Category Archives: SEO

Online Reviews: Should You Strive for a Perfect Five?

In today’s age, online reviews and ratings can make or break a business. Potential customers look to ratings to determine whether or not they want to support a business. With all that pressure, striving for a perfect five-star rating can be tempting. However, is that always the best approach? Let’s dive into the complexities of online reviews and how they can impact your business.

Five Star Reviews Only!

Firstly, it’s important to note that a perfect five-star rating isn’t necessarily the goal. While it may look impressive, it may appear fake to consumers browsing the web. A mix of ratings ranging from three to five stars can be more beneficial to your business. A mix of ratings shows potential customers that the reviews are authentic and will provide a well-rounded view of what to expect.

Quality Over Quantity

In addition to mixed ratings, quality should always come first over quantity. While an abundance of five-star reviews can look impressive, the content within the review truly matters. Customers aren’t looking for generic praise. They want specific examples of what made their experience great. Genuine reviews can truly paint a picture of what customers can expect from your business and are much more valuable than a high quantity of generic, uninformative reviews.

Responding to Negative (& Positive) Online Reviews

While we recommend responding to both positive and negative reviews, negative review responses are even more essential to your business’s online rating! Respond to negative reviews with understanding and a willingness to make things right. This effort to resolve or correct a negative experience can help change a customer’s perception of your business. This type of response shows that you take feedback seriously and are willing to go above and beyond to provide a positive experience. If you can “make it right” in the eyes of the customer, ask them if they would be willing to update their rating and review!

Where to collect reviews?

In terms of where to focus your reviews, it depends on your business.

Google My Business is a popular platform for reviews, allowing businesses to appear in Google searches and maps.
However, if your business has a strong social media presence, Facebook reviews can be just
as impactful.
No matter what platform they are on, keep an eye on reviews and respond promptly to any feedback.

In the end, the focus should be on providing exceptional service rather than striving for a perfect five-star rating and listening to the feedback provided, both good and bad! Remember these tips and watch as your review ratings naturally improve over time.

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Social Media Strategy

Getting & Responding to Reviews

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Goal Setting

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Marisa Lyon
Marisa is the Finance and Marketing Manager at Innereactive, and we are so grateful to have her. She enjoys helping businesses find the right solution for their marketing needs.

Google Analytics: Measure Website Metrics That Matter

You’ve dedicated the time and effort to launch a new website complete with a beautiful design, customized messaging, and search engine optimization, but now what? If this is as far as you read in this blog, we hope you take this one thing away. Don’t just let your website sit there! Use it as a tool to help you reach your company goals and measure website metrics that matter!
We’ve talked in the past about the importance of marketing goals and for 99.9% of businesses, your website is an essential tool to helping you reach those goals. To see how your website is helping accomplish those goals we need to track, report, and pivot.

Tracking Website Metrics

Installing Google Analytics & Google Search Console

First, make sure Google Analytics and Google Search Console are installed on your website. Google Analytics released a new tracking code version called GA4 that will replace Universal Analytics (UA) in 2023. If you have Google Analytics installed on your site, it’s important to make sure your code is updated or includes a GA4 version because, at this time, historical data is not able to transfer over.

Reporting Metrics That Matter

There are a million and one metrics that you can dive into and report on within your analytics dashboard. Our advice is don’t track just to track. Track and report on data that:

Provides insight into how users are engaging with your business and website.
Gives you insight into your goal performance.
Shows if you need to pivot your efforts to reach your goal.

While there are similarities in what to track across different business websites, the specific tracking for your website is unique to you!

Website As A Lead Generator

Is your marketing goal to gain more new clients? Your website should be a main reporting source to determine how this goal performs. Some metrics to track may be:

# of new users to your website you are receiving each month.
# of users that click on your call to action button or page
Of these users, how many complete your lead generation or new customer form?
# of users that click to call your office

Influencing or Informational Website

While all websites could be considered lead or customer generators, some business, like a restaurant may utilize their website as a tool when customers are already in-store. These websites are more informational or influencing in nature to help increase revenue per customer. Some metrics for these types of sites are:

How long are users spending on each services page?
Which services page or product is getting the most views?
Which services page is leading to the highest conversion?
Do your website views and revenue trends match?

Website As Revenue

For businesses with ecommerce, your marketing goals are probably directly related to your website’s traffic and performance. For these types of websites, important metrics to report may include:

# of users visiting shop vs # of customers placing orders (capture rate).
# of products placed per order.
Average dollar value of an order.
Source of website traffic (google, social, email marketing, etc).
Metrics of purchases made from automated website emails like an abandoned cart.

Report and Pivot

Once you’ve identified your key metrics to track, report on them monthly and quarterly along with your social, marketing, and revenue goals. Are all your metrics showing the same thing? Remember, not every metric is a simple pass or fail. Some metrics listed above can help guide your strategy if and when you need to make a change.

Our team of dedicated marketing strategists are here to help guide your marketing goals and determine which website metrics are the best to report on for your business.

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Marie Wiewiora

Marie is the VP of Client Relations at Innereactive and has experience in marketing strategy, graphic design, and web development. She has over 8 years of experience creating comprehensive marketing strategies.

What is SEO and how can I improve mine?

SEO stands for Search engine optimization, but what does it truly mean? Optimizing your site for search engines allows them to consume your site’s content as efficiently as possible, allowing new and returning traffic to find your site easier. So, where do you begin? When working with Innereactive on a website design, we will make many of these choices on your behalf to optimize your website SEO or walk you through any decisions needed. If you’re looking to set up a new site or improve on an existing site on your own, here are our tips and tricks!

New Website SEO

When establishing a new website, first sit down and determine what type of traffic you expect and outline your target audience. Narrowing down an audience will allow you to focus on the keywords that will perform best for your needs. For example, suppose you are a brick-and-mortar store looking to optimize for local users. In this case, place less emphasis on globally applicable terms and focus your keywords on geographic features coupled with your industry. (Ex: Eyecare in Detroit, Lawncare in Grand Rapids, etc)

Optimizing Existing SEO

Before making any changes to your SEO, the first step should be establishing a baseline of existing performance. Use this baseline to determine if your changes improved or hurt your site performance. A baseline can be established through a variety of metrics, the easiest being pulled from existing analytics platforms like Google Analytics or Google Search Console. Some of the more important metrics to focus on are:

New Users
Returning Users
Average Engagement Time
Keyword Results & Ranking

Using the above data points will give you insight into what drives successful performance on your website. If you plan to run a digital ad campaign, keyword results can be invaluable to provide insight into already successful search terms related to your business.

What Affects SEO Optimization?

Search engines place a lot of emphasis on data like keywords and meta descriptions to discover your website content properly. But there is much more that goes into SEO of a site! Many search engines also factor in the frequency and freshness of content, social media presence, backlinking, site mobile usability, etc. So how do you use this knowledge to your benefit?

Blogging

If your industry is suited for it, blogging can be a fantastic way to bring frequent and relevant content to your site. When recognized by search engines, this new and recurring content proves your business is still active and relevant. Coupled with driving new and returning visitors to your site, blogs can be a powerful marketing tool for your business.

Social Media & Backlinking

Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Linkedin expand your potential website reach and can create a healthy network of backlinks to your site. There are many tools out there to help analyze your existing backlink structure and allow you to identify who is referring traffic to your site. We are a fan of Ahref’s tool, which offers free and paid options for all business scales. Ready to take your social media to the next level with digital advertising? Check out our blog about Paid Social Advertising or reach out to us today!

Mobile Usability

With 4 out of 5 users browsing and shopping on their mobile devices, search engines include metrics like how fast a site loads and how easy it is to use on a mobile device to determine results and rank. If your site is not mobile optimized, you may be losing a lot of potential user engagement. To learn more about how to optimize your website for mobile usage, check out our article about mobile-first design.

As you can see, SEO is a large and complex topic with many aspects to factor in and adjust. If you are interested in improving your website performance and SEO, fill out the form below or subscribe to our blog for future tips and tricks! We are excited to help you grow your business online.

If you are interested in improving your website performance and SEO, fill out the form below or subscribe to our blog for future tips and tricks! We are excited to help you grow your business online.

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Josh Glovak
Josh is the Web Development Manager at Innereactive. He finds a lot of enjoyment in the puzzles and problem solving that comes with managing a web department. Josh chases that desire of making faster, cleaner, and user-friendly websites.

Is SEO Search Engine Manipulation?

Google is currently involved in an ongoing legal case with a company that is seeking damages after Google banned many of their websites for “search engine manipulation.” This has many business owners worried that they may accidentally be manipulating search engines by performing SEO, but is this a concern? Continue reading →

What is Your NAP and How is it Helping You?

business sign Who doesn’t love a good nap? Sadly, in marketing, the kind of NAP we’re talking about involves less of a couch and more of a comprehensive digital strategy for you business. But if you don’t care about your NAP because you think it’s a snoozefest, you may end up missing out on sales leads, customers, and a lot of important traffic. Continue reading →

How Formatting Text Helps SEO

Formatting text on your website is important for a lot of reasons. People think that SEO is all about secret, hidden forces coming together to help your website, but that’s not the case. A lot of the visible things you do on each page will help search engines understand and rank your content.

Here are the ways that text can be formatted to help SEO. Continue reading →

Blogging for Small Business

We’ve said it many times and it’s the first thing we say when people ask what they can do for SEO, but I’ll say it again: write original content!

Don’t be scared away if you think you’re not a great writer, don’t have time, or don’t know what to write about. We can help you get started. Here are five ways to get started blogging for small business today. Continue reading →

Can You Spot an SEO Scam Like This?

Wow. I just got off the phone with a client who received a very interesting call from “Google.” First, the caller asked to verify his business information in Google, which he agreed to and confirmed that their information was correct. Then the caller stated that, in order to keep his business listed in Google, the business owner needed to pay a one-time fee of $600, but that they were able to discount it to $400. This would guarantee that he could be in the top three spots on Google for “optometrist” searches in his area, and guaranteed that his business would be listed in Google forever.

As he told me the story, I gasped and asked, “You didn’t pay them, did you!?” knowing right away that it was an SEO scam. Continue reading →