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Now the other thing that you definitely need for your business is Google Analytics, Google Search Console and a Google Business listing. These three are completely different Google products. They're all free thankfully, but they're very different and that's confusing for a lot of people and I understand that. I was confused in the beginning too. Google Analytics should be connected to your website and you should have a basic understanding of how most people are finding your site with this tool. If you do not have Google Analytics connected, do it right away. Have your website designer do it. It's going to take 30 to 90 days before there'll be enough data in Google Analytics to analyze. Google Search Console should also be connected to your website because it's going to give you a quick monthly snapshot of which website pages might need to be fixed, as well as your most popular pages that month and some other miscellaneous information that you might find helpful. Google Search Console helps index your website so that Google can better understand the contents of your website, which does directly correlate to whether or not you show up in more search results. Lastly, your Google Business Listing. Everybody knows what this is, but not everybody has one. And most people who have a Google Business listing for their business do not fully fill it out and they don't keep it updated. So that's an easy way for you to stand out. Make sure you fill out absolutely every area in your Google Business Listing. Enter in all the categories, list all your services, all your service areas, and then you can also share your recent blog post as an update in your Google Business Listing. So you could do that once a month. We have found anecdotal evidence that shows when you do that, when you post on your Google Business Listing once a month, it definitely increases the number of views your listing gets, which can easily translate into more website traffic. All right, so that is basically the checklist, but then there are a few other things that you should already know. And is there a bit of guilt there? Is there an undertone of guilt? Yes, because you know what guilt is motivating. So there are some things that you should know because you are a business owner. And if you don't know the answers to these questions, this is your motivation to find out. This is your Monday motivation. All right, so you should know your brand colors down to the actual color codes. Now, I'm not suggesting you have to, like, memorize these codes, although I do know the code for white is hashtag fff. But I've also done a lot of graphic design, so that's why I remember. But you should have that information somewhere. And you should also have your official brand fonts. So. So if your brand was designed by a graphic designer, they probably gave you a brand guide. But if you DIY'd your brand, you need to consider having a professional redo it. You wouldn't want your clients to DIY their interior design, right? DIY logos are pretty easy to spot, and they can lessen your credibility Unless of course in your past career you were a graphic designer. I have had a few clients like that recently who come to me with these gorgeous websites and gorgeous brands and I'm like, girl, where did you get this? And she's like, I did it myself. And I'm like, wow, that's amazing. What an asset to your business. But for a lot of us, we weren't graphic designers. So working with a graphic designer to get a fully custom brand or even a semi custom brand is a great idea. Because if you want to instill trust in your ideal client, if you're working with that mid to high end luxury client, you need to look as high end as your client. And by the way, if any of you are looking for fully custom or semi custom branding, my friend Jill over at Julepaper, not sponsored, is amazing. I send all our agency clients to her. Just go to julapaper Co, that's J U L A paper company. All right. Other things that you should already know include how most of your clients are finding you and whether or not you have any influence with over that method. So if people are finding you because of Facebook groups, that's considered word of mouth referral. That is not a social media lead because it's usually someone else talking to someone else about you. And that could happen offline, it can happen online. It's definitely word of mouth. Are they finding you because you're showing up in search results? Are they finding you because of an industry organization you're part of? You need to know also what is your signature service? You should be offering no more than three services with one of those being the primary offering and you can group similar services together. So for example, my company offers website design and content marketing. So really two things. But within that we have the fully custom and the semi custom website design. And then within the content marketing we have the email and the blogging and the sales funnels. If you were to parse out all of that, if I were to parse out all of that, it would look like I had so many services it would overwhelm you guys. Because our brains don't like having to make so many decisions. And your clients brains are the same way. So if you offer consultation services, don't parse it out into designer for a day and then color consultations and then space planning consultations. No, it's just a consultation. Whatever happens in that consultation is fine. But you offer consultations and then you offer full service design or you offer virtual design for organizers. Same thing is true. Don't parse it out into pantry organization, closet organization, whole home organization. No, you offer home organizing. Whether that is the pantry, the bedroom, or both, the playroom or the entire house, it's still home organizing. Now you can certainly list here are common spaces that people hire us to organize. But don't parse it out and confuse people because then they won't be sure which service they need to hire you for. All right, moving on from that. What is your project minimum? This should be listed as a starting at price on your website to better qualify your leads. Now, if you're an organizer, you have an hourly rate. You might already list that on your site. But stagers and interior designers and custom window treatments and custom window treatment dealers even, like, you can't really give an hourly rate, but you can give a starting at price. So as an interior designer, you know you're not going to touch a renovation for less than 100,000 or whatever your number is, or if you like smaller scale projects, that's fine. But you need to state what you're starting at price is. That way you don't get the tire kickers, the people who are just like, well, I just wanted you to help me pick out a sofa. Like, no, that's such a waste of your time. So having a starting at price on your website, knowing internally what your project minimum is, and that should be based on like actual math, not on what you feel comfortable with. A lot of designers get nervous when they're like, oh, but if I tell people my project minimum is a six figure number, is that going to deter some people? Well, yeah, that's the point. All right, the next thing that you should know is the ways that you are developing a relationship with your future clients. So here's, here's how not to do it. Posting random graphics on social media, quoting other designers on your website, never sending newsletters, blogging about generic topics, refusing to share your face across your marketing. These are all things that I see people doing when they are deeply struggling with marketing and likely paying way too much money for it. None of these things will help your business grow and they will actually make you seem very sterile, very vanilla. That's not what you want. You want to be a burst of flavor. You want to be unforgettable. You want to be memorable. You want to to the right people. And every business has a different ideal client. You have to know who your ideal client is, what your specialty is, and then speak directly to them. And if that is something that you're struggling with, then you need to work with a marketing professional or a business coach. You need to get into a mastermind of your peers. You need to do something to figure this out. Otherwise your marketing is going to feel very painful and very ineffective. All right, now let's move on to some things that you might not know. First of all, I'm going to start with the big hard hitting thing. A lot of SEO professionals get really angry with me for what I'm about to say, but here it is. Your SEO is not a monthly ongoing task, and backlinks are not the sole key to getting more website traffic. If your website traffic doesn't increase due to SEO efforts that you're paying for, you're literally paying for nothing. If you don't understand the SEO reports that are being provided to you every month, you need to directly ask them, where does this report indicate the results of the SEO work that you have been doing? I say this because I have had so many clients burned by paying for SEO because they didn't understand what they were getting, they didn't understand how to measure results, and in some cases there simply were no results to measure. But the other thing to keep in mind as well is that not every SEO company understands the home industry. The home industry is not like the retail industry where we're selling small ticket items. These are big ticket services. The lead time is much longer for a client to convert, and the whole project costs a heck of a lot more money than things that they might have been used to helping people sell. So if you want to work with an SEO company, make sure they understand your industry and your specific business and your goals before you get into any sort of contract with them. Because not all SEO companies are bad. In fact, there's a lot of great ones out there. But the issue seems to come in when the SEO consultant doesn't understand the industry and, and the business owner doesn't understand SEO. So there has to be a bridge between the two. And you have to have a good understanding of how to track results, knowing that any new marketing strategy, even when that includes SEO, is going to take time. So SEO for your website might be a big enough project that it does require several months to complete, but you shouldn't be paying for monthly SEO services endlessly. What more is there for them to do if they say, well, we're creating backlinks, well, we're testing keywords. They should have been able to figure that out by now. And I know, like so many SEO people get mad at me. I literally had one SEO consultant rant against me on social media because she was so angry with what I was saying, which is kind of awkward because I totally sent clients to her because I do believe in SEO consultants and and a SEO specialist as long as they understand the client they're trying to serve. All right, moving on with that. One thing I should add is once your on site SEO has been established, which means you have good copywriting with proper use of keywords, you have images that are sized correctly and named correctly. You have page layouts that are user friendly. The only way to improve on that on site SEO is to start blogging at least once a month. Also, there are only so many keywords and additional pages that can be added to your site before your site gets dinged for keyword packing. A common keyword packing situation that I'm still seeing pop up today is when someone has a separate page on their website for every geographic area they service. So these pages are all duplicates of each other. The only thing that changes is the city or the county or the state being mentioned. That's not only super archaic SEO, but it's also completely unnecessary and you can get dinged for that. Your SEO can actually be hurt by that. So if someone tries to tell you you need to do that, say I've heard of that tactic, and it does not work. All right? The other thing that you might not know is that your Google business listing is actually one of the best ways to get found in your local geographic area. So like I said earlier, you need to make sure your profile is filled out completely and that you share at least one update per month. That can be as simple as recycling something that you posted on your blog. So grabbing an image from your blog, a paragraph from that blog post, and then linking it over to the actual blog post on your website. Because when you post an update, Google will give you the option to add a learn more button that you can hyperlink. So that's pretty neat. All right, so guys, that is a comprehensive list of things that you should already know, things you probably didn't know. And then the hard and fast rules of marketing and that every business, every service based business in the home industry should be following. If you guys have questions about any of this, I would love to get on a one on one discovery call with you. You can go to katethesocialite.com to book that call or you can send an email. Thank you guys so much for watching and listening. Until next time, keep your marketing simple, your message clear, and I will talk to you soon.
