Joseph Colarusso, Author at Cloud Control Media

How a New Website Can Help in Home Services Marketing

Joseph Colarusso on June 4, 2025

Home services businesses traditionally relied on local advertising and word-of-mouth marketing to find new customers. While these marketing efforts can still be effective, online and digital marketing are now more important – especially because the customer journey almost always starts online. How do you grow your business’s online presence? Start by creating and managing a new website. A new website offers many advantages that can help improve your home services marketing.

Tell Your Story with Home Services Marketing

Every successful home services business has a unique story. Maybe your business has been family-owned for generations. Or maybe your business volunteers in the local community. No matter your business’s history, telling your story can boost home services marketing. Research suggests that customers prefer to work with businesses to which they feel a connection. Your website gives you an opportunity to explain your business’s history, identify your values, showcase community efforts, and highlight employees. All this can establish a personal connection between you and your customers.

Grow Your Home Services Audience with Content Marketing

A new website for your home services business gives you a place to publish unique content that targets keywords that your audience searches. Content marketing helps you build awareness, differentiate your company from competitors, and showcase expertise in your home services industry. Everything you include on your website is content. Some of the most effective types of content marketing are:

Blog posts
Ebooks
Case studies
Whitepapers
Videos
Images

Reach Potential Customers with Home Services Blog Content

As previously mentioned, the home services customer journey starts online. In fact, over half of consumers do an online search before scheduling an appointment with a business. Many of these online searches are informational rather than transactional. In other words, consumers research topics and ideas before they are ready to find a business. One way for your home services business to appear in these informational searches is to publish blog content on your website. The best home services blogs target topics that are relevant to your business and audience. For example, if you own a flooring company, you can publish blogs about types of flooring, flooring trends, flooring installation, flooring maintenance, and so on. This is a great way to raise awareness with potential customers before your competitors do.

AI Search and Home Services Marketing

Google launched AI search results in 2024, and they appeared in almost half of online searches by the end of the year. As such, AI search undoubtedly changed the way your audience finds and interacts with home services topics and businesses. Our research shows that having a blog on your website makes it more likely that your business will show up in Ai searches.

Boost Home Services Marketing with Customer Reviews and Testimonials

Customer reviews are critical for home services businesses because they help you build trust with potential customers. But it is not enough to have a few positive reviews about your business. Studies show that consumers read an average of 10 reviews before being able to trust a business.

Customers often write reviews on platforms such as Google Business, Facebook, and other local listings websites. However, you can also encourage customers to leave reviews and testimonials on your business website. This gives you some control over how the reviews are displayed, and it also makes it easy for you to respond to any negative reviews. You can even add schema markup to your website so that these reviews are eligible to appear directly in Google search results.

Communicate with Customers on Your Website

Reviews and testimonials are one way that you can use your website to communicate with customers. You can also create a contact page that includes a submission form, phone number, and other contact information. A contact page makes it easy for customers to connect with you after you complete a home project – which increases the likelihood of repeat and referral business.

Another option is to include a live chat feature on your website. This makes it possible for customers and potential customers to directly connect with your business in real time. Some live chat options use AI to quickly answer questions even if you are not available.

Capture Home Services Marketing Leads on Your Website

Many home services businesses choose paid marketing channels such as pay-per-click and affiliate marketing for lead generation. However, paid leads, especially if they are qualified, can be expensive. Creating a new website and leveraging content marketing and search engine optimization can help you capture organic leads. These leads are not totally free, but they are much less expensive than paid leads. More importantly, our research shows that organic leads are more likely to convert to customers than paid leads.

You can then include lead forms on your website so that these potential customers can submit their information. Lead forms collect important information such as name, address, phone number, and so on. Beyond that, you can use your website to schedule in-person consultations and free estimates with potential customers.

Connect to Google Business and Other Home Services Listings

Home services businesses rely on Google Business more than any other online platform. Why? Google Business listings appear in almost every local search result. Creating a new website and connecting it to Google Business can boost visibility for your business listing. Google can even show information from your website directly in your Google Business listing. Google Business is only one of many online business directories. There are even directories unique to home services industries. Adding your website address to these directories helps you connect to potential customers who use these directories to find businesses. Also, business listings with a website address often show up higher in directory search results.

Analyze Home Services Marketing and Customer Trends on Your Website

After you create your home services website, you can add tracking and use tools to measure website performance. A free tool like Google Analytics allows you to view website traffic, engagement, and other common marketing metrics. All this can help you better understand your customers and any questions they have related to your business.

You can also use Google Analytics to collect audience demographics such as:

Age
City
Country
Region
Gender
Interests
Language

Demographics information, while not entirely accurate in Google Analytics, helps you better understand your potential customers. For example, you may find out that you have more potential customers than expected in a nearby town. You can then adjust your marketing spend accordingly.

Cloud Control Media and Home Services Marketing

Are you ready to create or update your home services website? Cloud Control Media can help you every step of the way. We offer performance digital marketing services to handle website projects from start to finish.

~Joseph Colarusso is the Director of SEO at Cloud Control Media

How to Measure SEO Performance for Your Website

Joseph Colarusso on April 2, 2025

The best search engine optimization (SEO) strategies incorporate technical SEO and content so that your website reaches your target audience with messages that matter to them. Measuring SEO performance for your website, however, is not as simple as counting website visitors. There are many important SEO key performance indicators that you must review to assess your SEO strategies.

Popular SEO Performance Tracking Tools for Websites

Before you measure SEO performance, you must set up the appropriate tracking for your website. Many free and paid performance tools are available.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics, a free tool from Google, is one of the most widely used SEO performance tools. Analytics provides detailed data and information about your website visitors. You can view website sessions and users by channel (organic, paid, referral, etc.) and by webpage. Analytics also includes audience information like location, device type, and browser type.

In addition to user and session information, Google Analytics tracks common website events like pageviews, file downloads, and clicks. You can also create custom events to measure website conversions or other important actions.

Google Analytics reports snapshot

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is another free tool that shows technical and keyword performance for your website. For technical SEO, you can view how Google crawls and indexes your webpages. For keywords, Search Console lists all keywords for which your website receives impressions and clicks in Google organic search.

SEO Keyword Tools

Since Search Console’s keyword reports are limited, you must choose an SEO keyword tool for detailed performance. While free tools are available, the best keyword tools are paid versions of SEMrush and Moz.

These paid keyword tools allow you to track keyword rankings, identify content gaps, and conduct competitor research. You can also use these tools to research and find target keywords for website content.

Website Crawlers

For advanced technical website analysis, you can use a website crawler like Screaming Frog. These tools can crawl your website and identify all technical components, including URLs, redirects, meta tags, schema markup, and so on. Crawlers also help you find and fix broken links or other technical errors.

Website Heatmapping Tools

Heatmapping tools like Hotjar and Microsoft Clarity are mainly for conversion rate optimization efforts, but you can use them for SEO performance as well. These tools show you exactly how website visitors engage with webpages and content. You can even view actual website sessions from organic search.

Heatmap of homepage

SEO Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Websites

Once you have the right tools available, you can review the most important KPIskey performance indicators to measure SEO performance.

Keyword Visibility and Rankings

Although the online landscape continues to evolve, SEO is still all about keywords. You must review all keywords for which your website ranks in organic search. While it is important to track all your keywords, you should prioritize keywords in the top 10 of organic search results. This is because studies suggest that most organic clicks occur in the top 10 (or first page) of Google search results.

In addition to keyword rankings, you should also track your website’s Google search features. Keyword tools like SEMrush show your website’s featured snippets, AI overviews, local packs, and other features. These search features continue to appear more and more in search results.

Impressions and Clicks

Organic impressions and clicks, which are available in Search Console, provide an overview of website visibility in Google organic search. Organic impressions are how many times your website appears in organic search results. Organic clicks are how many times somebody clicks on one of your organic listings.

Impressions are becoming increasingly important with the rise of zero-click searches in Google. Google often answers queries directly in search results, so you do not always receive clicks even with top keyword rankings. In these cases, impressions nonetheless indicate how frequently your audience sees your website in organic search.

Google Search Console report

Website Traffic

Website traffic remains one of the default performance measures for SEO. There are two common metrics in Google Analytics for traffic: users and sessions.

Users: unique visitors to your website
Sessions: individual website visits to your website

Sessions are usually greater than users because one user can have multiple sessions.

To assess SEO performance, you should filter website traffic by organic channels. The most common organic channel is organic search, but there are others like organic social, organic YouTube, and Google Business. You can also filter traffic by page to identify top-performing content.

Branded vs Nonbranded Website Traffic

Another consideration with website traffic is whether it comes from branded or nonbranded keywords. Branded keywords include your brand name, business name, or any other terms and even acronyms that directly relate to your brand. In general, nonbranded traffic is a better measure of SEO performance. An increase in nonbranded traffic likely indicates that your SEO efforts are helping you increase your online audience. Branded traffic is not as important because you will almost always rank for branded keywords – regardless of your SEO strategies.

A simple way to measure nonbranded vs branded performance is to filter out branded keywords in your reporting.

Website Engagement and Events

Keyword visibility, impressions, clicks, and traffic measure how people get to your website. Engagement metrics show what they do after they visit your website. Popular engagement metrics in Google Analytics are:

Session duration: how long do sessions last
Pages per session: how many pages visitors view per session
Bounce rate: percentage of visitors who leave without taking another action (such as viewing another page)

For more advanced website engagement reports, you can use a tool like Hotjar to create heatmaps, scrollmaps, and clickmaps for priority webpages.

Website Conversions

The most important engagement metric is conversion. Common website conversion actions are contact submissions and requests for more information. However, you can set up additional conversions for button clicks, link clicks, file downloads, and so on. Not only should you track conversion amounts; but you should also track conversion rate (conversions divided by users or sessions).

Tracking conversion rate by channel and page is important because it gives you an idea how your SEO efforts relate to actual business performance. For example, you may find that certain website content is more likely to generate conversions than others. Conversion also helps you calculate an estimated return on investment (ROI) for SEO.

Google Analytics events report

Domain Authority and Backlinks to Website

A backlink is any link from an external website to your website. Backlinks have historically been one of the most significant measures of SEO performance. In fact, Google’s original PageRank algorithm prioritized backlinks to rank websites. While the algorithm has significantly changed since then, backlinks remain a critical SEO measure. A simple way to view backlinks is as votes to your website content. When somebody links to your website, it is as if they vote that your content is valuable. That said, backlink quality is more important than quantity. A backlink from a popular, highly-regarded website is usually more valuable than one (or even two) from a less popular website.

Many keyword tools use a metric called domain authority to measure backlink profiles. Domain authority factors in the quantity and quality of backlinks, spam, and among other factors, to give your website an authority score. The higher the score, the more likely you are to rank in relevant search results. Domain authority scores range from 1-100, with 100 being the highest authority. An example of a high-authority website is coursera.org. Coursera’s Moz domain authority score is 92 because it has quality website content, 400,000 ranked organic keywords, backlinks from over 240,000 domains, and a 1% spam score.

CloudControlMedia and SEO Agency Services

Researching, planning, implementing, and measuring SEO strategies can be daunting for business owners and website managers. Fortunately, CloudControlMedia is here to help. We offer SEO services that align traditional SEO best practices with your unique business goals. Our analytics and reporting team can also create custom reports to track all your SEO performance data in one place. Contact us today to learn more.

Is SEO Part of Performance Marketing?

Joseph Colarusso on October 30, 2024

Most performance marketing strategies feature paid services like search engine marketing (SEM) and social media advertising. But marketers often exclude organic services like search engine optimization (SEO) from performance marketing. While SEO is clearly different than performance marketing, SEO can and should function alongside performance marketing strategies.

What Is SEO?

SEO is the process of updating your website, as well as other business properties like Google Business, to increase visibility in organic search engine results. The goal of SEO is for your website to show up when and where your target audience searches.

SEO strategies generally include services such as keyword research, technical website optimization, on-page website optimization, content optimization, and local SEO.

What Is Performance Marketing?

Performance marketing is a strategy by which you only pay for digital marketing services when they result in specific goals. For example, with a performance SEM campaign, you pay when somebody clicks on the ad – not whenever the ad appears in search results. The goal of performance marketing is to increase metrics like clicks, leads, and sales.

Common performance marketing channels are SEM, social media marketing, affiliate marketing, and email marketing.

Differences Between SEO and Performance Marketing

Most digital marketing separate SEO and performance marketing. Each has different goals, timeframes, marketing funnel applications, and return on investment (ROI) calculations.

Short-Term vs Long-Term Digital Marketing Goals

Performance marketing campaigns have short-term objectives. The idea is to generate a specific number of clicks or leads every month. SEO, however, has a longer-term focus. Rather than focusing on the next month, the best SEO strategies prioritize increased keyword visibility and organic traffic throughout the year.

SEO Is More Sustainable than Performance Marketing

Given its longer-term focus, SEO is more sustainable than performance marketing. Optimizing on-page content or fixing technical website errors in September can improve performance in September, October, November, and so on. On the other hand, performance marketing is not as sustainable because of its “pay-to-play” model. If you pay $1,000 for 100 clicks in September, you will almost certainly need to pay $1,000 for another 100 clicks in October.

Marketing Funnel Applications for SEO and Performance Marketing

Like all marketing activities, SEO and performance marketing play roles in the traditional marketing funnel. That said, their respective roles are at different stages of the funnel. SEO is more useful higher up in the marketing funnel because it generates awareness and increases visibility. At these stages, the audience seeks information and is not quite ready to convert. Performance marketing occurs lower in the funnel when the audience is closer to conversion.

Measurable Performance and Direct ROI with Performance Marketing

Digital marketers love performance marketing because it is totally transparent and measurable. You can see exact values for spend, impressions, clicks, leads, and even sales. As such, performance marketing campaigns show direct ROI. For the most part, SEO strategies are not as measurable. While you can measure keyword rankings and organic traffic, it is nearly impossible to connect these to specific SEO activities.

Similarities Between SEO and Performance Marketing

While SEO and performance marketing represent different activities, they share important similarities. SEO and performance marketing involve the same digital metrics, and they also function in platforms such as Google and Meta.

Digital Marketing Metrics Are the Same

Performance marketing and SEO share the same core set of digital marketing metrics. Key performance metrics include impressions, clicks, and click-through rate. The application of these metrics is different (impressions, for example, are more relevant to SEO than performance marketing), but the calculations and analysis remain pretty much the same.

Ultimate Marketing Goal Is Increased Leads

The ultimate goal of performance marketing is to drive leads. You can pay for leads directly or pay for clicks that potentially become leads. SEO lead performance is not as direct, but increased leads are the ultimate goal for SEO as well. The whole point of improving keyword visibility and traffic is so they can increase leads somewhere down the line – even if this increase is more difficult to measure.

Performance Marketing and SEO and Digital Marketing Channels

SEO and performance marketing both are digital marketing strategies. This means that they function in the same digital platforms. Google search results pages include ads (performance marketing), affiliate sites (performance marketing), local listings (SEO) and business websites (SEO). Social media platforms like Meta contain performance marketing and SEO listings as well.

How SEO Can Help Performance Marketing

SEO is not included in any performance marketing campaign – but quality SEO services can still improve performance marketing.

SEO Can Improve Brand Visibility

Performance marketing is all about driving clicks and leads from an audience that already knows your business (to a certain extent). But what about people who have yet to encounter your business? SEO can act as a branding tool and fill in these gaps with performance marketing. Publishing optimized blog content or updating your Google Business listing are good ways to get your business name in front of your audience.

SEO Can Increase Flow into Marketing Funnel

As a branding tool, SEO can increase flow into and even through the marketing funnel. Effective SEO can increase the number of people who make their way to the later stages of the funnel. This results in a larger and more engaged audience for your performance marketing campaigns. A larger audience means more impressions, more clicks, and more leads.

More Efficient Keyword Spending with SEO

Performance SEM and social media campaigns target branded and nonbranded search terms. Nonbranded search terms are generally more competitive and therefore more expensive than branded. What if you targeted some of these expensive nonbranded terms with SEO? Then you would have more budget with your performance marketing campaigns to spend on the most valuable nonbranded terms.

CloudControlMedia (CCM) offers a full suite of performance marketing services like SEM, programmatic advertising, social media advertising, and email marketing. We bolster our performance marketing services with SEO and content marketing.

By Joseph Colarusso, Director of SEO Services

Emergence of New Search Experiences in 2024 and Beyond

Joseph Colarusso on February 21, 2024

Ask any search engine optimization (SEO) professional or business owner about the goal of SEO, and you will receive the same response: to rank on the first page of Google. Why worry about other search results if Google still accounts for over 90% of all online searches?

Nevertheless, even with Google’s dominance, new technologies continue to emerge and change the way people search for information. Gone are the days of people relying on Google’s 10 blue organic links. Now, people search on their computers, tablets, phones, and other smart devices, all of which provide unique search experiences. Successful SEO strategies in 2024 and beyond must incorporate these new experiences. The most important experiences relate to artificial intelligence, local search directories, and social and community platforms.

Artificial Intelligence in Google and Bing Search Engines Results

Artificial intelligence (AI) is at the top of everybody’s mind in 2024. AI impacts all forms of technology, including search engines. Both Google and Bing now leverage AI applications to create more dynamic search experiences.

Google Search Generative Experience (SGE): Google launched the test version of SGE, its AI-powered search update, in the middle of 2023. SGE expanded over the next few months, and a November 2023 study suggested that more than 75% of Google searches showed AI results. Google’s SGE provides concise and visual topic overviews directly in the search results. It even uses AI to predict and answer follow-up queries. As such, a single search query may provide users with the same level of information they used to get with three to four queries.
Bing Copilot: Microsoft announced Copilot, an AI chat platform, in November 2023. Copilot integrates with Microsoft’s suite of applications, including Bing. With Copilot’s AI capabilities, Bing’s new search experience is like Google’s SGE. Bing results will often include a new sidebar that shows additional information related to the search query. However, what sets Bing apart are the new chat features. Users can directly chat with an automated assistant that helps them refine searches with more details.

How Google and Bing Artificial Intelligence Impacts SEO

New AI search engine capabilities change the search landscape, but they do not impact SEO strategies or best practices all that much. Publishing well-researched and relevant content remains the best way to rank in organic search. If anything, AI search only reinforces the importance of great content. First-page search results almost always showcase relevant content from reputable sources.

What AI search does, however, is limit the organic traffic that websites receive. Google and Bing continue to answer queries directly in search results, so there often is no reason for users to click on organic listings. Most business owners and marketers should expect less traffic to their websites moving forward. That said, less traffic does not necessarily mean less visibility. Businesses that publish quality content can reach their audiences in new AI research results, even if the level of reach is difficult to track.

Local Search with Apple Business Connect

Local SEO updates and optimizations are the best ways for businesses to connect with their local audiences. However, changes to the local search landscape mean that businesses must look beyond their location pages and prioritize offsite platforms. Google Business remains the dominant local search platform, but Apple Business Connect is primed to grow in 2024.

Apple introduced Apple Business Connect in January 2023. The tool looks and feels like Google Business. Businesses can create profiles, add contact information, upload photos, and publish updates. The main difference is that Apple Business Connect integrates with Apple Maps instead of Google Maps. There are two reasons why Apple Business Connect will emerge as a realistic alternative to Google Business:

Apple Maps market share: While Google Maps remains the dominant maps platform for smartphone users, Apple Maps continues to make strides toward second place. Near Media estimated that Apple Maps’ market share on iPhones grew to 37% in 2023. It is no coincidence that this market share growth occurred after the Apple Business Connect launch.
Apple Siri integration: Siri, Apple’s voice assistant, integrates with every Apple operating system and device. In the past, Siri provided users with basic information like directions and phone number. Now, Siri shares more detailed information from Apple Business Connect. Businesses now can connect with customers directly in Siri results.

How Apple Business Connect Impacts SEO

Business owners and SEO professionals must incorporate Apple Business Connect in their local search strategies. The easiest action to take is to treat Apple Business Connect like Google Business: claim business listings, update information, add URL tracking, optimize with relevant keywords, and publish content. Apple Business Connect does not quite have Google Business’s user base, but it will only grow in importance moving forward.

Social and Community Search Engines

While traditional search engines like Google and Bing still dominate the search landscape, they are not the only places people search. The truth is that people now go beyond search engines to find businesses and products. For example, social media platforms and community forums function as search engine for certain audiences.

Social media: Marketers and business owners already know the importance of social media platforms like Facebook. These platforms have search engine capabilities because users can search for businesses, products, images, people, business reviews, and so on.
Community forums: Many people do not realize that community forums like Reddit are search engines. Reddit alone has more than 45 million searches every day. Beyond that, Reddit posts appear in Google and Bing organic searches. More niche community forums exist in other markets and industries.
Video: People spend more and more time watching videos on platforms like YouTube. As such, YouTube receives more searches than any platform other than Google. People often research businesses and products on YouTube to hear from experts. And newer platforms like TikTok become increasingly important for younger audiences who want more visual search results.

How Social and Community Search Engines Impact SEO

Google and other traditional search engines remain the focus of SEO strategies and plans. However, the best SEO strategies incorporate social and community platforms as well. Business owners should prioritize the social platforms that matter the most to their audiences. Even something as simple as reviewing relevant Reddit threads may provide valuable information. Above all, businesses must reach existing and potential customers whenever and wherever they search.

CloudControlMedia and SEO

CloudControlMedia’s SEO and content marketing teams can help you plan, design, and write location pages for your website. Visit our agency services page to explore our digital marketing offerings.

Joseph Colarusso is our Director of SEO Services. With nearly a decade of digital marketing experience, Joseph uses his expertise to design, develop, implement, and manage SEO strategies that improve visibility in organic search for our clients.

Location Pages for SEO

Joseph Colarusso on September 20, 2023

What Are Location Pages?

Location pages are webpages that include all important information about individual business locations. These pages generally feature standard information such as your business name and address, as well as more customized content like testimonials and images. Ideally, you should create a single location page for each location. A business with three locations therefore should have three location pages on its website.

Most local businesses can create city-level location pages. That is, each location page represents a city where you have an official location. However, if you have a large business that operates in multiple states, you can consider state-level location pages in addition to city-level.

Why Location Pages Are Important for SEO

Location pages are important for SEO because they help businesses engage local audiences. As an example, let’s consider that business with three locations. Each business location likely has unique products and services and customer interests. Targeting these customers with local content that resonates with them is more impactful than relying on general content. Customers want to see content (such as business information and reviews) that meets their own needs.

In addition, location pages help your website stand out in organic search. Anybody who uses search engines like Google knows that search results are more competitive than ever. Not only do you compete with other local businesses; you also compete with industry websites and other affiliates. Creating location pages gives you an inside track to appear in online search results that matter most to your bottom line. Focusing on less competitive and local searches is more efficient and impactful.

What to Include in SEO Location Pages

The best location pages include local content that is meaningful to your business and your customers. Here are some important content opportunities for your pages:

Location-Specific Keywords

Creating optimized location pages always starts with keyword research. First, use keyword tools to determine how people search for the products and services that you offer. Then, do additional research to find out if these keywords vary by location. You may be surprised to see that people in different locations use their own terms for the same products and services.

Business Information: Name, Address, Phone Number

Standard business information such as name, address, and phone number (commonly referred to as NAP) is a must for any location page. Be sure to include the official mailing address and the phone number you wish customers to use.

Map Location and Directions

To supplement the business address, add a local map that shows exactly where your business is located. Embedding Google Maps on your website is a relatively easy way to accomplish this. In addition to a local map, incorporate easy-to-follow directions to your business location. Do not be afraid to include popular nearby landmarks for extra context.

Customer Reviews and Testimonials

Every business owner knows the importance of customer reviews and testimonials. They are the best form of marketing and therefore should feature prominently on location pages. Reviews and testimonials are valuable on location pages because they drive engagement. Website visitors are likely to stay on your location pages to read reviews. Beyond that, search engines like Google consider reviews and testimonials as important SEO signals.

If possible, feature location-specific customer reviews and testimonials on your website locations. Try not to show the same reviews on each page. One way to do this is to rely on a website plugin that can pull reviews from local directories like Google Business.

User-Generated Content

Customer reviews and testimonials are types of user-generated content. User-generated content is content that your customers publish about your business. In addition to reviews, social media posts and videos are popular types.

User-generated content is often more impactful than your own content. Potential customers are more likely to trust other customers.

Local News and Events

Local news and events, such as sales and promotions, are important pieces of local content. Consistently update your location pages with important news to keep your customers coming back for more.

Location Images and Other Local Photos

Share your best location images on your pages. Photos of your office, store, and even your staff can help you connect with your audience in a more personal way.

Do you own a business (such as a home services business) that does on-site work? Be sure to feature photos of your completed jobs., including before and after shots of your work. Job photos give you a chance to express your knowledge and expertise.

Nearby Areas that You Serve

You likely attract customers from cities or neighborhoods that are close to your locations. Include these nearby areas on your location pages to let potential customers know your reach. The areas served section is also a great place to reference more commonly used location terms (for example, Greater Boston Area or North Shore).

Links to Social Media Pages

Customers, both existing and potential, love to connect with you on social media. Start these connections by linking your social media pages on your location pages. In some cases, you may want to embed social media content directly on your pages.

Contact Form or Button

Location pages not only drive website traffic; they also drive website conversions. Add calls to action on your location pages to make it easy for potential customers to contact you.

Incorporating a contact form on your location pages is a good way to collect customer information.

SEO Best Practices and Optimizations for Location Pages

There are a few SEO best practices you can follow to get the most out of your location pages. These best practices will help you maximize the impact of your pages in organic search.

Add Location to Meta Tags

Every page on your website has meta tags like the meta title and meta description. For your location pages, adding your location to the meta tags is a way to clearly define these pages to website visitors and to search engines. In most cases, including the city name is sufficient. For example, if you are a flooring installer with a location in Boston, an appropriate meta title may be “Flooring Installer in Boston, MA.”

Create Internal Links to Product Pages and Blog Posts

Your business website likely has pages for your products and services. Maybe you publish blog posts as well. Be sure to create links to your website content on the location pages. Linking to additional content keeps website visitors engaged and makes them more likely to convert.

Link Google Business Profiles to Location Pages

Google Business, formerly known as Google My Business, is one of the most important platforms for local businesses. Google Business functions as the modern-day Yellow Pages and connects businesses and customers. It is crucial to create Google Business profiles for your individual locations so they show up in Search and Maps. Beyond that, a best practice is to link these profiles to your website location pages.

Directly linking Google Business to your location pages is a great way to engage your local website visitors. These visitors are likely to stay on your website if they see local content as opposed to a general homepage.

Add Location Pages in Website Main Menu

The main menu on a website helps visitors navigate and find the content that matters to them the most. As such, it is important to prioritize your location pages in the main menu. One way to do this is to add a navigation link group that includes all location pages in a convenient dropdown.

Include Local Business Schema Markup (Structured Data)

Schema markup, or structured data, is special code you can add to a webpage that categorizes the webpage for search engines like Google and Bing. Adding local business schema is a way for you to clearly tell search engines that your location page is designed for a unique and real business location. Please note that schema markup is only included in the webpage’s HTML and is not visible on the page.

Common Mistakes to Avoid with SEO Location Pages

Watch Out for Duplicate Content

Odds are your locations share similar business information, products and services, and even audiences. Even if this is the case, do not copy and paste content from one location page to another. Duplicate content may prevent potential customers from finding your best website content. Search engines can usually spot duplicate content and consequently remove your pages from search results.

You can likely avoid duplicate content by customizing your location pages as much as possible. Location-specific testimonials, photos, and news can help. There are also duplicate content tools you can use to confirm that your location pages are unique.

Only Create Location Pages for Places with Actual Locations

Location pages must relate to cities or states in which you actually have business locations. You may attract customers in nearby cities, but that does not mean you should create pages for those cities. You can include these nearby cities in the areas served sections of your location pages.

Do Not Hide Any Negative Reviews

Reviews and testimonials are crucial for location pages – even the negative ones. Hiding negative reviews gives the wrong impression to potential customers. They will be skeptical of your business if they only see positive reviews on the website.

In some cases, you can turn a negative review into a positive by commenting and showing your commitment to fixing any problems. Potential customers like to see how you connect with and support your customers.

CloudControlMedia and SEO

CloudControlMedia’s SEO and content marketing teams can help you plan, design, and write location pages for your website. Visit our agency services page to explore our digital marketing offerings.

Do You Have Pride in Your Email Marketing?

Joseph Colarusso on June 22, 2022

It’s June, which means it’s Pride Month AND it’s Email Month! Not to mention it’s almost summer. What a great time of year! And with summer approaching, depending on your industry, you might be hitting a slower time for your business, which means it’s a perfect time to take a deep dive into how your email marketing efforts are holding up.

Email Metrics

One area you’re going to want to take particular interest in is the impact that Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) has had on your email campaigns and how you should measure results. Since the public launch of iOS15 in the fall of 2021 the adoption rate of the new operating system has hit nearly 90%. So, it’s fairly safe to assume that the vast majority of those iOS15 users have opted-in to MPP – and you’re no longer receiving accurate open data for those subscribers.

At CCM we’ve seen open rates boom in 2022 and while we’d like to say it’s all due to our team’s brilliant approach to email marketing – that’s only part of it. MPP is most certainly behind a big portion of the increase. So as a team, we’ve adjusted how we view success. Have you?

Open Rates are still a useful metric, especially if you have insight into user agent details like we do and can sort out suspected privacy opens from Apple’s MPP feature. However, for many this metric has always been a vanity metric; a showboat number that doesn’t tell a true story. It’s the flair and panache that everyone loves about Pride Parades, but it only scratches the surface.

More substantiative metrics to consider focusing on are Click Through Rate and Conversion Rates. These metrics give you a better idea of the effectiveness of your campaign. Higher rates reflect that your messaging, design, subject line – your email – resonated with your subscriber enough for them to take action, to learn more, to convert.

Automated Email Campaigns

You took a deep dive into your email metrics, and everything looks great. So, now what? It’s time to take a close look at your automations. If you don’t already have a list of all your active automations – make one. It’s important to know that what is running is actually what should be running.

Review your automations and compare it against overall email marketing strategy and goals to see where there may be holes in your efforts. For example, is there a step in your sales funnel that isn’t fully addressed in your email strategy? Perhaps there’s an opportunity for added messaging.

Quality Assurance Check

Changes are constant in the email world regarding supported code and rendering changes and within your own company’s operations or industry. Have you remembered to change your emails to keep up?

Take some time to review your codes, links, and logic. There are a lot of moving parts in automated email marketing campaigns and if just one of those parts breaks it can cause problems in the whole campaign. This is where that list of automated campaigns can be really helpful (try including a logic overview and active links for quick quality assurance checks).

Optimize and Refresh Your Email

Now that you’ve taken stalk of your entire email marketing campaign and you know everything is functioning properly and what’s getting the best results, it’s time to try to improve even more. In the first step of the review process, you should have identified what emails perform the best and which ones lack a little something. Consider refreshing copy or updating the overall design.

Is there a new trend in email marketing design you could test out on your audience? Give it a try! Maybe there’s an opportunity to create a more personalized touch with some new data you’ve started collecting for your subscribers? Give it a try! Do you have new photography you could incorporate in your campaigns? Give it a try!

Sometimes small changes can have a big impact, so don’t be afraid to test anything and everything (but not all at once!). You might surprise yourself with what your audience finds engaging.

No matter what you optimize make sure you can feel proud about what you’ve tried – even if the test doesn’t result in a boost in performance. Having pride in your email marketing campaign doesn’t mean always being successful. It might just mean learning something new.

Nevertheless, if you’re feeling a little uneasy about what the right choice is for your email marketing strategy our team of experts are happy to help!

Happy Pride and Email Month!

Marcy Ansley, Director of Email and Social Engagement

Marcy has over a decade of experience working within marketing agencies and managing email campaigns. She is the head of the CCM email service, responsible for overseeing everything from strategy to implementation.

Hi [Fname], Let’s Get Started on Your Personalized Email

Joseph Colarusso on March 30, 2022

Email personalization. Even if you’re just starting to dip your toes into this high ROI marketing channel, you’ve probably heard of email personalization, and you know it’s important. But do you really know what it means and how to do it?

What is Email Personalization?

Creating a truly personalized email goes way beyond using someone’s name. The idea is to send the right message to the right person at the right time – to create the experience of a 1-to-1 email. The key to creating such a campaign? Data.

The Importance of Data for Email Personalization

The more data you can collect about your subscribers the better. Where are they in the sales cycle? Have they made purchases before? Do they have specific interests? Where do they live? What content are they engaging with the most? These are all critical data points to utilize in personalization.

How to Capture Email Data

Email behavioral data is probably the easiest to capture since it’s right there in your email marketing tool. Every email you send to your subscribers brings in just a little bit more data. Is your subscriber not engaging with your email content? Send them re-engagement emails. Ask them to share their interests or update their preferences. If the subscriber is only engaging with one specific type of content, say blog posts about healthcare careers – send them more about healthcare!

If you have the technology in place to collect behavioral data from your prospect’s activity on your website – put that to use too! Depending on your industry it can be a treasure trove of intelligence. For example, if your industry is ecommerce (you should absolutely be collecting data from your website), knowing what products your customer is browsing can give insight into what products to recommend in an email.

Other ways to collect useful data to help personalize your email campaign is to simply ask. Include an interests section on your subscription form. Or, add a preferences section to your opt-out page. Consumers are getting more and more savvy, and they understand if they want personalized email messages (which studies show they do!), then they need to provide information about what they want.

Putting Email Data to Use

Once you get your head – and your database – around all that data, how will you put it to work?
These days just about any email marketing tool worth a subscription fee will have robust tools at your disposal to help you create a personalized email plan. Your first tool to utilize is segmentations. Map out the different stages of your sales cycle, personas or any general type of contact groupings or audiences. Some easy places to start would be people who place items in their cart and then don’t complete their purchase, or new subscribers to your email listing. Welcome series and abandoned cart automations are often even prebuilt templates in a number of email marketing tools.

Now, it’s time to personalize the content of your email and the easiest place to start is with personalization tokens. This is where you can insert your subscribers name, but don’t stop there! Consider inserting other useful contact fields too. Are you recommending a new purchase to your subscriber? Try referencing past purchases. Has your subscriber been communicating with a sales rep? Drop in the name!

The next tool in your marketing toolbox? Dynamic content. Again, this is a pretty standard feature in nearly every email marketing tool. This feature will allow you to have varying versions of a single email to send to your audience. For example, you could show different coupons based on VIP or new customer statuses or show news articles based on geographic location.

As your marketing efforts get even more advanced there are yet more ways to further personalize email content based on using if/else logic statements, relational data tools, and product recommendation AI. The opportunities to fine tune your messaging toward an individual person is practically endless – if you have the right tools and skill set.

Need a little help with personalizing your email marketing efforts? Talk to our experts at CloudControMedia!

– Marcy Ansley

A/B vs. Lift Testing on Facebook: What’s the Difference?

Joseph Colarusso on January 5, 2022

So, you want to run some ads on Facebook. But how do you determine if the ads you run actually achieve your goals?

Quick Answer: If you see more results based on the objective you set for a campaign, you may already be doing a good job, but if you want to be sure, test.

Facebook Ad Testing

Enter Facebook ad testing—a great way to ensure that your ads hit the mark based on your objectives.

There are two general types of tests you can run on your Facebook ads to make sure you get the results you want: A/B Testing or Lift Testing. Once you finish the tests, you can use the results to see where you can make improvements to the ad campaign.

Facebook A/B Testing

How Facebook Runs A/B Tests

On Facebook, this means that your ad audience is divided into random, non-overlapping groups to reduce that impact from outside factors on your ads.

What can you test with A/B testing?

You can run similar variations of an ad to see which works better. For instance, you can switch up the ad’s imagery, use the same copy, and use the same call to action (CTA). Then, review the results to see which ad “won.”

It is crucial to keep in mind here that you should only change ONE variable for testing. Remember way back when you changed one thing in high school chemistry, and well, sometimes fire happened? Yes, we’re looking for that spark in your ads. Run the ads for a short period of time (a week is good) and see what results shake out.

How Can You Tell Which Ad Won?

The winning ad set is determined by the Cost Per Result (CPR) based on your campaign objective. If your objective is link clicks to the landing page you have specified, you would look to see which ad had a lower cost per result regarding clicks or cost-per-click (CPC).

Facebook Lift Testing

How Facebook Runs Lift Tests

On Facebook, a lift test compares the actions of people who have seen your ads vs. those who have not to determine if ads generate the desired outcome. A lift test should be used when your goal is to measure brand recognition and conversion from brand recognition. The more “lift,” the more effective your ads are.

There are two types of lift:

1) Brand lift: Brand lift measures and assesses incremental brand awareness through polls and questionnaires. If you have ever come across a simple survey in your Facebook news feed that asks if you remember seeing a specific ad for a particular brand in your news feed, chances are you were selected to be a part of a brand’s lift test (lucky you)!

2) Conversion lift: Conversion lift is defined as incremental conversions assessed through user actions gathered from a website or app using standard and custom events. It compares additional business (online, offline, or on an app) driven by advertising on Facebook across Facebook, Instagram, and Facebook’s Audience Network across devices. By making this comparison, you can get a bigger picture look at ad performance (*Note: You must install a Facebook Pixel on your site or have the SDK in place for in-app events.) “Events” are actions that happen on your website or app. They can be actions such as adding payment information at checkout, adding an item to a cart, completing an event registration, scheduling an appointment, etc. Facebook provides a list of predefined, standard events that you can choose from.

An example of conversion lift would be when someone sees your ad on Instagram but does not click or take any action to complete a purchase on your website. Then, that same person ends up visiting a website that is a part of Facebook’s Audience Network. Now, that same person sees the ad again and actually clicks on the ad. That same person is now directed to your landing page and, voila, they make a purchase. To see if there is lift attributed to seeing the ad across the Facebook Audience Network, we look at the difference in people just making a purchase versus people who see the ad and then make a purchase.

Say, during a typical business day, on average, only five customers visit your online store, and two complete a purchase. However, after running a conversion lift test with an ad on Facebook, you see that there are, on average, ten customers visiting the store, and now seven are making a purchase. Facebook would then attribute the conversions to the ads because they are tracked across devices. Facebook would calculate lift and provide a test confidence percentage to deem the test statistically reliable.

What is Facebook’s Confidence Percentage?

“Confidence percentage” is a term used to describe the likelihood that your ad would receive the same results if the test were to run again. A strong confidence percentage that meets or exceeds a specific benchmark deems your test statistically reliable. According to the confidence percentage, a statistically reliable test can then be said to provide the same results in a real-life scenario or if the test is rerun. If the confidence percentage is less than what is deemed successful, you would not want to run this test again and instead you would make changes to make the test more reliable and then re-run the test. Note that the more data you collect or the more people you have interacting with your ad will help increase the probability that your test results will be statistically reliable.

For an A/B test to be successful, the confidence percentage should be at least 65%. Learn more about A/B Testing on Facebook here.

For conversion lift campaigns to be deemed successful, they should receive a confidence percentage of at least 90%.

As you can imagine, running tests on Facebook is essential to making sure you are using your budget wisely to create impactful ads that get results. You can try it on your own. Or, make it easy on yourself and partner with the CloudControlMedia experts to simplify and streamline your Facebook strategy.

Lindsy Bentz

How to Choose Keywords for SEO

Joseph Colarusso on September 30, 2021

Keywords are at the core of any search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. Choose the right target keywords, and you will have an inside track toward reaching your audience in Google search. Choose the wrong target keywords, and you will find yourself struggling to stand out in the search results.

Follow these tips to identify the best keywords for SEO:

1. Align Your SEO Keywords with Your Brand

The first step for choosing keywords for SEO is to align your brand identity with your keyword research. The simplest way to do this is to ask yourself which types of questions should your brand answer. This is based on your areas of expertise and authority. Be as specific as possible when coming up with your authority topics.

A school’s website is almost certainly a top authority for topics related to its programs and higher education in general. However, even if the school offers career services, it is not likely a top authority for career topics. Instead, career and job websites have more authority with these career-related topics and keywords. Therefore, if you manage a school’s website, it is a good idea to prioritize SEO keywords that closely relate to your programs.

2. SEO Keyword Research Starts with Your Target Audience

Every marketing plan revolves around a target audience. SEO is no different. You must understand the people in your audience and incorporate them into your keyword research. What words do they use to describe your products or services? Focus your research on these specific terms instead of industry jargon. Do not call something a “business solution” when your audience simply refers to it as “software.” It might be helpful to come up with a list of negative keywords like you usually do for paid search.

Location is another important factor that relates to keywords and your target audience. If your audience is local, then consider adding specific locations to your keywords.

After you conduct an audience analysis, group common traits and characteristics to create personas. These personas are examples of your target customers. You can use to personas to improve keyword targeting.

3. Understand Search Intent with SEO

Search intent describes the purpose of an online search. Think of it as the reason why somebody searched on Google. The most basic conception of search intent is transactional vs. informational.

Transactional search: The intention is to make a purchase. An example is “kids running shoes.” Whoever does that search most likely wants to buy running shoes for a kid.
Informational search: The intention is to research or find information. An example is “kids vs adult running shoes.” Whoever does that search might want to buy running shoes at some point, but right now the goal is to learn how they compare to adult running shoes.

As a first step, you must figure out whether your target keywords are transactional or informational. Then, go into more detail and determine what exactly your audience wants to know. If you identify your keywords as informational, try to understand what type of information is most relevant.

4. Find SEO Keywords with Search Volume or Interest

You can probably come up with a list of relevant keywords for a particular topic without much effort. But these keywords, regardless of how closely they align with your topic, are not useful unless people search for them. Popular SEO tools such as SEMrush give you estimates of the monthly search volume for keywords. You want to find keywords with search volume greater than zero to make sure there is an actual audience to capture. Otherwise, you might produce great content that nobody will find.

That said, search volume is relative, so you do not want to simply choose the keywords with the most monthly searches. A keyword such as “business ethics” gets around 15,000 searches every month, but it is probably too broad for your blog post. Something like “what does ethics mean in business,” which gets 170 monthly searches, is a better option because you have a realistic chance to rank for it.

5. Compare Yourself to the Competition in Google Search

What is another reason to avoid broad keywords such as “business ethics”? The search results are usually competitive. There are probably a lot of big, high-authority websites that target that keyword phrase. If you manage a smaller website, you will find it difficult, or even impossible, to carve out a piece of the search results. Size is not the only factor that impacts competition; relevancy matters as well. If your website is for a school, only target business-related keywords if the school offers business programs. And to go a step further: identify queries that a business school should answer.

The quickest way to understand competition in Google search is to perform the searches yourself. See what types of websites show up on the first page. If those sites are like yours, then that keyword is likely a good target.

6. Assess AI and Other Google Search Features for Your SEO Keywords

Competition also relates to the types of search results. Anybody who uses Google knows that the 10 blue organic links are a thing of the past. Now, Google shows a handful of dynamic search features that change based on keyword. Examples are featured snippets, people also ask questions, local packs, image packs, and knowledge panels.

Let us use the local pack, which includes Google My Business listings, as an example. If Google shows a local pack in the results, then you might want to avoid targeting that keyword with a blog post. Instead, target that keyword with your Google My Business listing. And for your blog, identify keywords that have blog posts in the search results.

In 2024, Google launched AI Overviews, which totally changed the organic search landscape. AI Overviews pull information from a variety of web sources and provide detailed answers to search queries. As such, searchers do not need to click and visit and websites to get answers to their questions. Our research suggests that AI Overviews appear in 20-50% of search results, so it is important to incorporate them into your SEO efforts. For example, if your goal is to increase website traffic, you may want to target SEO keywords that do not feature an AI Overview. However, if brand visibility is your goal, then targeting AI Overviews is a good strategt.

7. Match SEO Keywords with Paid Search

Many Google search engine results pages feature paid advertisements above the organic results. As such, it makes sense to consider paid search when you choose target keywords for SEO. If, for example, a specific search query results in three to four advertisements, then it might not make sense to focus on that as a target keyword. Even the top organic listing will be the fourth or fifth listing overall. Instead, try to find search queries that do not include advertisements. Long-tail keywords that are more question-and-answer by nature typically do not have advertisements.

In addition, pay attention to your own paid advertising campaigns to find keyword gaps. Which keywords perform exceptionally well in Google Ads? Avoid cannibalizing any of that paid performance with organic search. Are there relevant keywords that are too expensive for your campaigns? Consider those as target keywords to generate value from organic search.

If choosing keywords for SEO sounds like a daunting process, contact the experts at CloudControlMedia. Our SEO team can help you integrate the right keywords into your online marketing strategies to get the most out of organic search.