There's a lot of talk right now about the impact of Social Media on SEO - how important it is for businesses to be building online communities, monitoring mentions of their brand online and connecting with customers throughout the web. Social media is churning up so much data that can be tracked and mapped that it is inevitably becoming the backbone of the internet. For a growing number of consumers, Facebook has become the window through which they browse and view the web. Think about it...

Do you know what percentage of your website visitors are coming from a mobile device or smart phone? If you're like most business owners, you probably have no idea. But you need this information in order to see just how important having a mobile-friendly version of your website is - and for many businesses, the importance of mobile is growing by the day.

Look at this:

Search engines drive the majority of traffic on the web. If you want your company's website to rank well organically, you must make it easy for search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing to find, crawl (read) and index. Plain text (as opposed to images, pictures, podcasts, videos) is the easiest form of content for search engines to find and index, so getting the best content on your website is critical to getting more website traffic, leads and booked jobs.

As a business owner or marketing executive, you know that SEO is important. If your company's website is not found multiple times in the first page of search results on Google, Yahoo and Bing, you're losing business to your competitors - guaranteed. Reputable SEO consultants are famous for telling prospective clients that no SEO consultant can guarantee a #1 ranking (or even a first page ranking). Part of the explanation for this is the two dozen or so variables uncontrollable by the SEO consultant - i.e.

Thanks for tuning in to part 3 of our blog series, "how to double your web leads." In our first post, we wrote about the importance of big goals (vs. incremental goals) and thinking of your website as if it were a full-time sales rep. Speaking of sales reps... think for a moment about how much you'd have to pay per month to bring on a new sales rep. Once you factor in taxes, benefits, training, etc., you're looking at somewhere in the ballpark of $4,000 - $5,000 per month (for most industries and geographic markets).

You want more leads - we all do. If you didn't catch Part 1 of this series, here's a quick recap: If you want to double your web leads, you must set big goals (vs. incremental goals) which encourage major changes in behavior. You have to recognize that the lead generation strategies you employ and how you execute them depends on whether you're selling to other businesses (B2B lead generation) or to consumers (B2C lead generation) - and the industry you're in. A plumbing company is going to utilize different messages than a high-end remodeling company might.