep popping up, free scan tool. You can use it, check out, see where your business stands.

Glyna: Yeah.

Sarah: And ways to fix it. So, it's a very valuable, great place to start.

Glyna: That is definitely right. And for the podcast people, that's FusionOneMarketing.com/DBA. I didn't mention, but if you do a scan and you want help trying to figure out what it says or how you can fix things, or, as always, make sure that you contact us and these are things that we are really, really good at. SEO is one of the main key things that we do really well. So message me if you want more information, and that's it for this week, Sarah. I guess we will see everybody on Friday at eight AM, at Biz Talk. Make sure that you tune in, we will have Kristie LaRochelle, who is with KP Studios.

Sarah: All right.

Glyna: We'll see you guys later!

Sarah: Looking forward to it. All right, thanks for joining us. Bye!