The post SDVoyager Interview: Story & Lesson Highlights with Matt Smith appeared first on Modmacro.

For most of our clients, the vast majority of their traffic still comes from Google searches, but we are definitely seeing an increase in the number of visitors coming from chatbots and AI-powered answer engines. And there’s no reason to think that the number won’t continue to increase as time goes on.

So how are we, as a marketing company, adapting to this new type of online searching?

Fortunately, a lot of the digital marketing tactics we’ve been using for many years serve our clients well with AI. Our research shows that we gain preference with AI answer engines by having a complete and well-rounded web presence. Here are some of the things that a well-round presence includes:

• A large website with good consumer information that is updated regularly with fresh content
• A good number of positive reviews across different websites (Google, Yelp, etc.)
• Unique, high-quality content
• Regular social media activity
• Targeted content

FAQ pages on a website are particularly helpful because queries on AI tend to be long form, rather than just a couple of keywords. For example, instead of simply Googling “Nashville plumber,” people are asking AI to find them a plumber in Nashville that is open on the weekends and has good customer reviews. If a plumbing website has an FAQ that asks, “Is your Nashville plumbing company open on weekends?” as well as one that asks, “Does your Nashville plumbing company have good customer reviews?”, and answers both of these questions in the affirmative, AI will be more likely to recommend that company than one with a website that doesn’t answer these specific questions.

If your website doesn’t already have FAQs on it (or if it only has a few), we should talk about adding some (more). We can use the FAQs on your site to answer common questions that people ask when using AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity.

Another area we are focusing on with our current digital marketing clients to help them gain preference with AI is getting them more positive online reviews. As we mentioned in a recent blog post, we developed Moxly, a service that helps small businesses and nonprofits gain more positive online reviews with almost no effort on their part. Even if you aren’t one of our annual marketing clients, you can take advantage of Moxly at a very affordable rate.

Finally, we will continue to focus on high-quality, informative content for our clients. While many businesses are turning to AI itself to produce copy for their websites, we don’t think this is the right approach. While AI-powered content generators can churn out content quickly, it is typically not the type of unique, targeted content that gives websites an edge with AI-powered search tools, search engines like Google, or with potential customers.

The post How Important is it for Your Small Business or Nonprofit to Earn Preference with Popular AI Answer Engines? appeared first on Modmacro.

It would be impossible to talk about everything we’ve done in the last 15 years in a single blog post, but we did want to touch on some things that come to mind when we reflect on how our company arrived at this point.

Long-Term Partnerships Are the Key to Our Longevity

Here at Modmacro, we’ve always been about building strong partnerships. While we don’t mind doing a single project for a client, our most successful clients are those who have allowed us to help with their ongoing marketing efforts. We have several clients who have been with us for more than a decade! We helped them with branding and designed their websites. Now, we handle search engine optimization on their behalf, manage their social media presence, create and manage email marketing campaigns, and sometimes even do some print marketing when it makes sense. We have loved seeing these companies grow over the years and have enjoyed being a key part of their successes!

We have also enjoyed building an in-houses team that has been with us for many years. While we’ve had some employees who only had a short tenure with us, and have since moved on to other opportunities, our core team has been with us at Modmacro for 10+ years!

Always Evolving to Best Serve our Clients

The world of marketing is always changing! When we started out 15 years ago, smart phones were just coming onto the scene. Most people were still using desktop or laptop computers to visit websites, and the websites we built were designed accordingly. When more people started using their phones to research companies, we had to adapt our web design approach to accommodate this trend and create sites that were mobile responsive.

We have also adapted based on demand. When we started out, we mainly did web design and software development projects. However, after we had multiple clients tell us they were having a hard time finding a company they trusted for copywriting and search engine optimization, we decided to add these to our service offerings.

Search engine optimization has changed over the years as well. No longer can you engage in “keyword stuffing” on a website and expect your site to land in the top search results. Google wants to see secure, fast-loading websites with high-quality content. Google also wants to see other high-quality websites linking to your website, which is why we engage in link building for most of our clients.

As we continue to stay on top of best practices for search engine optimization, we now have something new to contend with: AI-powered answer engines and chatbots like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude. In increasing numbers, your potential customers are now asking AI assistants and answer engines for business recommendations. Fortunately, many of the same tactics that work to garner preference with Google also work with AI, but there are few that need more attention if you want AI to show your business some love. For example, sites like ChatGPT rely heavily on online reviews when making recommendations, making it even more important to get those positive reviews from your customers.

In response to this, Modmacro has created a new service we call Moxly. Moxly provides small businesses and nonprofits with an easy way to encourage customers to leave reviews. But not only that, the service helps to filter out any negative feedback they might receive! We’d love to tell you more about Moxly and how this service can help your small business or nonprofit!

Businessing Magazine Has Grown Beyond our Wildest Expectations

We would be remiss if we didn’t talk about Businessing Magazine. This online publication started out as a fun side project. We weren’t quite sure what it would turn into, but we slowly grew the publication by adding articles that we thought would be helpful to small business owners and entrepreneurs. Soon, we were being approached by outside authors who wanted to publish their own content on the site.

Today, the site features more than 4,500 articles, written by more than 600 different authors! It is a large, high-authority site and a great platform for promoting our clients. Businessing is the cornerstone of our network of almost 100 websites that we’ve developed for the benefit of our clients. If you would like your company to be featured on Businessing Magazine, contact us to discuss details.

The post Happy 15 Years to Us! appeared first on Modmacro.

But did you know that Google reviews can also affect your website’s search rankings? It’s true. Having a good number of positive reviews for your company can help boost your position in some Google search results.

To help small businesses easily obtain more Google reviews—and specifically positive Google reviews—Modmacro has developed Moxly. Moxly is an affordable review automation service that is completely managed on your company’s behalf. You simply provide us with the email addresses of your customers or clients, and we handle everything from there!

How Does Moxly Work?

When you sign up for Moxly, we email your customers and ask them one simple question: Did they have a positive or negative experience with your company? If they click “positive,” they will be taken directly to Google where they can leave a positive review. If they click “negative,” they have to opportunity to leave private feedback that will only go to you (and won’t be published on Google).

Moxly makes it easy for customers to provide your company with feedback, but it helps to keep any negative feedback from being published publicly.

If a customer doesn’t leave a review after the initial email, we send them two additional, polite reminders. Customers can opt out of the service at any time (although most don’t).

Real Results from Moxly Clients

Since we launched Moxly, those using it have seen some really great results! Email open rates are at 74%. (If you know anything about open rates, you know this is an exceptionally high percentage!) Clients using Moxly have seen an increase of 550% in their 5-star Google reviews. In addition, 100% of negative reviews were filtered out. Instead of being posted on Google, all negative feedback went directly to our clients, where they had the chance to respond privately.

Nonprofits Can Benefit from Moxly as Well

Moxly isn’t just for small businesses. If you run a nonprofit organization, such as a church, a private school, an animal shelter, a thrift store, a food bank, or any other type of organization that could benefit from boosting its reputation in the community, Moxly can help! We can email your list of supporters and ask them to review your organization so others can learn more about the great things you are doing!

Contact us at Modmacro to learn more about Moxly. You don’t have to be a current digital marketing client of Modmacro’s in order to take advantage of it—it is an affordable, standalone service that any company or nonprofit can use to boost its reputation online.

The post Moxly, a New Service that Helps Small Businesses Increase Their Positive Google Reviews With Polite Automation and Learning appeared first on Modmacro.

AI has been used in digital advertising for some time now. Companies like Google and Facebook use AI to decide who should see certain ads based on a person’s profile and their history of online activity. In fact, Facebook now has AI built into their advertising in such a way that certain aspects of it can’t be turned off. In other words, we no longer have complete manual control over who to target in our Facebook advertising in some circumstances. Facebook chooses for us. So far, this hasn’t been advantageous for our clients, as our manual targeting regularly outperformed Facebook’s AI targeting, but we are adapting to this new reality.

AI-powered searches have also crept into the stock photography sites we use and seemed to have made the sites’ search functionality worse. AI-powered proofing tools are also common. You may have experienced them yourself, as you type up emails and documents. If you’ve had the same experience we’ve had with AI-powered proofing tools, the suggested corrections they make are typically not all that helpful—and are sometimes flat-out wrong!

A newer advancement in digital marketing with regard to AI is generative AI, or genAI. This involves the production of images, audio, and copy by platforms like ChapGPT. GenAI is amazing technology, to be sure, but it’s far from perfect. Despite this, many digital marketing companies are jumping on the AI bandwagon, seemingly without much thought. At Modmacro, we are taking our time to really evaluate the technology, and as of now, we have decided not to utilize genAI in our content creation.

For many years now, Modmacro has been a content-heavy marketing agency. We have taken this approach because it works! High-quality written content that incorporates high-value keywords has been a winning formula for our marketing clients in terms of search engine optimization (SEO). We have a team of writers who diligently produce copy that is engaging, informative, and relevant to our clients’ potential customers. They work hard to provide our clients with a consistent “voice” for their online content. Some of our clients want to be known as the “friendly and affordable” service provider, while others wish to present themselves as an “upscale” solution provider for more high-end clients. The content for these two types of clients can vary quite drastically.

As of now, genAI platforms have not quite figured out how to create that personalized “voice” like our writers can. AI-generated content tends to be formulaic and generic. Many have also argued (as we have) that content written by non-humans can feel soulless, which makes sense, since computers don’t have souls. Our clients appreciate that we capture their mission and vision in the content we write for them; that we mirror their values; that we provide not just informative, but also inciteful content; and that we address their reader’s concerns. These are all things that AI struggles with, but our writers do well. 

We’ve also found that having AI content produced doesn’t really save all that much time—at least if you care about what it says and how well it reads. The main reason someone would use genAI to produce content would be to save time, and as a result, save money. Currently, you have to spend so much time prompting the technology and then heavily editing the content it produces that it doesn’t really yield the time savings you might be anticipating.

So, at least for now, our digital marketing company will continue to use actual humans to write the content on behalf of our clients. This is the approach that makes the most sense for our small business and nonprofit clients and works for the personalized approach to digital marketing that we’re known for.

If you have any questions or thoughts about this approach, we always welcome the conversation!

The post Our Approach to AI (Artificial Intelligence) in Digital Marketing and Content Creation appeared first on Modmacro.

Grisafe Architecture is a Long Beach, California-based architecture firm with a great reputation for providing amazing design services for their commercial and residential clients. They just celebrated 20 successful years in business and continue to grow—in terms of both the size of their team and their service offerings. They are absolutely killing it, and we couldn’t be happier for them!

Recently, Grisafe Architecture was approached by Destination LA, a television series that features Los Angeles-area small businesses. The producers asked if they could film an interview with owner and lead architect, Mark Grisafe, tour their office space, and even get some footage of some spaces they’ve designed in order produce a segment about Grisafe Architecture. After looking into the Destination LA series, Mark readily agreed to be a part of their series! Destination LA is a high-quality program that does a great job of showcasing small businesses. Each episode really captures what makes small businesses special and celebrates how they help make their communities unique.

A couple of months ago, the episode featuring Grisafe Architecture aired on CBS-LA (KCBS Channel 2). Mark and his team were very happy with how it came together—and so were we! It’s a great representation of their architecture firm, and it allowed them to be exposed to a whole new local audience. In addition to airing on television, the Destination LA episode is also a part of the Roku permanent collection and is available on Amazon Prime Video. If you want to see just the segment on Grisafe Architecture, you can view it on their YouTube channel.

To learn more about Grisafe Architecture, you can also check out the ebook by Businessing Magazine that features their company. It’s titled Business by Design: An Inside Look at a Thriving Long Beach Architecture Firm and is available as a free download.

The post Modmacro Client, Grisafe Architecture, Featured in Television Series appeared first on Modmacro.

dotComm Awards

Back in August 2022, we heard from the dotCOMM Awards that we took home four awards for website design. We received one Platinum award (the competition’s highest honor), two Gold awards, and an Honorable Mention for the following websites:

Scott McKee Construction: Platinum for Small Business Website

AV Programming Associates: Gold for Small Business Website

Knockout Pest Control & Termite: Gold for Small Business Website

Diamond Touch Strategies: Honorable Mention for Small Business Website

Vega Digital Awards

In October 2022, we were recognized for our work by the Vega Digital Awards competition. We received top honors for these four websites in their respective categories:

Scott McKee Construction: Construction Website

Businessing Magazine: Magazine Website

Diamond Touch Strategies: Consulting Website

AV Programming Associates: Information Technology Website

MarCom Awards

In that same month, we took home multiple awards from the international MarCom Awards competition. The following websites received the competition’s Gold Award:

Scott McKee Construction: Small Business Website

Knockout Pest Control: Business to Consumer Website

In addition, the Diamond Touch Strategies logo, which was designed by the Modmacro team, earned a Gold Award. Honorable mentions were received in the MarCom competition in the following categories:

Grisafe Architecture: Logo Design

Diamond Touch Strategies: Small Business Website

Horizon Interactive Awards

In February of this year, the Horizon Interactive Awards announced the winners from their 2022 competition. Modmacro earned three awards from this international competition, including:

Businessing Magazine: Gold for Magazine/Blog Website

Scott McKee Construction: Bronze for Professional Services Website

AV Programming Associates: Bronze for Professional Services Website

La Jolla Village News

For the 10^th year in a row, Modmacro was named as one of the top web design companies serving the city of La Jolla, California—earning the La Jolla Village News’ coveted Gold Medal! Our web design firm was recognized in a special edition of this local newspaper, which was widely distributed throughout the city of La Jolla.

Communitas Awards

In this competition dedicated to honoring companies that are making a difference in their communities, Modmacro was given a Communitas Award for Company Sponsored Volunteer Project for our pro bono work on the Sunridge Community Church website.

Hermes Creative Awards

Finally, we recently heard from the Hermes Creative Awards that we had won three awards in their 2023 competition, including:

Diamond Touch Strategies: Platinum Award for Logo Design

Sunridge Community Church: Gold Award for Pro Bono Web Design

Scott McKee Construction: Honorable Mention for Small Business Website

You can visit our Awards page to see a comprehensive list of all of the awards our company has received over the years for website design, logo design, content creation, and more!

The post 21 New Awards for Our Web Design and Marketing Company! appeared first on Modmacro.

What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is a type of online marketing that targets potential customers who are already searching for a company like yours. You are presenting them with relevant information about your company when they do specific searches online. This is opposed to outbound marketing, that presents people with ads and other content that they weren’t necessarily looking for, in the hopes that they will be interested in what you have to say or offer.

Inbound marketing is the preferred method of marketing for many small businesses, because it allows them to focus their marketing dollars on methods that are most likely to yield quality leads. It is also a very “hands off” approach for our clients. In other words, the team at Modmacro works behind the scenes on your company’s behalf to bring the leads to you. You don’t have to spend your valuable time selling, networking, or placing print ads in various places. You simply wait for potential customers to contact you for a quote or for service.

Why Inbound Marketing is Especially Effective for Home Improvement Companies

Companies in any industry can benefit from inbound marketing, but it’s an especially effective form of marketing for home improvement companies.

Many homeowners looking to do a home improvement project start looking for contractors online. They may go to review sites like Yelp or Home Advisor, but will typically also do a Google search to start creating a list of potential companies to contact. If you want to be added to that list, your company’s website needs to show up early in the Google search results.

At Modmacro, we are experts at positioning our clients to be seen online by the people who are looking for their services. We do this in several ways, but most importantly, we create content on your website that matches what your potential customers are looking for. For example, if you are an electrician in Irvine, you’ll definitely want your website to be optimized for the phrase “electrician Irvine”, but you may also want to create content around some specific searches, like “electric vehicle charging station installation Irvine” or “electrical panel upgrade Irvine”.

When your website contains specialized content, you are more likely to attract visitors looking for exactly what you do, and those visitors are the ones who are most likely to become paying customers!

Modmacro has many years of experience creating effective inbound marketing campaigns for home improvement companies. We know what works and what doesn’t. We have worked with many home improvement companies just like yours to grow their businesses through digital marketing. We have taken small home improvement from relative obscurity online and helped them dominate the search rankings in their respective markets! As a result, these companies are inundated with service requests.

Are you looking to focus your marketing dollars on methods that actually work—ones that bring quality leads directly to you, with little effort on your part? Contact us at Modmacro to learn more about inbound marketing and how it can work for your company.

The post Our Inbound Marketing Approach for Home Improvement Companies in Orange County, CA appeared first on Modmacro.

Today’s business websites are very different from those you would find on the web 20, 10, or even 5 years ago. They can now be full-blown marketing tools that can help grow your business by bringing in quality leads.

A business website can be an amazing marketing tool for your small business, but only if it has the elements to make it one. Simply throwing a website up on the internet won’t get you the results you might hope for.

Search engine optimization (SEO) helps to turn your business website into a powerful inbound marketing tool. What is inbound marketing? Simply stated, inbound marketing is a method of attracting customers who are actively looking for what your company provides. In other words, people are searching online for information and services, and you are providing them with quality content and solutions. (By contrast, outbound marketing presents people with ads for goods and services they may not be looking for.) Once they land on your website, they will learn more about your company and the services your provide and be prompted to contact you for service.

This is a huge benefit to small businesses. Not only are you receiving leads through your website, but they are good leads—leads that are likely to turn into actual paying customers. And the best part is, bringing in these leads requires little to no effort on your part! The SEO experts at Modmacro do all of the work on your behalf, behind the scenes, and you just wait for the leads to come to you!

So ,What Does SEO Involve Exactly?

For every company we work with on SEO, we take a personalized approach. But in general, we work on your website, as well as off your website to improve your website’s search rankings. We will do things like make your website mobile-friendly (if it isn’t already) and make sure it loads quickly. We may do what’s called “link building”, which involves placing links to your site on high-quality, external websites. But most importantly, we will create content on your website that appeals to your target customers and matches what they are searching for online.

For example, if you are a residential electrician in San Diego, we would create content on your website that focuses on common electrical services for homes in San Diego. Or maybe you want to be the go-to emergency electrician in the area. The content on your site would include phrases like “24-hour electrician” and “emergency electrician”.

All of the content we produce for your website is written by our talented team of copy writers who will work to understand your business and present it in a professional manner on your website.

Our Experience Providing SEO Services for San Diego Home Improvement Companies

At Modmacro, we’ve taken many home improvement companies through the process of improving their search engine rankings with SEO. We’ve worked with electricians, plumbers, house painters, general contractors, woodworkers, and more. Each of them saw their business grow as they received more leads that turned into paying customers.

Take a look at this write-up of how we helped grow a San Diego replacement window company through SEO.

When Can You Expect to See Results from SEO?

An optimized website can be a very powerful marketing tool for your business, but you won’t see instant results. SEO isn’t a faucet that you just turn on—it’s a process. Any SEO “expert” who tells you otherwise is either being dishonest or doesn’t know what he or she is talking about. SEO takes time to produce results. It takes time (typically several months) to make search engines, like Google, understand that your website is the one they should present to people when they do specific searches. But once they do, you will start to see some amazing results!

If you’re interested in learning more about how Modmacro can transform your website into a powerful marketing tool for your business that will bring in quality leads, contact us. We look forward to learning more about your business and seeing how we can help it grow.

The post Why Invest in SEO for Your San Diego Home Improvement Company appeared first on Modmacro.

However, this won’t always be the case. Great economies come and go, and while there will always be a need for plumbing services, the jobs won’t always be as plentiful as they have been.

Even if you find that your plumbing company is still currently busy, it’s important to put a marketing plan in place for when things start to slow down, or simply if you want to grow your company. At Modmacro, we help plumbers in San Diego market their businesses by putting together tailored marketing plans that will help keep the leads coming in, despite the economy. We can help you bring in consistent work, as well as the specific types of jobs you want.

Online marketing starts with a great website. If it’s time for a new website for your San Diego plumbing company (or your first website), Modmacro can design and build a clean, professional website that will present your business in the best possible light. If you already have a website that you like, we can make some updates that will help increase traffic to it. For example, our team can optimize the content on your website so search engines like Google will better understand what you do and where your service area is. We typically create multiple “Services” pages for your most popular or profitable services, such as complete re-pipes, water heater installations, or emergency service. These Services pages are designed to help you capture potential customers who are doing more specific searches online, rather than just searching for a “San Diego plumber”.

Maintaining an active blog on your website is another way we can help market your plumbing business to the right types of customers. Our team can create blog posts on your behalf that address the issues that your potential customers are most concerned about and that highlight the types of services that your company specializes in.

Social media marketing is another component that is typically included in our online marketing campaigns. We target your potential customers through carefully designed ads and posts on sites like Facebook. The goal of those ads and posts is to drive people to your website, where they can learn more about your company and the services you provide. Carefully crafted calls to action on your website will then present them with ways to contact you for plumbing services.

If you want to grow your San Diego plumbing company, a customized digital marketing plan is a great place to start! The Modmacro team has more than a decade of experience working with local home improvement companies just like yours. Contact us to learn more about how we can partner with you.

The post Do You Need Marketing for your San Diego Plumbing Company? appeared first on Modmacro.