Local Businesses Look to Internet to Help Maximize Reach

March 5th, 2010 by Jason Koop No comments »

Are SEO Agencies Meeting Local Business Needs? 

In a recent post I  joked about all the different ways I use a phone book besides actually looking for a phone number. While I’m not perusing for phone numbers in a book, I wonder if the same holds true for most households.  Are local businesses catching on to the internet as a method of local business searching? 

As recently as a few years ago, you’d have to be specific in your searching to find the right business. Yahoo and Google crawlers did not pick up on the locality of the user conducting the search. Because I live in Utah, if I wanted to throw my five-year-old son a birthday bash at Chuck E. Cheese’s I made sure I entered in the search field: “Chuck E. Cheese’s Salt Lake City”. It wasn’t terribly cumbersome but I do appreciate that all I have to do now is just enter Chuck E. Cheese’s.

Interent searching is smarter today. Nothing can be easier than just entering the type of service, or the exact name of the business and voila, results are split second fast (at least on my cable connection), and thanks to Google Maps I can see the location and contact information of the business in proximity to my location. If local businesses are not already trying to tap how they can boost exposure through  ever-popular local search methods, they soon will be.

The question is are these small businesses going to take the time to cite their business on internet directories and regularly conduct DIY SEO? Business owners may soon realize the work it takes to get a high listing on Google Maps and will be reaching out to an SEO agency for help. Perhaps these businesses will have the budget to have an outside consultant get them to where they want to be. An SEO agency may have a range of plans that fit the needs of different types of clients.

If you are an SEO agency and offer local businesses an SEO consulting plan, can you commit the resources to this emerging market and still maintain favorable margins? At Boostability we’re aware that high-performing and reputable SEO agencies retain top talent to effectively manage their clients’ needs. What may be challenging is meeting expectations for local businesses with smaller budgets. 

Our main goal at Boostability is to provide the tools necessary to cut through the tediousness of cumbersome SEO tasks. Our campaign management software is designed to address multiple domains with clear cut automated workflow for each of them. SEO analysts can log in to the tool online and follow the set of instructions.  SEO agency managers can view the progress their analysts are making and provide input.

In addition, our software tool includes centralized dashboards and reporting that can be accessed internally to review campaign status.  Clients may also have access to reporting to follow the progress of their campaign.

If you want to learn more about how our suite of tools can help create additional business opportunities please contact us at sales@boostability.com

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Posted in Local Online Marketing, SEO Agency, Small Business

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Boostability Press Release, March 3, 2010

March 2nd, 2010 by Jason Koop No comments »

Agencies Use SEO Campaign Management Software to Deliver results for Small Businesses

Small businesses need a cost effective local search solution. Internet marketing agencies are addressing the market, but need tools and campaign management software to deliver high value to the customer in a cost effective way. Boostability offers a web-based solution that automates local search campaigns.   

Lehi, Utah (Boostability) – Travis Thorpe, CEO and co-founder of Boostability, a search engine optimization (SEO) campaign management solution provider, is painfully aware of the problems Internet marketing agencies face when servicing smaller-sized customers. “Local businesses need a cost-effective solution.  Traditional SEO strategies and consultation can be too expensive for them,” Thorpe explains. “There’s a big difference between national SEO campaigns and local search campaigns.  We’re certain the bulk of the work for the local campaigns can be automated with dynamic software to deliver high results.”  

Yet, Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO), a global non-profit serving the search engine marketing (SEM) industry, posted on its website that SEM spending in 2008 totaled $13.4 billion. By 2013 the number is expected reach $26.1 billion. That exponential leap is causing these marketing agencies to take notice.

Large enterprises will continue to pay for search engine marketing, so where is the extra spending going to come from?  Thorpe believes a large chunk of the money will be drawn from local businesses entering the search market.  Marketing agencies will be adapting to meet their needs. This translates to the agency maximizing its efficiencies if they want to see strong profit returns.

“I was the CTO for a large Internet marketing firm. We had thousands of clients from Fortune 500 to smaller, local companies.  I saw firsthand the problems we had trying to deliver expected levels of service to local businesses,” he says. “It would have been nice to have campaign management software to define the work flow, automate redundant SEO activities, and provide reporting to our customers.”

Instead of losing sleep over it, Thorpe and fellow founder and President, Rick Horsley, got to work. Thorpe left his employer and in February 2009 Boostability was born. The founders recruited top talent and launched their web-based SEO campaign management technology company.

Currently, the application is live and being utilized by thousands of users, ranging from web hosting providers, Internet marketing agencies, and small business owners.  “My dream has become reality. Our team has created a product that can help agencies efficiently meet the needs of their local search clients.”

Boostability’s technology provides easy to use workflow processes that generate relevant action items. Agencies have the ability to white label the management platform to provide seamless automated reporting to their customers. Thorpe adds, “It provides a turn-key solution for agencies that want to provide a local search solution and deliver the quality reporting their customers are hungry for.” He thinks this can bode well for retention rates – which is essential to any marketing agency.

About Boostability:

Boostability provides an integrated enterprise level SEO software platform for Internet marketing companies and professionals that service the SMB marketplace. Its enterprise workflow platform gives the ability to manage up to tens of thousands of customer campaigns and was designed for the marketing professional to scale their operations and reach.

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Posted in Local Online Marketing

Return on Investment (ROI) Reporting Made Accessible

February 15th, 2010 by Jason Koop No comments »

“Show me The Money!”

SEO is tricky business. You may be operating a firm and have a staff of highly qualified analysts working earnestly to service your customers’ needs. Internally, you’re able to monitor work-load activities, cross off action items, set goals, and track domain progress.

With all you are doing to operate a high-functioning SEO agency, how is the reporting you offer your customers? Are you able to provide transparent reporting activities and dashboards that display a range of detail ensuring them they are getting what they pay for? Can the customer access these reports through an on-line account? If not, can they contact their account representative and quickly be provided this information?

Many SEO agencies do not offer effective ROI reporting. This is common in the industry and there are no standards that customers can expect. This may lead to their frustration. Even the best SEO agencies suffer from troubling retention rates as customers become agitated spending hundreds, if not thousands of dollars per month and not being sure they are making any headway in their on-line marketing campaign. They want assurances that the money they pay you is delivering them tangible results.  

Boostability was formed to solve the reporting pains your agency may be faced with. We come from a large SEO agency that, even now, caters to thousands of customers but is weak in reporting. We experienced the frustration of not fully meeting the customers’ needs.  So what did we do? We left and started something revolutionary.

Put simply, we spent all our energies and efforts building an SEO enterprise solution that can assist your agency in delivering what your customers are looking for, namely a full suite of centralized reporting dashboards that clearly show the progress your efforts are making for them.

Our programmers have tapped all the analytical assists we could gather, including Google Analytics and Alexa Rank, and have thrown in our own mixture of diagnostic dashboards to provide breakthrough reporting solutions that will wow your customers. 

Some of our reporting includes:

  • Competition - A report that compares the customer’s  site to their competition. This information is drawn from the Alexa Rank, Google Page Rank, inbound links, and pages indexed to calculate the customer’s competitors’ scores in relation to them.
  • Page Index - A report that shows the number of web pages from the customer’s website that the various search engines have indexed, or added to their results pages.
  • Google Page Rank -  A link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to the customer’s site on a scale of 0 to 10 (10 being the highest). The purpose of this number reveals to your customer the relevance of their website on the Web.
  • Keyword Ranking - A report that allows the customer to see the current search engine rank for each keyword they are focusing on, and also shows a history of how those rankings have evolved over time.
  • Actions and Traffic: Boostability’s  SEO enterprise solution provides action items for your analysts to accomplish on your customer’s behalf. Such actions are in line with your current activities, including back-linking and registry updates. This report provides graphical analysis that reveals if these actions are having an impact on the customer’s website over time.
  • Overall Web-page Scoring – A collection of analyzed data to deliver an overall score based on every section reported on.

Our intentions are to assist an SEO agency’s goal of delivering superior customer service. The results of this translate to a satisfied customer that sticks with you for a long time.

Boostability also offers these reporting tools to small businesses with limited on-line marketing budgets that want to manage their own SEO.

For more information please call us at 1-800-261-1537 or email us at sales@boostability.com.

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Posted in Local Online Marketing, ROI Reporting, SEO Agency

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