This article was originally written at foxxr.com

No matter where you are located and whom you serve, Google can help you make money. It is the dominant search engine in the United States, claiming a market share of 85.82 percent in August 2017.

Indeed, Google is so huge that it’s almost criminal for any Business owner to ignore the opportunity to capitalize on it. It may come to you as a surprise, but 46 percent of small U.S. businesses are guilty of this crime; they haven’t invested in a website. Check out our web design services if you are among them.

Huge congratulations to the remaining 54 percent. You have taken the first big step towards growth and more profit.

Spoiled Consumers

You are in 2017, an era when consumers are spoiled. They have simply too many choices. A website alone isn’t enough to keep them coming.

The web witnesses the birth of 822,240 websites during an average day. Unless you are constantly reminding your customers that you exist, your risk being forgotten into obscurity. Successful business owners know that.

Coca-Cola has been a household name in the U.S. for more than a century. That didn’t stop the company to spend $4 billion on advertising in 2016. Before it stopped making public its advertising expenditure, Apple was spending $1.8 billion on advertising.

Digital Marketing to Overtake Television Advertising

You can take a cue from those big boys, and set aside an online Marketing budget. Ten years ago, online marketing and advertising were optional. That’s not the case any longer.
Small Biz Trends reports that 70 percent of small to medium-sized businesses plan to put in more dollars into their digital marketing.

Within the next two years, marketing leaders will be spending more than $103 billion annually—overtaking television advertising—on search marketing, display advertising, social media marketing, and email marketing.

The writing is on the wall. Everyone is spending more on marketing their business online. You will have to ask yourself: Can I afford to stay aloof and pretend nothing has changed when my competitors are using the Internet to grow their business?

Unless you have accumulated enough wealth to live off the rent or interest, you cannot!

Word of the mouth is not sufficient these days. To ensure that new customers keep coming in, you will have to start to building relationships with your target market. Promoting your website through Google is one of the most profitable ways to do that.

Why Google?

Because it’s ginormous!

Internet users perform 1.2 trillion searches each year on Google, and when it comes to promoting your business that gargantuan number matters.

Let’s assume that you are an entrepreneur and want to start a business. You have the money to open an office in only one state. Where will you head to? California, Texas, New York, or a similarly populous state, or in the wilderness of Alaska? Unless you are selling skies, a populous state will make more business sense.

The same logic of business applies to online marketing.

You have Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, and multiple other search engines. You can optimize your website for all of them and run ads on each platform if you have the marketing budget of a Fortune 500 firm. Short of that, Google is your best bet because:

• Your customers use Google. Google has become synonymous with to search online.
• In most verticals, Google gives you the highest return on investment if you are on a shoestring budget.
• Google’s powerful ad performance analysis tools help you to optimize your ads for maximum profitability.
• Through Google’s massive keyword data sets, you can study your target market, analyze how your customers behave during the buying cycle, and use this information to run highly-targeted ad campaigns.

Many of the features that Google provides are available with other search engines, but Google is at the top of the game and the best bet for small businesses on a tight budget.

Google Services You Can Use to Make More Money

Google’s range of products runs into more than one hundred, and nearly all of them can be used to build your brand and increase sales. Here we are going to focus on the top seven strategies that we think will be most relevant to small business owners, such as plumbers, doctors, and arborists.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

This is a catch-all term encompassing a set of methods that marketers use to convince Google to rank your website on the first page when your customers search. It’s crucial in a world where 86 percent of buyers rely on search to find local businesses.

The Forbes magazine encourages small businesses to invest in SEO because [by] performing methodic SEO strategies, you will be rewarded with higher positioning and organic traffic.”

Compared to other marketing strategies, SEO is low cost and immensely effective in the long run. You can effectively get it started for as little as $900 a month.

Schema Implementation

Ranking on the first page of Google is good. Getting the top rank for your desired keywords is better. This said, nothing compares to being featured in a Knowledge Panel. It’s even better than being the top dog; it means outranking all your competitors in search.

Knowledge Panels are a new Google feature that has become immensely popular in the past couple of years because it answers user queries right on the search page.

Currently, Knowledge Panels show up in approximately 38 percent of all Google searches. That means getting featured in a Knowledge panel is sure to increase your website’s organic visitor count.

A team of experts, such as Foxxr, can utilize the existing content on your website, set up Schema, and make it easier for Google to understand the raison d’etre of your website, which in turn facilitates its inclusion it in its Knowledge Panel.

Image Data Optimization

Web pages are not the only results you Google fetches when you enter a keyword. Its combined search page—including multimedia content—has been in place for more than 10 years

According to a Moz blog, image blocks show up in 3–11% of Google results. It’s not a minuscule number when you consider how many people use Google every day.

Internet users perform 1.2 trillion searches each year on Google. That means between 36 billion and 132 billion of them show image blocks.

Optimizing your image with a descriptive file name, caption, and Alt tag will help Google figure out the content of your image and rank it near the top for the keywords that matter to your business.

That means, even if your website is not among the top 10 results, you can still get organic visitors through images.

Pay-Per Click (PPC) Advertising

Searchers use Google to discover brands and professionals. PPC ads allow you to create brand awareness, thus increasing the chances of customers turning to you when they need the products or services you sell.

You can increase your consumers’ chances of buying from you two–four times by running paid ads. Not only that, the results are almost instantaneous.

Depending on the type of service or product you sell, a well-managed PPC campaign can start producing results for you in a matter of a few days; even a few hours. Foxxr’s Google certified marketers can use AdWords to start sending traffic—and potential customers—to your website within a few minutes of starting your campaign.

YouTube Video Marketing

YouTube can be a goldmine of traffic. This Google-owned website gets a billion views a day and offers businesses like yours an ideal opportunity to contribute to the community and increase sales.

You can create professional-grade helpful videos without investing in expensive shooting equipment. Outsource video marketing to an agency, like Foxxr, to get videos that compare with big-budget feature films in quality. You can then share those videos on Facebook.

If you market your videos, your customers will watch them, will like them, will visit your website, and a small number of them will turn into paying customers.

Video marketing is not rocket science, but it’s not a walk in the park either. Team up with an agency that knows what they do to get the most out of your videos.

Mobile-Friendly Websites

Did you know that 48 percent of millennials view a website only from their mobile devices, and 57 percent of people will not recommend a business if its website was poorly designed for mobile phones? Those numbers alone should have prompted small businesses to get a mobile-friendly website. It hasn’t happened.

Only 30 percent of small U.S. businesses own a mobile-friendly website. Google hesitates to rank high desktop-only websites on mobiles. That means you can cut your competition by 60 percent just by getting a mobile-friendly website.

Don’t worry if you don’t know coding because when it comes to creating mobile-friendly websites, Foxxr has you covered.

Hyper-Local SEO Campaigns

That means getting your business registered on Google Maps. That also means getting backlinks from local business directories and doing plenty of other stuff that helps your website rank high when locals search for the products and services you sell.

Local SEO is different from run-of-the-mill SEO because the former’s goal is to get your website rank near the top in the regions where you serve.

Content Marketing

Apple, Google, and Facebook are earmarking billions of dollars on content marketing in 2018. So you can be all but sure the written word is going to play a big role in customer acquisition and satisfaction.

Last year, Pepsi announced the launch of an internal content studio because it has realized that the way to branding and sales is through content.

While most small businesses can’t match the content marketing budgets of these behemoths, they can hire a digital marketing agency to write and promote content for them.

Google loves fresh and informative content. So if you are publishing a useful blog on your website once a week or once a month, you can be sure to get some pretty good rank sooner than later.

Writing is difficult and can divert you from what you do best—running a business. But Foxxr has you covered here. The agency has been writing and promoting content for its clients for many years.

Takeaway

TV ads were for big companies. Online marketing has democratized the advertising landscape. Whatever your line of business and budget, you can benefit from heightened brand awareness and increased sales that a great marketing campaign on Google can offer, and compete with Fortune 500 companies.

There are multiple ways to market your business online but, for a business with a small marketing budget, none comes close to the effectiveness of Google. You can start small on Google, optimize, and scale when you see results.

It’s even better when Foxxr is marketing your business on Google because the company does not bind you to a long-term contract. You pay Foxxr to market your business online and pay for the next month only when you see results.

Don’t allow your competitors to dominate Google’s search results and grab your customers’ attention. Allow us to put up a tough fight for you. Get started with online marketing right away.

The post Your Profits Are Under Attack! Rescue Them by Marketing on Google appeared first on Foxxr.