The Netrafic.com Blog offers a mix of “lowdown” and “hoedown” about the Search Marketing Industry. Articles from our monthly newsletter, tips, highlights and "news you can use" will be found here. Thanks for stopping by, Chris and Dave.
I like to read a newspaper just as much as the next person. But I also take in news all day long from so many sources I can’t even count. Nor do I have to. Just today, I was intrigued by the buzz story in the Wall Street Journal about Apple’s ITunes considering a move to the web.
But when I went to the WSJ site they demanded I pay them to read the story. Now, if I read the WSJ regularly online I probably would already be a subscriber. In fact, I do subscribe to several online publications. They never demanded that I do it though.
So what did I do? I went back to Google and queried it for “ITunes on the web”. There was the WSJ link at the top of the page. But Mashable had a take on the same news and there was Reality Check and Huffington Post and all the usual pundits. When I clicked on the blog search button I backfilled with more info about the subject.I even viewed a free video about it!
I will not be bullied on the web. After all its my space not the Wall Street Journal’s. But what’s a dinosaur to do? Everyone has always paid dearly to have one association or another with them. It’s not my fault that they lack the creativity to come up with a new workable plan. It’s remarkable to watch businesses large and small get caught up in the sea change.
I just have to wonder how I might have reacted if the story in the WSJ was really, really good and they just let me read it. What if a banner at the end of the story said, “If this article read was important to you click here”,and in so doing I was swept away to an offer page that made me feel like I was an important business reader. How hard would that be to do ? What would the potential be to convert new business after everyone who was going to subscribe to you already had?
Sorry folks there really is no place in the market for relationships that are not win-win anymore. Those days are fully over. Think about your promotions. Are you doing them because you have to and this is how we’ve always done it? Or are you doing it to cause new business to come from a different angle than you are already getting it from?
Moving or Redesigning You Site
SEO & Linking Considerations
Your web site is going to move to a new server, or be involved in a site redesign at some point. Often this transition is simultaneous. The prospect of expanding your web presence can be exciting, and help boost your bottom line if done correctly. If done incorrectly, you can wipe out a huge portion of your past work and customer base, as well as destroying your rankings in the search engines. A failure to plan your move is a sure-fire plan for failure!
Are the URLs of your site going to change? Most likely, the answer is yes. Reasons for generating a new URL structure could be that you are moving from a static site to a dynamic site like adding a content management system, upgrading to a different server technology, like moving from .php to .asp or ColdFusion, or implementing a process to make your URLs more Search Engine Friendly.
Your web page URLs are your addresses from the internet to your site. If you change your address without notifying inbound requests, people will not see your website, but instead a blank page with the error message, “The page cannot be found.” This can be devastating if the request is made from a search engine trying to spider your site!
In addition, if you have been developing a comprehensive SEO program for your site, you will have deep links - inbound links to the interior pages of your site. You will lose a large portion of your inbound link inventory if you don’t plan your move.
Here are the steps your web design team needs to take to make the move as smooth as possible.
301 Redirects: Research - pull an inventory of your natural search engine results (in Google use the site: command) and match it up to your most powerful page urls by comparing your statistics. Make sure that you implement a 301 redirect for every indexed page and point requests to the new page location. This needs to be done before moving day.
Custom 404 Page: Realize up front that there are going to be some loose ends. Design a custom 404 “not found” page that is inside the structure of your site and offers a clear menu of options for the human searcher. This will help them engage with your site. Make sure that the site has a clear text link to your sitemap so that search engine spiders can learn about the structure of your site. NEVER automatically redirect bad requests to the home page.
Sitemaps: Make sure you launch the site with a complete sitemap in place so that the search engines can spider your new structure. In addition, you will need to create an XML sitemap and submit it to Google increase the speed at which your new site is indexed.
Pay Per Click: Consider increasing your PPC budget for core terms that drive your business. There is always a natural short term drop in search engine results when you make a change.
Backlink Check: Pull your inventory of incoming links. Change any links that will point to URLs that will become obsolete where possible. Use Google Webmaster Tools to detect broken backlinks. A proper 301 redirect plan should take care of most of these issues.
Outbound Links: Do you have a list of resources or links on your site, or reciprocal link agreements? If so, make sure you have a plan to reinstall them in the new site, and there is a clear way to get to them.
Robots.txt File: Move and update the robots.txt exclusions file to reflect your site structure change. If your private data, images, or testing area has changed locations, make sure to add a line in the file to account for it.
Hosting: If your move involves a hosting / server change make sure your new IP address is not black listed. Some IP ranges get recycled, and may have been previously used in an activity that got them banned. Check how many other sites will be sharing your server if not dedicated the lower the number the better.
Timing: If you have a seasonal site or known high / low traffic periods plan your move during the slow season.
Build Links: Obtain high value back-links pointing toward your critical interior landing pages just after the site is moved. This will help get your site re-indexed quickly.
It is important to consult your SEO firm prior to making any changes in your site design. This way you can avoid turning your shining star into black hole.
The burning question in every business owner’s mind this time of year is should I discount and if so when and how much. Under normal economic conditions a good argument can be made for both sides of this discussion. But in tough times like we we face now it’s harder to argue for the side of holding that line. It nearly acknowledges that you are out of touch with consumers.
Because in an extraordinary time like this we are actually resetting prices. Yes, we will be able to raise them again some day, but in my opinion right now we have to pay close attention to what the market can bear. Just look at how WalMart is dominating the early holiday shopping ads with their heartfelt plea to offer low prices.
Face it, if you sell low priced units you are selling less of them or discounting and taking less profit. But most of our clients sell big ticket units and a large majority of you sell leisure and/or vacation oriented units. The plain truth is that consumers who could marginally afford what you offered in the past are “off the list” now. Many who could afford you are now marginal. Yet, still a small percentage are actually doing ok and are able to seize good opportunities to buy cars, homes and leisure time at will when the perceived value is “too good to pass up.” With all of this in mind, you need to spend some time being creative.
What can you offer that is different from the crowd. Right now, it seems like it takes something equal to at least 30% off of your full price. This is not a time to just pay the concept of “discount” momentary lip service and move on. Obviously, the more margin you had to start with the chance you have to still make a reasonable profit. But you also need to look at what a creative discount promotion can do in the long run; create new customers you might never have had.
If you “steal” a long time customer from the competitor down the street through a creative deal that gets people excited and then end up delivering a better product than they got at the other place you sow the seeds for a growing customer base of the future. While out of the scope of our day to day work we do for our clients, we have been marketers since the dawn of time and would be happy to be your sounding board on creative ideas and help you steer through these turbulent times successfully.
Google Alerts www.google.com/alerts is an essential tool for business owners that want to monitor their brand, business name, and ultimately their reputation online. With a few quick entries you will be notified via email every time Google discovers the topic of your Alert.
Here is the syntax that I recommend you set up for your Alerts.
Your exact business name in parenthesis - “business name here”
Your domain is mentioned – yourdomain.com
Your website gets indexed – site:yourdomain.com
When links point back to your site - link:yourdomain.com -site:yourdomain.com
This is not a great solution for larger business that receive a large volume of traffic on their brand. But for the normal small business, or individual it is a good advance warning system.
Netrafic clients - If you need help setting this up please feel free to contact us.
If your site has been dropping in the search engines for a search term that you have traditionally performed well for, read on…
There is no way to sugar-coat the message in this article; It is almost impossible for your website to be competitive anymore if you are not engaged in a link building campaign, and adding fresh content to your website.
There are hundreds of factors that the search engines use to determine the indexing position for a given search term. Some factors are minor, but two are major – Links and Content.
Links – Your sites link profile can be as much as 50% of the equation in ranking your website. For competitive search terms, you will not arrive on the front page if you do not have links that support your website for that search term. The top SEO practitioners recently created an SEO success map, there was 100% agreement that Linking is one of the top contributing factors to ranking success. There was also complete agreement that poor linking practices can kill a website. For more on link building please read What Are Links and In Link We Trust.
Netrafic Offers a Complete Link Building Strategy – Contact Us
Content – Your sites content profile can be as much as 50% of the equation in ranking your website. The search engines will no longer consider a few pages of content on a subject to be authoritative for highly competitive search terms. In addition, content freshness is being given additional weight today. If makes sense that a top website on a given subject should have a wealth of topical content and new information would be added on a regular basis. Content is primarily text. Graphics, Media, and Flash are also minor considerations, but there is no replacement for text. An important note – text built anywhere other than on your websites primary domain does not count. Its not worthless, but it does not count toward building your site as far as the search engines are concerned.
Netrafic Offers Content Building Strategies – Contact Us
The above assumes that your website design is already search engine friendly, and some other key elements are in place. It is a generalization given the complexity and competitive nature of the search results race. Here is what you need to take away from this article – even if you are perfect in one area (links or content) it is still possible to fail. You need the complete package. You can not count of your past success in the search engines to continue if you don’t get in the game.
Even if your organization is focusing on quality customer service, sooner or latter you are going to receive a “less than favorable” review on the web. What you do next is critical to your bottom line!
Online reviews aren’t really about “customer service.” They’re a part of the sales process. Consider this: A review’s purpose is to give potential new customers an idea of what to expect if they decide to do business with your company. Third-party party information and experiences can be very influential in the buyers decision making process. That’s exactly what a review is — third-party information. The likelihood that the negative reviewer will ever return to your business to spend money is low, so the purpose of any response is to mitigate the negative impact that review may have on potential new customers.
The first step is knowledge. You need to know when negative reviews are put up about your company. Don’t wait passively to discover the comment months or even years down the road. In the meantime, countless customers may be turned off and turned away by that review. Response time is key! You can easily monitor your brand name and website domain in real time using Google Alerts. Properly setup, Google will notify you in real time, any time your site or business name is used online. Read our article on Setting Up Google Alerts.
Now you need to determine if you can respond. Some sites like TripAdvisor and Yelp have a “Business Owner Response” gateway. Other sites like Google Maps do not provide a method to directly respond. The crew over at SEO Igloo has developed a list of site interaction options which you can find out about in their Respond to Reviews article.
Next you need to decide if intervention is necessary. Some reviews are too general or abstract to get involved in the response process. Non-specific comments should be ignored (in my opinion) for the most part. There may be a some nuggets of information that you can use as a business owner to improve your customers experience, for example if the same complaint keeps surfacing, but responding to generalizations is counterproductive.
If you find a specific complaint that is a good candidate for a response, remember to check your ego at the door. This is part of the sales process, so you need to think of that review as if it were any other sales objection or concern. Nothing has ever been sold by telling the potential prospect that they were “wrong or stupid,” even if that’s the truth. Instead you need to demonstrate that you care, and turn the review is a non-issue. Maybe even sprinkle some “sales pitch” into the response if you have a creative writer!
The “caring resolution” approach utilizes a time honored method to answering sales objections called the “Feel, Felt, Found” method. The twist is that I have added “Fixed” to the formula. Here is what the response structure looks like in practice:
Feel – We understand how you feel about this; product, service, treatment, quality, or price.
Felt – If any other customers have felt this way, please contact us directly and immediately.
Found – We looked into your complaint and here is what we found out about our business.
Fixed - Thanks for bringing this to our attention, this is how we Fixed it so that it never happens again.
Of course you will need to camouflage the words so your sales tactic is not obvious to the consumer. This approach has a strong psychological impact on potential clients as it completely dilutes the complaint. In addition, I have seen this method turn the original complainer into an advocate, getting them to update the review with a more positive slant. Always strive for a win-win solution.
On a final note, make sure to read the rules and terms of service for each particular review site. They all have unique engagement rules, and violating them could cause your response to not appear on the site. If you need help getting started, please contact us.
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