Attn: Security Guard Companies: Use LinkedIn Groups To Become An Expert On Your Customers
In order to be successful in the security guard industry you must truly be an expert on your customers and their needs. Successful businesses must know their customers as well as they know their own families. In addition to knowing basic market facts, like size of the market and number of potential customers, you must also be an expert on each of your individual customers and prospects. The type of information that you should be collecting includes:
Names
Age
Gender
Number of children
Hobbies
Personal interests
Associations they are involved in
Magazines they read
Wants and wishes
Challenges they face
Possessing this depth of knowledge about your customers allows you to deliver the solutions that they need at the right time, place, and price. There are several methods for gaining this type of knowledge including sending surveys, networking at business events, and leveraging social media.
As social media becomes more ubiquitous, platforms such as LinkedIn have increasingly become the go to tool for becoming an expert on your customers and prospects. Specifically, LinkedIn Groups are an excellent tool for learning about your prospects and customers.
LinkedIn Groups
LinkedIn Groups were developed to provide a place for professionals to share content, post questions, find answers, and to connect with people with similar interests. If you are not currently participating in LinkedIn Groups you are missing out on a huge opportunity. Here are a few tips to maximize using LinkedIn Groups:
Join Groups that your customers join – Resist the temptation to just join groups that are specific to your industry, you should be focusing on the groups that your customers are part of. Take a moment to find several customers or prospects that you would like to connect with. View their profiles and find out which groups they are part of and join those groups.
Don’t use Groups for advertising – Although you are joining these groups to eventually build connections with prospects, avoid using groups to self-promote. No one in a group wants to see a lot of advertising for your company.
Join the maximum number of groups – Currently the maximum number of groups you can join on LinkedIn is 50, so join 50. Although this might seem like a lot, failing to join all 50 means that you are missing out on news and discussions that help you better understand your customers and prospects.
Remain active – Remaining active in the groups is the number one thing that you can do to increase your understanding of your customers. By remaining active and engaging in discussions you will continue to learn things about customers and prospects that you would not normally have the opportunity to learn.
Ask questions – Part of being active in Groups should include asking questions that are compelling, thought-provoking, and relate to your company’s expertise. By asking questions you will be more equipped to deliver products and services that speak to your clients’ wants and needs.
So, You’re An Expert…Now What?
Now that you have gained a deeper insight into your customers’ needs and wants, it’s time to put that information to use answering questions and providing useful materials. First, consider speaking at local community events or offering a free webinar for customers or prospects. As with Groups, don’t use these events as a way to self promote, use them to build your standing as an expert. You will begin to see that prospects convert to customers at a much higher rate when you are seen as an expert in your niche.
In addition, if you find that customers and prospects are asking the same questions repeatedly consider drafting a white paper or other document for download from your website. An even better way of sharing your expertise is setting up a blog where you can share your knowledge with others on a routine basis.
Buyers tend to be much savvier these days and do a lot more research about companies before they decide to make a purchase. By knowing what buyers’ wants and needs are, it is much easier to position yourself as an industry expert. By doing so, they are more likely to trust your advice and purchase your products and services.
Do you have some expertise that your clients or prospects need? How are you leveraging your expertise to convert more prospects to clients? Please leave your comments below, we would love to hear from you.
“Imagine Closing 1-2 or 3 New Security Contracts every month. Possibly earning you hundreds of thousands $$$ extra each year.For about as much as a regular Armed Guard?”
If you got new security contract clients every month, What new doors of freedom would open? Would that mean more admiration at home? Allow you to breath more easily? Allow you to compete for bigger contracts?
My name is Matt Johnson and I help security Guard Companies get New Clients every month.
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This Could Be You!
You’ve already been to my website. It cost nothing to call me ..
It’s 2020, Google is still the undisputed king of Search Engines. (92.95% worldwide market share as of November 2019.)
Knowing how Google works and how to get a better ranking in the Google SERPs is what puts food on the table of 99% of SEO professionals. Even then, Google holds a few mysteries with SEOs, especially when it comes to using Google’s advanced search operators. Here’s the most important part…
You could use them to do your job more efficiently.
For example: When gauging the amount of content dedicated to a specific topic, you can quickly filter out 90% of simple mentions.
And this is just scratching the surface of the power of Google’s search operators.
You might also be interested in advanced keyword research. Get the same hyperfocus in a keyword search that you do with search operators.
How to Accomplish More with Search Operators
This full article will cover advanced tactics, why you’d use them, and how to put them into action. Look for some of those special angles listed just below the video.
You can also reference this video for more common practical uses of search operators and how you’d put them into action.
Any links mentioned during the video won’t be in the description, but will instead be at the end of this article.
You can scroll through the article or use these links to jump ahead to specific things you can do with Google Search Operators:
Find link opportunities on a specific site. (Industry sites that have covered direct competitors, but not your product, in a comparison post)
Source:
The sister operator of site. Allows you to choose a specific source in Google News. (Useful if you have to cite specific news sources when you write news pieces.)
Use to:
Source news pieces to reliable sites.
Find quotes and tidbits to spice up your content.
Intext:
Intext tells Google that you want results where the text appears in the body of the page. (If the text appears in the title, but not the body text, it won’t be returned as a result. Since it virtually functions the same as a normal Google result, there aren’t many advanced uses. We kept it in the list to contrast it against this next operator “Allintext.”
Basically the same as intext, but every word in the query has to be in the body text of a page. Otherwise, Google does not include it in results. Essentially functions as using “ ” quotes on individual words.
Intitle tells Google that you only want results where pages include the search term in their meta title tag. This operator helps you understand how many pages target a particular search phrase.
Same as intitle, but ensures every word in the query is in the title meta tag of all results. If you sold airpods on your ecommerce site you could use this operator to find other websites that have ‘airpods’ in their titles. This is a quick and easy way to spot your direct competition.
Like with Intitle & Intext, Google will only return results where the search words are included in the URL. This will often drastically reduce search volume and can be handy for finding potential direct competitors.
All words included in the search query must be in the URL to become a result. For long search phrases, this often returns only a handful or no results at all.
Filetype: tells Google to return only results of, you guessed it, a specific type of file. It is useful when looking for research, which is often in PDF or other document file formats, rather than HTML.
Quickly find original research, statistics and case studies on a certain topic.
Related:
Related: is an operator that helps you find sites related to a specified URL. Using it is an illuminating look into how Google categorizes your website and your competitors.
For example, if we take a look at the results for airbnb.com, it returns the usual SEO suspects, but also some peripheral competitors for attention.
Obviously, Airbnb’s two biggest competitors VRBO and Homeaway made the cut, but there’s something else. A more generalist booking website is listed as well. So from that, we learn that Google understands the categorical hierarchy of SEO inside of online travel.
Use to:
Find competitors.
Understand how Google is categorizing your site.
AROUND(X)
Limit results to pages that contain search words within X words of each other. Useful for finding quotes and song lyrics you don’t quite remember, but not much else. Google will bold the phrases it thinks you are looking for, not just the search words. (Note: It defines a range with a max of X, not just X.)
Find official statements/case studies/research that back up a point you want to make.
Basic Search Operators
Google’s basic search operators help filter the results you get from your search.
You should be familiar with every single one of these, so consider this a review, not a lesson. (As such the descriptions will be brief and there are no screenshots to explain.)
“”
Putting your search term in quotes initiates an exact match search for that phrase. The exact words in that exact order have to be on the page or. Using it on single words excludes synonyms and related words.
Google will search for results related to both/all terms that you’ve typed in the search field. Typically Google’s algorithm will correctly estimate whether it’s a phrase search or multiple separate terms, making AND mostly redundant.
The hyphen helps you exclude words from your search queries. For example, you can search for “SEO California” but exclude “LA” if you don’t want results from that city.
The asterisk tells Google to “fill in the blank”. Similar to the more advanced AROUND(X) but you don’t specify the max length of a phrase. Like AROUND(X) it can be useful for finding quotes and phrases.
Google and SEO sites classify these as search operators. But, they interact with Google’s own content/function and don’t necessarily trigger an internet search.
Define:
Cache:
Weather:
Stocks:
Map:
Movie:
In / To
They might not be useful for research purposes, but understanding is a piece of the puzzle having a holistic understanding of Google search.
The Retired! Officially Deprecated/Dysfunctional Search Operators
These search operators no longer work. Some have officially been discontinued, and others were attached to Google properties that have since been shut down.
Link:
Old school SEOs will fondly remember this one. In the past, you could use the link: operator to find pages linking to a specified URL. Google officially discontinued this operator back in 2017.
Other Deprecated Search Operators:
+
~
inpostauthor:
allinpostauthor:
inposttitle:
info:
daterange:
phonebook:
#
blogurl:
inanchor:
allinanchor:
loc:placename
location:
Google is continually working on new things and discarding old projects. So don’t expect the list above to stay the same for very long.
They typically dispense of advanced and rarely used search operators without any prior warning at all, so make sure you get the most out of them while you still can.
Quickly Gauge Competitiveness Of Long-Tail Keywords
For over 10 years we’ve known that the long tail is actually the bigger piece of the pie.
60% of Google searches are made for queries that are not even in the top 1 BILLION most popular ones.
Let that sink in.
As a result, continually finding and capitalizing on the long-tail is key to the success of any SEO.
Sometimes you find yourself thinking of a keyword opportunity when you least expect it.
Maybe you’re eating lunch, or in the shower, or out in the park on a stroll.
Google makes it simple for you to gauge competitiveness for specific terms with the operator “allintitle”.
For example, let’s say you had a new content idea and you wanted to target the phrase “SEO small business San Diego”. You could quickly do an allintitle search.
Long-tail keywords are an integral part of SEO strategy, and while doing an operator qualified search is good for quick insights, it doesn’t go as in-depth as our tools.
Find Statistics & Research To Level Up Your Content
76.7 million pieces of content were published in February alone on WordPress.com blogs. That’s more than 2,7 million a day, and it’s not even the entire internet.
This simple statistic shows you the most important thing about content; there’s too much of it.
And it’s confusing the end users. Trust in online reviews decreased significantly from 2015-2018. It declined from 31% who unequivocally believed in all reviews in 2015, down to 19% in 2018.
This decline was likely caused by the incredible increase in Amazon Associates and other affiliate websites.
These sites often have fake or dubious reviews, and this has impacted the reputation of the web as a whole. Bounce rates for many sites are increasing as it gets harder to gain user trust and attention.
There’s too much content out there, and people are suffering from information overload. And people have less trust in internet content as there is more of it and they recognize less.
Why should they read yours?
How do you pique interest and gain trust in one move?
How can you reduce bounce rates with the content itself?
Statistics from a reliable source. Borrowed trust.
When you read this section of the post, the first thing you saw was a statistic sourced to the blog giant WordPress. If anyone has reliable data on the internet and content, it’s them.
So I borrowed their trustworthiness to level up my content.
Google makes it easy to do the same for any topic.
Specify the trustworthy site you want to source research to when you search for statistics.
Using this combination lets you find the combination of research and source that you want.
Statistics alone are no longer enough.
A reliable, interesting statistic, however, can help take your content to the next level.
Find Glaring Indexation Errors & Other SEO Issues
In a recent SEO study, 175 million websites were checked, and they found 300 million SEO errors. Almost 10% of the sites had issues with duplicated content or canonical tags.
Translation: Most websites have SEO errors, even with increased spending on SEO and content marketing.
Even Apple has pages on HTTP despite HTTPS being an official ranking factor for crying out loud. (And indexed pages for discontinued services.)
If you work with clients that have big content budgets, or large ecommerce sites, it’s important to do these kinds of checks regularly.
You can even teach non-SEO members of the team to use Google Search operators to do these kinds of tests.
That way you can effectively share the responsibility and improve the organizations SEO as a whole.
Find Backlink & Content Opportunities
High-quality backlinks are still one of the most reliable ranking factors out there.
In a 2018 study, more Backlinks still had the strongest correlation with higher rankings compared to any other factor. On average, the 1st result had over 700% the number of backlinks of result 10. And over 300% the amount of referring domains.
Translation: a diverse backlink portfolio is still incredibly important in 2020.
But backlinks don’t just appear out of thin air.
Buying them isn’t an option (Google more than frowns upon this), and people don’t just hand them out for free either.
You have to do your research.
Maybe you even use some basic search operators to help you already.
But some advanced combinations can speed up your search dramatically.
If you combine intitle: with inurl: you can often eliminate 100% of the fluff from search results, and find resource/link pages that you need.
(Note: Allin operators tend not to play nicely together, so stick to in.)
While SEO tools and APIs are getting more and more sophisticated, it never hurts to go back to our roots as SEOs.
By using the Google search algorithm yourself, you get first-hand experience as a consumer, whilst also working on fixing SEO problems for yourself, or your client.
Sometimes the best ideas come to us at the worst times, and by learning to do the basics with only Google, you have the ability to instantly check & improve your SEO from the comfort of your search engine.
Still, the toolbox of SEOs needs to include more than just the operators Google provide.
If you need more than just the basics, you can try SpyFu risk-free for 30 days.
Get all the data you need to find your perfect keywords: searches per month, how competitive each keyword is to rank for, how much money you can make per click from sponsored ads, etc.
