Frequently Asked Questions

Paid Search

It all comes back to your business goals and the realities of your margins. We work backwards from your business goals to determine the best starting budget and growth strategy that is in line with the goals you have set out. If you need guidance on where to start, we can provide that too.

We offer experience, technology and a strong relationship with AdWords and Bing agency teams. All our paid search analysts dedicate 100% of their time to tackling paid search questions across a number of industries and clients. Chances are we have seen your problem before and know how to leverage tools and experience to get you returns fast.

Definitely. Let’s talk about how that fits into your overall strategy and find a plan of action that works for your company.

We don’t shy away from the intricacies of ecommerce sites. Our team of experts create, manage and optimize product feeds for ecommerce clients and make sure they’re built to hit business goals. Custom bidding and on-site

We tie paid search performance to down-channel revenue. We make it easy to not only learn what keywords, ad groups, and campaigns are driving leads, but what is driving actual revenue and closed business. This is one of the hardest parts for lead generation businesses to accomplish, and we make it a top priority.

Email Marketing Automation

We are well-versed in all aspects of email marketing. From template design to writing messages, conversion tracking, automation and more, we can completely manage your email marketing efforts. Additionally, we are able to help your business acquire additional email subscribers through our unique opt-in software.

We utilize a variety of best-in-industry email marketing and marketing automation platforms in our clients’ email campaigns. We prefer to use Mailchimp for our clients that are not yet leveraging marketing automation software. For clients that are pursuing marketing automation, we utilize the Silverpop, Marketo, Hubspot, Pardot and Act-On software platforms.

We use multiple tactics to add subscribers and keep them on your list. It starts with optimizing your site to convert visitors to subscribers. Additionally, we leverage content assets we create and utilize a unique opt-in software to entice visitors to join your email subscription list.

We create all types of marketing emails for ecommerce sites. These include newsletters, product announcement emails, abandoned cart emails, and review reminder emails. Additionally, we can measure the specific revenue impact these marketing emails have on your business. We do not provide services for transactional emails such as receipts or shipping update emails.

Email marketing has one of the highest ROIs among any marketing tactic and is a great supporting source for all other marketing tactics. Email marketing has continued to be a source of traffic that nurtures our clients’ audiences and converts subscribers to leads and buyers.

Content Marketing

There’s no magic number of content pieces that will lead to online success. What’s more important is having high-quality original content on your website and adding more high-quality content on a regular basis.

Our content team has written content for a wide range of clients in highly technical fields, including data center infrastructure, accounting, digital security, and agricultural equipment manufacturing. We perform thorough research and regularly communicate with you to ensure the content we create is both engaging and accurate.

Search engines like Google are designed to deliver results that are the most relevant and helpful to internet users. When you create original, useful content that contains searchable keywords, that content will appear in the results for relevant searches. The better that content is at meeting a searcher’s needs, the more clicks, time on page, and shares that content is likely to get. Search engines look at these metrics (among others) when determining rankings on their results pages.

Yes. Our content team is experienced in creating a wide range of content pieces that may exist outside of your site, such as email messaging, press releases, guest blog posts, social media posts, and ads.

Yes. While web pages, blog posts, and articles are the most common types of content we produce, our team also has experience with white papers, eBooks, infographic copy, video scripts, and more.

A content hub is a destination within your website where visitors can find a collection of resources related to a specific topic. For example, if you run a boutique hotel in Austin, you might create content hubs around categories like Food & Drink, Family Activities, and Nightlife. Content hubs can help brands pull together resources in a way that’s easy for visitors to navigate, so that brand sites get more traffic, engagement, and leads. In-depth content hubs can also help brands establish themselves as trusted authorities in their industries.

If you have ideas about the content you’d like to have created, one of our copywriters can set up a meeting or communicate through email to ensure the right information is covered. When topics are left up to our team, our copywriters review existing content on your site, view content on competitor’s blogs, and use tools like Buzzsumo to search for trending topics in the industry. We can then pitch topics to you or begin writing and have you approve the finished content, depending on the your preferences.

Display Video

The biggest factors for your production budget are timing (project timeline, number of shoot days, etc.), resources (crew size, equipment, etc.), location (location fees, travel, etc.) and deliverables (number of videos to shoot/edit). Once we have a basic understanding of these factors, we can accurately ballpark budgets.

We are experts in operating any production equipment, depending on your needs. From HD DSLR to 4k cameras, we’ll recommend the best and the most cost-efficient equipment for any concept.

First, consider utilizing casted talent, whether it’s on camera or voiceover. If the concept requires you to be in front of the camera, our Directors, Hair, Makeup, and Wardrobe Stylists will work closely with you to ensure your best appearance and delivery on camera.

We are collaborators at heart! While we maintain control over the production process, we understand that collaboration during creative concepting and planning is a necessity.

We’ll walk you through each step of the process to determine your individual involvement based on the project components.

We’ll help you determine the most effective type of video based on your content objective and strategy.

We can come to you! If your concept requires a particular location outside of a studio, we’ll help to scout and determine the right location for your video.

Production timing largely depends on the number of shoot days and number of deliverables.

For your original content, there are no licensing requirements other than any stock video or music licensing for the video (if applicable). However, we do offer licensed content as well.

Yes, we transfer rights ownership of all assets, final product, and raw footage, to you following final approval.

Comprehensive Digital Plan

Our plans are prepared and ready for presentation within 1 to 3 weeks.

Our findings are presented either in-person in our Austin office or on a GoToMeeting. The information is presented in a slideshow format with each service expert (SEO, PPC, Social, etc.) presenting their findings and taking questions. This is the real deal.

Our experts. They did the research, and they’ll present their findings and recommendations. They’ve done hundreds of these, and they know their stuff.

Would you dedicate 50 hours of your top talent to use their expertise to research and present their findings and knowledge for free? Rest assured that we work hard for the money and do our very best to wow you.

Nope. Whether you ever become a client of our online marketing services or not, we present our findings the same way. This is your plan to keep and use as your own. If you choose to have us enact our findings, we’ll be happy to credit the cost of our plan to our services. Find more info about this in our guarantee section.

Online Presence

Costs for a website can run the gamut from a few thousand dollars to a lot more. We build custom websites specifically for our clients’ businesses and find this to be a much more effective approach in the long term. We don’t sell “template” sites because, invariably, there are change and alteration requests and before long, the cost of a “template” site is more than a custom site. There are other reasons we avoid templates including update issues, feature bloat, viruses, theme creators going out of business, and more.

As a company, Leverage has been building websites for over 3 years. However, our team’s collective experience goes back a few decades now.

This question gets to the core of our strengths in paid search and SEM/SEO work. We found ourselves requesting changes from third party designers and developers in order to improve specific elements on the site to help with our clients’ conversion rate or SEO settings. Often, the changes would either be done improperly or not done at all and almost always as an added expense to our client. The only solution was to follow the old mantra, “if you need something done right, do it yourself”. So we brought the web design business in-house where we can control the websites our clients own AND get work done on websites we do not control since we “speak the language” and can interface with third party developers when needed.

Of course. It would be an impeachable offense if your site was not responsive. It is virtually impossible to make a site 100% responsive across the 550+ different devices on the marketplace, but we hit the major devices and browsers. We work with the SEO team to identify the most important devices and browsers and work backwards from there.

We will test your site with third-party tools, and then tweak it. And test it again. And tweak it again. Seriously, there are hundreds of things that need to be done to a site in order to optimize it. Sometimes a CDN (content delivery network) is appropriate, and sometimes it is overkill if your business is 100% local. In addition to the optimization tweaks, we recommend the best hosting companies, help you configure your server, or just give you plain, old-fashioned advice on what you can do.

Depends how small. Our website development costs start at around $5000. For our existing clients, we are willing to work with you on cost because we KNOW that if we develop a site AND control the SEO/PPC elements on the site, it will be beneficial to everyone involved.

Yes, you have full access to the website, cPanel, and all files. We can build a website entirely in PHP or use a CMS such as WordPress or Magento. During the build process, we discuss your comfort level with making edits and design the site appropriately. For instance, WordPress gets billed as “easy to update”, which is true, if you know how. We can work with you to make sure you can edit the appropriate areas on a page or site without the risk of “screwing it up.”

There are a number of factors involved in the security of a website. The base level of security is the server, and that is generally up to your server admin or web host. In terms of security at the website level, we build the site and will implement the latest plugins, security software, and base tools in order to make the site secure. Security is not a “one and done” scenario– it requires weekly or monthly updates to the core software, patches, and monitoring. After we are done building a site, we can hand it off to you to let you maintain it or we can maintain it for you.

Sure. So can the Pentagon, Facebook, Google or anything a hacker sets their mind to. Website security is a defensive game. That said, hackers will go after low hanging fruit and easy targets. An easy WordPress target is someone who doesn’t update their plugins (ie: Panama Papers) or the WordPress core files.

We recover sites all the time for our clients. At that point, they typically opt to have us maintain their sites for them because we know how. That said, it is possible a hacked site is not worth fixing, and in that case we go to a recent backup. Our advice is to backup your site and when you are done, back it up again to a different location.

We work closely with our SEO team to make sure you retain as much SEO value as possible. We don’t control Google’s or Bing’s algorithms, but we do follow their standards and procedures. A few of the things we do include:

  • 301 Redirects – Put in place or provide code for any necessary 301 redirects to ensure that your existing SEO value is transferred to the new site.
  • XML Sitemap – Create an optimized sitemap to launch with the new site
  • Audit Current Site Structure – Create a site structure diagram to ensure all pages transition to the new site
  • WordPress SEO Plugin Setup – Setup and implement base SEO settings within the premium best-of-class SEO plugin that will be provided on the site
  • Google Tag Manager Setup – Create and publish Google Tag Manager on the new site for Tag inputs in the future
  • Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools – Set-up Webmaster Tools on the site to monitor technical SEO
  • Google Analytics Setup – Update Analytics to ensure proper tracking and to set up goals relevant to the new site

Yes. As long as there is an API or it is a standard database, we have probably worked with it and can work with it.