9 Tips to Increase Response Rates from Google Maps

February 26, 2010 by Ryan Wheaton
Filed under Online Marketing

I talk a lot about Google because typically 40% of the traffic to my site comes from this one source. Most websites experience the same levels of traffic from Google so it’s important to understand all things Google as it relates to promoting your business.

One of the best additions to their lineup has been Google Maps. I’ve mentioned Google Maps before in previous posts but wanted to go into more detail about how you can improve response rates from it.

If you don’t have a listing yet, logon today to Google’s Local Business Center and set one up! Be sure to do a search first for your martial arts school as you might already have a listing and just need to claim it.

Why Should You Care About Google Maps?wet

When potential students search for martial arts schools in Google, they immediately see the 7-pack; the top seven most relevant business locations based on the searcher’s query and location according to Google. It’s one of the first things searchers see after they hit “search.”

Please note that your business may be listed but not appearing in the 7-pack because they have found your competitors might be more relevant. The easiest way to tell if you’re coming up (or not) is to search for “martial arts <your city> <your state>” and see what comes up.

Google’s 7-Pack in Action

Here’s what this looks like for my particular city (My schools listing is the second from the top):

According to Google, “Google Maps for the United States compiles information from many sources to bring you the best results. Our listings combine information from our web search results, data submitted directly by local business owners, and third-party sources such as publicly available Yellow Pages directories.”

However, that doesn’t mean everything is accurate or complete; which is why you’re going to want to claim your listing then tune it up to help get more inquiries from it.

And, just having a listing isn’t enough. You have to optimize your listing not only to have better placement in the Google maps – a topic I will cover in the near future – but you should also optimize for better response rates (read inquiries) from your listing.

How to Increase Response Rates from Google Maps

Get more reviews – The more reviews, the better. To get more reviews, send your students an email and ask them to honestly review your martial arts school then give them the link to the review portion of your listing. It’s that simple. Why are reviews so important? They provide social proof that other people have used your services and are happy with the results and service they’ve received and implies if other’s are satisfied, they will be, too.
List your Business Hours – This is different than listing you class schedule. This just lets people know your hours of your operation so they know when to call or come by. If you’re a full time business, it demonstrates convenience and implies you have a lot of classes to choose from. If you don’t teach a lot of days or times, you might want to leave this blank.
Link to your website – If you have a website, be sure to add your domain name. This not only communicates a sense of professionalism but it also makes it easier to direct people to your lead generation focused website. Not having a website these days can send the wrong impression that you’re behind the times and not customer friendly.
Make an offer - Making an offer is one of the most important things you can do. Google allows you to create a coupon and is something that you should definitely consider adding to your listing. And, if you can make it a Google Maps exclusive offer, it will be easier to track if someone calls or comes in and wants to redeem it. This could be a discount on your trial program, a free trial, or whatever offer you want to use.
Enhance your business description – You have 200 characters to tell your story and whet your prospects appetite. Use it wisely and be as descriptive as you can while speaking directly to your target audience about why they should consider calling you over your competitors. Be sure to also include your unique selling proposition here.
Use a Call To Action – Using a call to action helps prompt your prospects to pick up the phone, send you an email… whatever response you want your prospect to take. This could be as simple as saying “Call us today to learn how you can get one month of martial arts lessons for free!”
Add photos – Photos help prospects visualize your martial arts school and help draw attention to your listing. Take photos of your school in daylight hours, particularly if you have a lot of windows. Include photos with and without your students of your facility. Take photos of the outside of your facility as well. If you have great parking, be sure to feature that as well.
Add videos – Like photos, videos capture attention. If you have a martial arts commercial uploaded to YouTube, you can easily add the URL to your listing. This way, prospects can view your videos without having to leave your listing and possibly getting off track.
Tune up your details – Google allows you to add details about your business. You can add the forms of payment you accept, associations, awards and more. Basically, you can use the details to mention all of your various features.

The good news is that you can follow the same advice when creating or claiming your listings on Yahoo, Bing and other local business directory listings.

Be sure to to visit Google’s Local Business Center and either set up your listing, edit it or claim it so you can benefit from having this work harder for you in Google search results.

What else would you add to this list of ways to get more response from your Google Maps listing? Let me know in the form of a comment below!

Tags: google, google local, google maps

Google Capoeira

February 12, 2010 by Ryan Wheaton
Filed under Online Marketing

2 Comments

Every month Google does a little dance that can either help you by elevating your site in the search rankings or it can hurt you by dropping it lower in the search results; making it harder to find.

I’m seeing some big shifts in the Google search results in my local market on local terms. And, at least for now, I think these changes have probably helped out some of my competitors out more than it has helped me.

Rats.

Many in the search engine optimization industry call these shifts in the search results the Google dance. Being that I’m in the martial arts, I call it Google Capoeira. It can be a deadly dance, indeed.

What is the Google Dance? Simply put that term is often used to describe the index update of the Google search engine that happens approximately once a month.

Until recently, there was only one other martial arts schools website on page one of the search results other than mine. The rest were local directories like yellowpages.com, superpages.com, merchantcircle.com…et al. This has been this way for years now.

I liked that because my martial arts school is listed in those directories. If a visitor didn’t go to my site, at least I had a chance to get them in the directories versus them going to my competitors home page where I had nothing.

Now, all of a sudden, the top 10 results in Google’s search engine results pages (aka SERPS) are ALL martial arts schools. This is a big change and is something I’ve NEVER seen in my market. Most of these sites have been out there for years… stale… unchanged…. then all of a sudden, they’re there.

Poof! In the top 10.

Like magic my competitor’s sites appeared on page one of the search results when they weren’t even in the top 20 before. And, I know they haven’t done anything search engine optimization wise as I have torn them apart a ton of times over the years.

Google, for now, just gave them a lift thanks to the obvious changes in their algorithm.

Here are a few other observations I’ve made:

New competitors in the top 10 – As I said above, I’m seeing my competitors websites who weren’t previously ranked in the top 20 now appear in the top 10. Many of the local directory sites have gone to page two of the search results.
Facebook gets dropped – My Facebook fan page for my martial arts school was number 3 for a desirable keyword phrase while my site was #1. Now, its nowhere to be found in the first 50 results. I think this has more to do with Google devaluing Facebook overall. I don’t see Facebook come up in a lot of searches anymore. But, it’s still a great tool to have; especially for keeping in touch with current students.
The #3 Ranked Site shouldn’t be there – The biggest surprise to me is that the new #3 site in Google is 99% built using FLASH…has music…uses a splash page… and huge file sizes. All no-no’s in basic Search Engine Optimization. But, there they are. This site shouldn’t be ranking this well. They don’t even have good title tags so this one is head scratcher. I think this site will tank after a few months but for now is clogging things up.
My Merchant Circle page wiggles – My merchant circle page keeps floating in and out of the top 10. I’m hoping it sticks soon. I’ve done additional optimization to that page to help it in the rankings and it looks like that might land soon. I’m going to do a post about that soon so hold tight.

Some strange things are afoot at Google. These could be temporary changes as part of their algorithm or perhaps they are more permanent. Time will tell, I suppose.

However, I’m not surprised to see things shift like this at all.

In fact, I expect it.

Why?

Because Google is always trying to figure out what is the most relevant pages to serve up. They are constantly spidering and re-indexing their results and want to have the best sites appear on page one for a given keyword or keyword set.

Sometimes this process will help you. Sometimes it won’t.

Some of these directory sites might come back but other’s might not. That’s why it’s good to diversify as part of your defensive blockade.

Are you seeing changes in your Google search results? Has your site gone up or down in your market?

Tags: google, Search Engine Optimization, seo

Are You Guilty of these Search Engine Optimization Mistakes?

January 27, 2010 by Ryan Wheaton
Filed under Online Marketing

1 Comment

While you’re way ahead of most martial arts schools if you have a website, you still need to apply fundamental search engine optimization elements to help get higher rankings.

Having a higher rankings for your targeted keywords will help you to drive more qualified people to your website from within your geographic area.

However, in order to do this, you have to build your website in such a way to make it “search engine friendly.”

That process is called search engine optimization.

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization, or SEO as it is often called, is the process of structuring your website to be able to be easily found and ranked in the search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo for targeted keywords or keyword phrases.

NOTE: Keyword is something like “Karate” a keyword phrase is something like “San Diego California Karate.”

Following are five common SEO mistakes I see on martial arts schools websites. Many more posts on this subject are to come.

1. Not including keywords people are searching for on your site

Your potential customers sit down, turn their computer on, fire up their browser and type some words into Google to find your business.

What are those keywords?

Most people don’t know the name of your business so that isn’t what you should focus on. So what should you focus on? Being the solution to their problem (Martial arts lessons) in the geographic location they live (City/state).

Be sure to read my post on “title tags” to learn the right keywords to use in your title tag. The good news is that those words are the same as what you’ll want to have in the content of your website.

2. Targeting the wrong keywords

Often times, owners target the wrong keyword terms. They are too generic and think by having “X” or “Y” on the page that is all they have to do. Or, they emphasize the name of their system.

If you live in Westminster Maryland you shouldn’t be targeting that by itself. Nor should you be targeting “Martial Arts” by itself. A much more potent way is to combine those two into one powerful combination - Westminster Maryland Martial Arts.

3. Not including the targeted keywords enough on your page

You have to put your targeted keyword phrase on the page more than once in order for the search engines to know those keywords are important to your page. As an idea, list your keyword in the following places:

Title Tag
Headline (H1 tag)
Sub headlines (H2 tags)
In the 1st paragraph
In the middle paragraph
In the last paragraph
File name of the HTML page (example: www.yoursite.com/keyword.html)

That said, you want to have a keyword density of about 3-5% on average. No more.

Keyword density = How many times a given keyword or keyword phrase appears on a page compared to all other words on the page.

However, the most important thing to do is make is read naturally. Don’t stuff keywords! A quick test to see if you’ve done too much is to read it out loud. You’ll know when you have over done it when you hear yourself say “did I really just say that keyword five times in two sentences?”

4. Using the same title and description tag on every page

Each page needs to have its own unique title tag and description. Both the title tag and description tag need to describe what can be found on each page. And, I wouldn’t let your software auto generate this information, either.

Do this by hand and pick one keyword phrase per title tag. Then repeat that keyword somewhere in your meta description, preferably near the beginning.

Again, read my post on “How to Boost Your Search Engine Rankings with a Title Tag.”

5. Poor content structuring

There is a basic hierarchy with respect to content structuring that can help your organic rankings:

Primary headline – In HTML this is represented as <h1></h1>. Should only be used once on a page.
Sub headlines – In HTML this is represented as <h2></h2>. Can be used more than once.
Paragraph – In HTML this is represented as <p></p>.
Ordered and unordered lists – In HTML this is represented as <ol></ol> and <ul></ul> respectively.
Bolding- In HTML this is represented as <strong></strong>.
Italics – In HTML this is represented as <em></em>.

The HTML of a page with this markup could look something like this:

<h1>Westminster Marlyand Martial Arts</h1></div>

<h3>Learn Martial Arts at Carrol County Kenpo Karate</h3>

<p>This paragraph explains why people need to take <strong>martial arts lessons in Westminster Maryland</strong></p>

<p>Here is a list of important stuff:</p>

<ul>

<li>Martial Arts for Kids</li>

<li>Martial Arts for Adults</li>

<li>Self-Defense Lessons</li>>

</ul>

<p>Don’t forget, this <em>Westminster Martial Arts</em> stuff is important!</p>

And the final output would look like this (based on my CSS stylesheet on my site. Yours might look different):

Westminster Marlyand Martial Arts

Learn Martial Arts at Carrol County Kenpo Karate

This paragraph explains why people need to take martial arts lessons in Westminster Maryland.

Here is a list of important stuff:

Martial Arts for Kids

Martial Arts for Adults

Self-Defense Lessons

Don’t forget, this Westminster Martial Arts stuff is important!

In short, the search engines send automated bots called “spiders” to your website and they crawl all of the pages on your website then they store the results they find.

Whenever someone does a search, the search engines are actually returning results they have stored in their servers about your site and others like it.

Structuring your content correctly makes the search engine’s job easier and is the basis of search engine friendly design. If you don’t structure your content properly, it will be harder for them to accurately spider, and therefore index, your pages. And that can only hurt you when it comes to your sites search engine rankings.

Most martial arts sites I review only use paragraph tags and bolding on their pages. There is a lot of opportunity for your website if you’re not doing the rest. Be sure to emphasize the keywords or keyword phrases you are targeting, not just a sampling of random words.

A Final Note on Timing

Note it can take a couple of months for your rankings to change in the search results. The search engines do this on their own time so don’t expect immediate results. In time, however, you should start to see things climbing higher. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

Did this post help you better understand search engine optimization? Let me know in the form of a comment below!

Tags: onsite seo, Search Engine Optimization, seo

Blanketing the Search Engines

December 28, 2009 by Ryan Wheaton
Filed under Online Marketing

3 Comments

When it comes to marketing your business online do you solely rely on your martial arts school’s website to drive potential new students to your business or do you blanket the search engines?

I subscribe to the theory of blanketing the search engines and use a lot of third party websites to help give my salt lake city utah martial arts school more of a presence. This way I have more than one opportunity in the search results to attract potential new students.

Some might call this a shotgun approach but in online marketing relying on only one thing (your website) is just plain a bad idea. While it certainly should be a primary focus, you should also consider using these other tools to help build and grow your martial arts school as it gives you more opportunity to get your prospects attention.

Some examples to help you blanket your search results include local business directories, social media sites and paid search.

Local Directories

Google.com/local
local.yahoo.com
Bing.com/local
Yelp.com
InsiderPages.com
CitySearch.com
SuperPages.com
Local.com

With the directories mentioned above that are owned by a search engine, your school can be included in the local maps that appear at the top of the search results pages.

Further, the search engines weigh heavily on the local directories in many markets. Sometimes they list the directory (a ton of local martial arts businesses) and sometimes they list specific martial arts businesses. Either way, if it’s indexed and ranking well, you have a chance at more eyeballs looking at your page.

Social Media Sites

Facebook Fan Pages
Twitter
FriendFeed
YouTube
Flickr

The search engines love social media sites as they find them highly relevant because they are updated so frequently, among other reasons.

Paid Search

Google Adwords
Yahoo Advertising
Bing/Microsoft Advertising
Facebook Ads

Another big idea to consider is paid search. This is where you pay a search engine on a per click basis to have an ad in the “sponsored ads” section of the search results. You bid on different keywords for higher placement. So long as your daily budget isn’t exhausted and your competitors don’t outbid you, you’re in good shape. This can also be highly cost effective depending on your market. More on that in future posts.

With all of these sites and resources helping to blanket the search results, I don’t have to worry if one particular third party site gets devalued in the search results because Google was having a bad day. I have plenty of others to help pick up the slack. And, with paid search, you have a presence even if your website or other sites aren’t ranking well.

The great thing about this is that all of these, with the exception of Google’s Adwords, are free. And, best of all, these all drive people back to my lead generation website one way or another.

Blanketing the search engines is a good idea for your business. The more spaces you occupy in the search results the better your chances are at attracting more potential students.

Do you blanket the search engines? How do you do it?

Tags: facebook, local, paid search, ppc, social media

Email Marketing that Gets Prospective Martial Arts Students to Respond

December 10, 2009 by Ryan Wheaton
Filed under Online Marketing

2 Comments

This question came from one of our readers, John Young, in response to one of my posts (I need your help). Here is John’s question:

What is the best type of message to send out to potential new students? Those who sign up for more information on our school’s site receive an email I send to them. The emails contain all the information about a trial program and the procedure to follow to sign up. However, many of our leads do not respond to the email. Is there any guidelines for us to follow, when writing a message, that will make them want to pick up the phone or email back about joining our trial program?

And, the answer is yes, there are absolutely things you want to include that will help prospects want to respond.

Before I go into all that, let me say this topic is actually one of my favorites in online marketing.

The reasons is because the use of Email has transformed my business. I still get (and return phone) calls but the ratio is totally lopsided now at about 15:1 emails to phone calls.

Let’s just say I’ve learned a lot in the last nine years of replying to emails from potential students and converting them to students. And, if I had to do it all over again, I would make sure I started my business with email marketing just as I did from day one. It’s that important.

Now back to John’s question…

Here’s how you can increase response rates using email:

Email Basics

Have permission – Make sure you’re only sending emails to people who have directly asked you for it. Do not buy lists and send emails to people who haven’t requested information. This is SPAM.
Send frequent emails - Most martial arts schools send one email to their prospect and expect them to respond. Then they don’t send any follow up emails because they don’t think the prospect is interested. Remember, it can take up to 7 contacts before someone responds. This is a marathon and not a sprint.
Develop a campaign – Devise say 8 emails that are automatically are sent out of a course of 3 months with more frequency in the beginning and less towards the end of three months. Then test to see at what point you’re getting the most response then tune up your campaign as you get more people to respond closer to the time of sign up. Remember, that’s when they’re most interested so you have to front load the “good stuff” early. You can even write follow ups that are sent in 15-30 day increments so you can keep in touch.
Timing of emails – Timing is everything. You should have a system set up to instantly respond to inquiries. You can’t wait until the next day, you have to begin the process the second someone emails you because, again, you have to act while the prospect is most interested.
Use email software – This is one of the best investments you can make. I use Aweber.com to keep in touch with all my prospects, current students and past clients. This way, I don’t have to retype a ton of repetitive emails. I can send custom emails to all of my lists or just to some people on my list. My system responds 24 hours a day, 365 days a week. The best part is that no matter what time of day a person requests for more information, they instantly get an email from me…even when I’m sleeping.

Email Message Strategies

Subject line - I will actually do a separate post on this topic but needless to say it must capture your prospects attention and get them to want to read the rest of your email. Testing the best headlines for open rates is something you want to do and can easily do using Aweber.com.
Make an offer – Making an offer in your email will definitely help increase response rates. A hard offer is where you are stating specifically what they’ll receive by responding… “Receive one month of lessons with a black belt instructor for only $49!” while a soft offer is passive… “Contact us to learn about our holiday special” where there isn’t anything specific mentioned.
Call to action – A good call to action includes urging the prospect to respond now, includes the deadline, restates the offer and provides an easy way to contact you. Are you using strong calls to action or just hoping they know they should contact you now? Sending an email doesn’t automatically mean you expect a response. You have to ask for it.
Use hard deadlines – This alone can significantly increase response rates. When people there is a time limit, it drives them to take action. With no deadlines, people know they can put this off.
Social proof – Another good thing to include is social proof like testimonials or that other people are taking you up on your offer. If you’re sending HTML emails you can include photos with testimonials, which can be very powerful.
Keep emails on point- Your email shouldn’t be long winded. Keep it on point and remember you can break the message up into multiple emails. This way, you get the benefit of frequent messages and demonstrates you respect your prospects time. Plus, you maximize the communication.

Further, if you have a lot of references to “free” in your email, you might be getting caught in spam filters at a mail client level or at the ISP level. Here are some other words and phrases that might flag your email as spam:

50% off!
Click Here
Call now!
Subscribe
Discount!
You’re a Winner!
Information you requested
“Stop” or “Stops”
Lose Weight
Opportunity
Amazing
Satisfaction Guaranteed

John, I hope this thoroughly answered your question and that it helped give you some ideas to consider to get more response to your email.

For everyone else with experience, what else would you add to this list of important email ideas?

Tags: email, email marketing

Martial Arts Commercials

October 12, 2009 by Ryan Wheaton
Filed under Online Marketing

5 Comments

If you’re looking for ideas on how to put together a commercial for your martial arts school that will air either on television or online, perhaps these videos I found on YouTube.com will help get your creative juices flowing.

Videos are a great way to help people visualize what you have to offer in a way that is hard to do with just words and pictures. After sifting through dozens of videos, these are some of the ones that stood out to me.

Some of the martial arts commercials below aired on television while some were just made for online viewing. See what you think: