Hello, patrons on Steam it. This is my first post hopefully of many.<br />

I am a consultant for small businesses Marketing and website optimization for ranking on Google and the other search engines.<br />

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A group of associates and myself are constantly abreast of what Google is doing and the changes being implemented. This group consults for Fortune 500 and even some 100 companies.<br />

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I would like to take this opportunity to share with this community what my experiences have been over the last three years of helping businesses and show what I think is a huge disconnect between business and their online presence.<br />

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I’d like to share with business owners how they can optimize and rank their website so that they can increase their bottom line. In this post will be the first steps to achieving optimization and a marketing plan.<br />

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This information is to help the people in a business that are on Steam it. The information I’m about to share with you is valuable, I know of businesses that have paid so-called experts, thousands of dollars and not get a fraction of what I’m going to release here over time.<br />

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*WARNING* There will be several issues that I will cover that are going to be controversial!<br />

Sometimes what I will write will go against the mainstream industry. Everything that I will suggest is not theory or hypothesis, they are proven and tested practices and processes accepted and approved by Google that work.<br />

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95% of these so called agencies out there today have not a clue about what to do for their clients or their websites since all the changes by Google in just the last 24 months.<br />

What we do at Pro Biz Ranker works and continues to work for all of our clients. So I’m not going to get into a debate over what works and what doesn’t work, to rank on Google.<br />

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First of all the deck is stacked against any business that has not kept up with all the changes with Google, even the last 24 months. (more on that later)<br />

What this does, makes it 100 times harder as a consultant to educate the client and bring them up to speed.<br />

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Because of all of those out there professing to be the one all and be all, I hear all the horror stories.<br />

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One story about an agency professing to optimize the client's website and get them leads, calls, sales. The only thing the agency did is go on Google and buy ads to bring in a dismal amount of results. The agency didn’t do one thing on the client's site!<br />

This is a common story I hear all the time, because agencies don’t know what to do, and are afraid of getting sued if they do something and the site tanks.<br />

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I had a client tell me they hired a so called expert for Google and Facebook ads spent tens of thousands of dollars and didn’t get one phone call! And so when they came to me, I couldn’t convince them to spend a fraction of that to see the results we could get for them. (Even after I show them other clients results)<br />

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I could fill this entire post with story after story. That’s one of the biggest reasons I’m writing here on Steam it.<br />

<b>Marketing your small business online</b></b>,<br />

isn’t the easiest thing in the world to do when you also have to run your small business day to day. As a business owner, there are many different responsibilities that you must take care of and, sometimes, getting to the marketing is the last thing on the list. Today I am going to show you the biggest problem I’ve seen over the years, and how you can fix it for good.<br />

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<b>The Problem:</b> No Clue where to start<br />

Over many years of small business marketing consulting, I have found that the biggest marketing problem that small business owners face is a lack of knowledge where to start with their marketing.<br />

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Back in the good old days, it used to be called SEO. Today with all the changes inside of Google, SEO is important, but, it's one tiny piece of the giant puzzle of ranking on Google. SEO has become a bad word in the business world because of the bad rap from those that think they know about ranking, when in fact they don’t have a clue.<br />

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We call this process now “<u>website optimization</u>”.<br />

The optimization process isn’t just on your website. It entails your social media networks, (not just FB or Twitter), a whole social media network branded to your company, brand, product or service.<br />

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I know of a big agency that teaches what a social media network consist of, their definition is three properties. FB, Twitter, and G+. I busted up laughing when I heard this.<br />

Our branded social media networks have a minimum of 15 social media accounts. This same agency charges $5,000 just to produce a “plan”, on what they will do for the client! I think this is Outrageous!<br />

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Google’s report shows that Social engagement makes up 67% of the decision factor (algorithm) in ranking anything online.<br />

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Social Media Networks is only one important part of the off page/ off site optimization. You have to have the on-page optimization for your site as well.<br />

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Most business owners have it in their mind that they need their website on page one of Google to get the free traffic. Although it is great when that happens, this isn’t always the case to bring in leads, sales, or calls to the business. Besides, today there is no such thing as free traffic.<br />

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Anymore a business website for a brick and mortar store, or service, is just a glorified business card. There will always be exceptions, but for the most part, this is true. You are not going to get conversions from your website. You may get a few phone calls if you are a local business.<br />

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There is much more to cover in the optimization process that I will go over in future posts.<br />

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I’m sure by now you are asking What does optimization have to do with Marketing?<br />

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With all the changes that Google has implemented;<br />

<b>New Algorithm changes,</b> (the Semantic Web 3.0)<br />

<b>New Knowledge Graft</b><br />

<b>New Rank Brian, </b>(an algorithm that learns)<br />

<b>Google Rank Scoring</b>. (Google scores everything)<br />

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If you take just the list above, and there is more, Google scores everything by “relevance”. So if your website, on page, off page, social media network are not all saying the same thing, Google is not going to score your online presence very high.<br />

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When you don’t have a very good score from Google, even though your ads are scored separately, your ads won’t score high, your landing page,(most likely on your website), won’t score high. As a result, your ads, your website, or any of your content isn’t going to rank or be seen.<br />

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Because this post is getting to be long, let me cut to the chase and tell you where you need to start.<br />

<b><br /></b> <b>Where to start</b><br />

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You know your business better than anyone, or at least you should. With that said, <u><b>you know who your ideal customer is.</b></u><br />

Knowing who your ideal customer is will allow you to focus and laser target that person in your marketing.<br />

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You should know <u><b>where your ideal customer is,</b></u> what they like, where they hang out.<br />

Knowing where your customer is, and what their interested (what sites they visit) in is going to give you an advantage over your competition when target marketing.<br />

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You should know <u><b>what your ideal customer demographics are,</b></u> age, gender, income etc.<br />

Again, more information to laser target that ideal customer. The more you know about them, the less work you have to do and the easier it is getting in front of them.<br />

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And if you have been in business very long, you should <u><b>know how much that ideal customer is worth</b></u> to your business.<br />

When you know how much your customer is worth to your business, you know how much you can spend on marketing to get that ideal customer. This way you won’t spend more on ads, and stay within your budget.<br />

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Figure out <u><b>what search terms your ideal customer is using </b></u>to find you, your product or service.<br />

Google has tools you can use to find out what search terms people are searching for your product or service. Google/trends is one, and Google’s suggestive search phrases is another. We will get into those in a later post.<br />

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When you compile all of this information, you have the beginnings of putting together a marketing plan.<br />

As you can see there is a lot that goes into the pre-planning part of marketing.<br />

If you are a business owner, you have to do this! You can’t just pay someone to do this.<br />

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First, they don’t know your business, you do. Second, they will be guessing on all this information if you ask them to do it for you. So do you want guess work or do you want new business and new customers?<br />

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If you do the preliminary work, you will have a leg up on your competition, and you are going to get a lot better ROI. (return on your investment)<br />

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Ultimately you want to get the best ROI on your marketing. Marketing is an investment, not an expense.<br />

Let me put it to you the way I do with my clients when I address this subject.<br />

If you invest $1 in marketing, and you get back $2 in return. How much would you invest in your marketing?<br />

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And if you are still hell bent on organic search results ranking, all of this information is gold when it comes to optimizing your website.<br />

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You won’t be guessing or optimizing for what you think your customer is searching for, you will know what they are searching for. So you optimize your website, pages, posts, videos for those keyword phrases and keywords.<br />

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We are good at what we do, but I have to profess, I’m not a writer. I hope you will see your way through my bad grammar or spelling, and get the message instead of the delivery.<br />

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For all of those that want to see results of our marketing, I have included this video on video marketing that shows 3 different businesses that are doing very well with video marketing. Video Marketing is dominating and will become 80% of sales online by 2020 according to Google.<br />

Let me know your thoughts or questions.<br />

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If you found value in this post, it would mean the world to me if you would comment with your thoughts and also up vote right now!<br />

Thanks!<br />

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Based on the results of your comments and questions from this post will determine the next post and its content.