Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/sewblog/~3/eZgVrT1Di3I/10-Tips-to-Help-Small-Marketing-Teams-Kill-It
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jueves, 28 de febrero de 2013
10 Tips to Help Small Marketing Teams Kill It
While the stress and pressure of delivering high volumes of qualified leads is not getting any easier, small marketing teams can manage the multitude of channels, tactics, and online possibilities to meet their goals by doing these 10 things.
My Halloween costume for 2012: Matt Romney!
My fellow Americans, I’d like to introduce my latest Halloween costume: Matt Romney! My five-point plan for the Mitt Romney Halloween costume went like this: Start with a suit and tie. Put a little silver in my sideburns. My wife used some silver and white eye shadow. Swoosh the hair up a little bit and [...]
Source: http://feeds.mattcutts.com/~r/mattcutts/uJBW/~3/UGzbirwIopY/
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Batter Up! MLB Ticketing Via Passbook Grows This Season
People love to put baseball out to pasture with quaint old activities of yesteryear like rocking the summer night away on the front porch with family and regularly sitting at the same table for dinner. Of course, those folks aren’t paying attention since baseball is likely the leading major sport when it comes to its [...]
Source: http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2013/02/batter-up-mlb-ticketing-via-passbook-grows-this-season.html
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Facebook?s Graph Search and Google+ for Social: Does One Have to Prevail?
Facebook and Google have been seen as separate online necessities for quite some time, but it seems as though both companies are beginning to close that gap. Facebook is becoming more search oriented with the announcement of the Facebook Graph (currently in Beta testing), and Google is becoming more socially oriented as Google+ begins to [...]
Author information
The post Facebook?s Graph Search and Google+ for Social: Does One Have to Prevail? appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
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GoDaddy SOPA Backlash: Karma from Bad Link Practices?
GoDaddy sure is making the headlines these days. Though people are mainly incensed about the fickleness of their stance on the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act), what has been playing over and over in my head is Joost deValk’s post …
GoDaddy SOPA Backlash: Karma from Bad Link Practices? was originally posted on the Phoenixrealm SEO Blog by Gary Cottam.
You can connect with Gary on Google+, on Twitter @garycottam, or follow these links to find out more about Doublespark SEO or Doublespark Web Design.
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/phoenixrealm/UynW/~3/zUf6JHXyJng/
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WordPress Archive Pages: the tutorial
On any bigger site, you’ll get archive pages of some sort. Whether they are taxonomy or category archives, like this SEO category, Custom Post Type archives like this one for our WordPress plugin reviews�or my speaking engagements,�or even date archives: they all share the same common traits. In WordPress an archive will, by default, consist…
WordPress Archive Pages: the tutorial is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites. A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/ituadafIpro/
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What I learned from time away from the internet and email
Hey folks, I just finished January’s 30 day challenge: no news, no Twitter, fewer emails, and no social media in general. For February, my wife and I are trying a gluten-free, wheat-free month to see what that’s like. Okay, so how was January? I started with a week completely off the internet, which coincided with [...]
Source: http://feeds.mattcutts.com/~r/mattcutts/uJBW/~3/0R1D8etDsPo/
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How Low Can #1 Go? (A Ranking Study)
Posted by Dr. Pete
In the days of 10 blue links, getting a #1 ranking on Google was the ultimate goal. As advertising becomes more prominent, local and vertical results become more complex, and Knowledge Graph and other rich SERP features become more prevalent, though, a #1 ranking isn’t always what it used to be. We’ve seen a lot of anecdotes over the past year or two, but I thought it was time to ask the question – where, on average, does a #1 Google ranking appear on the page?
Visualizing 10,000 #1 Rankings
I’ll dig into the methodology in a minute, but let’s cut right to the chase – we measured the vertical (Y) position of the #1 organic ranking across 10,000 keywords during business hours (roughly 10am-5pm ET) on Wednesday, February 12th. The following visualization shows what we found:
Embed this image:
I’ll spell out a few stats, for the sake of accessibility and because not all of them fit neatly in the visualization:
- Y=157 – Top position without Google Plus Bar
- Y=221 – Average position of SERPs with no ads
- Y=358 – Average position of SERPs with 1 ad
- Y=375 – Average position across all 10,000 queries
- Y=482 – Average position of SERPs with 2 ads
- Y=493 – Average position of SERPs with 3 ads
- Y=976 – Lowest position in our data set (see below)
Vertical position was well correlated with the number of ads that appeared at the top of the page (r=0.80), not surprisingly, but that doesn’t paint the whole picture. Rich SERP features are occupying more and more of the real estate.
The Big “Winners”
I thought it might be interesting to look at a couple of specific examples, so here are three “winners” – the queries with the lowest vertical positions for the #1 organic spot:
2nd Runner-Up: “Myrtle Beach Weather” (Y=869)
Here’s an example of the latest weather forecast widget – add in just one ad, and the #1 organic listing on this page is almost nowhere to be seen. Note: all of these screenshots have been cropped horizontally but are displayed in their actual vertical size.
1st Runner-Up: “Family Portraits” (Y=876)
This SERP combines two ads, both with links/extensions, plus a mega-block of images:
2013’s Winner: “Disney Stock” (Y=976)
Our winner pushed the #1 organic position down to nearly 1,000 pixels, well below the fold on many screens. This was a perfect storm of ads plus an enhanced stock ticker plus News results:
The Basic Methodology
I want to briefly explain how the data was collected, for transparency’s sake. The 10,000 keywords were taken from Google AdWords keyword research tools, split evenly across 20 categories. Naturally, these keywords are probably more commercial than the “average” keyword, but they do represent a wide range of volume, competition, query length, etc.
We did not count News results or Places blocks (local results that specifically say “Places for…”) as “organic”, but we did count video results (these are integrated now), and blended or “Pack” local results. The problem is that pack results are, at least within the DOM, very difficult to distinguish from organic – Google seems to count some as blended and some as “pure” local. This also gave Google the benefit of the doubt, which seemed only fair.
The actual technology was a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster. Queries were crawled from a variety of IPs (and, presumably, data centers) with personalization off, and rendered automatically in a Chrome browser. The #1 organic ranking was detected programmatically and a new DIV ID was injected. This ID’s vertical position was measured via jQuery’s offset() function and was passed via AJAX to the proper database. We spot-checked measurements against screenshots – the approach was crude but effective.
How Much Is #1 Worth?
To be fair to Google, most of the #1 rankings we measured that were really pushed down were in the bottom 20th percentile. Many #1 rankings still have reasonably good on-screen real-estate. The trick is knowing where your own rankings fall. This is a very dynamic situation, and non-standard SERP features are becoming more common and more diverse. If you only see what your rank tracking tool tells you and celebrate staying in the “top” spot, but the top spot is below 3 ads, a stock ticker, 3 news links, and a Places block, you probably don’t have much to celebrate. This is why it’s critically important to actually look at your SERPs in the wild, and to keep an eye on “downstream” metrics, like your organic traffic.
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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/T37SRSEBN0Q/how-low-can-number-one-go
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We're Going Google...
In the search ecosystem Google controls the relevancy algorithms (& the biases baked into those) as well as the display of advertisements and the presentation of content. They also control (or restrict) the flow of marketable data.
For example, a publisher might not get keyword referral data on organic search, but Google passes that data on via advertisements & passes a large amount of data on through their ad network to other ad networks. Consider this:
a DoubleClick tag on the site sent data to two other companies that collect it for various purposes -- Rubicon and Casale Media, representing a "hop." In a subsequent hop, Casale transferred the IMDB data to BlueKai, Optimax and Brandscreen, while Rubicon pushed it to TargusInfo, RocketFuel, Platform 161, Efficient Frontier and the AMP Platform. AMP then sent the data on to AppNexus and back to DoubleClick.
For about a decade being relevant & focused created efficiencies that more than offset any "size = quality" biases that the Google engineers created. However across many verticals that window is closing & it is never a good idea to wait until it is fully closed to adjust. ;)
This shift from relevancy to "size = quality" can be seen in the stock performance of mid-market companies like BankRate & Quinstreet.
Those companies were laser focused on the markets that have significant consumer intent & traffic value, but Google has eroded the affiliate base & ad networks of many of the direct marketing plays for a couple years straight now.
If Google's algorithmic biases are strong enough to literally move the market on companies worth hundreds of millions to billions of Dollars, one is naive to swim against the tide. The market is becoming more bifurcated.
This is why it is so hard to find a great SEO to recommend for small businesses. If that SEO really knows what they are doing & understands the market dynamics, then they probably won't serve the small business end of the market very long, or if they do, they will do so in a way where their continued flow of payments is not tied to performance. It is hard to have a sustainable business operating in a closed ecosystem if you are swimming in the opposite direction of that ecosystem.
In terms of our membership site here, a good slice of our customer base is the expert end of the market.
It is a tiny sliver of the market, but it is a segment that is somewhat well aligned with independent affiliate types & the sort of direct marketing relevancy-minded folks that Google has spent a couple years trying to marginalize as they cater to branded advertisers. We could try to shift our site to make it more mass market, but I prefer to run a site where we both learn & teach, and fear that moving to lower the barrier to entry and push more mass market will destroy what makes the membership site unique & valuable in the first place.
In early Google research they warned about relevancy shifting toward the interest of advertisers.
Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.
Perform that same cellular phone search today & that original cited page is nowhere to be found. Today that same search includes Wal-Mart, T-mobile, Samsung, Amazon.com, Best Buy & other well known brands. Search for the more common phrase cell phones & you get the same brands plus local results and shopping results. Awareness is replacing precision.
I think Gabe Newell described it best:
Closed platforms increase the chunk size of competition & increase the cost of market entry, so people who have good ideas, it is a lot more expensive for their productivity to be monetized. They also don't like standardization ... it looks like rent seeking behaviors on top of friction
As Google makes search more complex & mixes in more signals, it is becoming harder to win at the game if your operation is singularly focused on SEO & it is becoming easier to win if your business already has a strong footprint in many other channels which bleeds into your search profile. The following chart is conceptual, but it aims to get the issue across.
If one company is spending significant capital & effort trying to combat the Panda algorithm & another company automatically sees a ranking boost from Panda, then the company with the boost is typically going to see greater ROI from any further investments in SEO.
Having spilled all the above digital ink, back in 2007 we decided to shift away from an ebook model to run a membership site. On and off over the years we have done a bit of consulting outside of running this site, but haven't put significant emphasis on it over the past couple years as we were pushing hard to keep up with the algorithms & keep this site growing. With all the above shifts in place we recently decided to offer SEO consulting again.
Some FAQs on that front...
- If we work with you, who will be working on our project? The same people who write on the blog & run the community: Peter Da Vanzo, Eric Covino & Aaron Wall.
- How many clients will you work with? Just a handful at any given time. We prefer to have a deep integration with a few clients rather than a bulk model.
- Who are ideal clients? Those who know the value of search traffic & already have some general awareness & momentum in the marketplace. Examples of companies we have worked with in the past include: large ecommerce companies, tier 1 web portals, strong start ups & hedge funds invested in the web. Many of these clients already had an in-house SEO team & some were just actively beginning to leverage search.
- I have a tiny company with a small budget. Could I still work with you? In some cases there might be a fit, but if you feel our consulting is beyond your budget you can of course still join our membership website. Consulting is for those who want a deeper engagement than we can provide through our current membership site model.
- Can you name some past clients? For the most part, no. Our consulting projects typically come with nondisclosure agreements.
- Can you fill out an RFP? Most likely not. If you are still shopping around for an SEO, we are probably not going to be a great fit. But if you have known of us for years & know you want to work with us, do get in touch.
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Source: http://www.seobook.com/going-google
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Google: "As We Say, NOT As We Do"
Due to heavy lobbying, the FTC's investigation into Google's business practices has ended with few marks or bruises on Google's behalf. If the EU has similar results, you can count on Google growing more anti-competitive in their practices:
Google is flat-out lying. They?ve modified their code to break Google Maps on Windows Phones. It worked before, but with the ?redirect,? it no longer works.
We are only a couple days into the new year, but there have already been numerous absurdities highlighted, in addition to the FTC decision & Google blocking Windows Phones.
When is Cloaking, Cloaking?
Don't ask Larry Page:
Mr. Page, the CEO, about a year ago pushed the idea of requiring Google users to sign on to their Google+ accounts simply to view reviews of businesses, the people say. Google executives persuaded him not to pursue that strategy, fearing it would irritate Google search users, the people say.
...
Links to Google+ also appear in Google search-engine results involving people and brands that have set up a Google+ account.
Other websites can't hardcode their own listings into the search results. But anyone who widely attempted showing things to Googlebot while cloaking them to users would stand a good chance of being penalized for their spam. They would risk both a manual intervention & being hit by Panda based on poor engagement metrics.
Recall that a big portion of the complaint about Google's business practices was their scrape-n-displace modus operandi. As part of the FTC agreement, companies are able to opt out of being scraped into some of Google's vertical offerings, but that still doesn't prevent their content from making its way into the knowledge graph.
Now that Google is no longer free to scrape-n-displace competitors, apparently the parallel Google version of that type of content that should be "free and open to all to improve user experience" (when owned by a 3rd party) is a premium feature locked behind a registration wall (when owned by Google). There is a teaser for the cloaked information in the SERPs, & you are officially invited to sign into Google & join Google+ if you would like to view more.
Information wants to be free.
Unless it is Google's.
Then users want to be tracked and monetized.
Trademark Violations & Copyright Spam
A few years back Google gave themselves a pat on the back for ending relationships with "approximately 50,000 AdWords accounts for attempting to advertise counterfeit goods."
How the problem grew to that scale before being addressed went unasked.
Last year Google announced a relevancy signal based on DMCA complaints (while exempting YouTube) & even nuked an AdSense publisher for linking to a torrent of his own ebook. Google sees a stray link, makes a presumption. If they are wrong and you have access to media channels then the issue might get fixed. But if you lack the ability to get coverage, you're toast.
Years ago a study highlighted how Google's AdSense & DoubleClick were the monetization engine for stolen content. Recently some USC researchers came to the same conclusion by looking at Google's list of domains that saw the most DMCA requests against them. Upon hearing of the recent study, Google's shady public relations team stated:
"To the extent [the study] suggests that Google ads are a major source of funds for major pirate sites, we believe it is mistaken," a Google spokesperson said. "Over the past several years, we've taken a leadership role in this fight. The complexity of online advertising has led some to conclude, incorrectly, that the mere presence of any Google code on a site means financial support from Google."
So Google intentionally avails their infrastructure to people they believe are engaged in criminal conduct (based on their own 50,000,000+ "valid" DMCA findings) and yet Google claims to have zero responsibility for those actions because Google may, in some cases, not get a direct taste in the revenues (only benefiting indirectly through increasing the operating costs of running a publishing business that is not partnered with Google).
A smaller company engaged in a similar operation might end up getting charged for the conduct of their partners. However, when Google's ad code is in the page you are wrong to assume any relationship.
The above linked LA Times article also had the following quote in it:
"When our ads were running unbeknownst to us on these pirate sites, we had a serious problem with that," said Gareth Hornberger, senior manager of global digital marketing for Levi's. "We reached out to our global ad agency of record, OMD, and immediately had them remove them.... We made a point, moving forward, that we really need to take steps to avoid having these problems again."
Through Google's reality warping efforts the ad network, the ad agency, the publisher, and the advertiser are all entirely unaccountable for their own efforts & revenue streams. And it is not like Google or the large ad agencies lack the resources to deal with these issues, as there is some serious cash in these types of deals: "WPP, Google's largest customer, increased its spending on Google by 25% in 2012, to about $2 billion."
These multi-billion Dollar budgets are insufficient funds to police the associated activities. Whenever anything is mentioned in the media, mention system complexity & other forms of plausible deniability. When that falls short, outsource the blame onto a contractor, service provider, or rogue partner. Contrasting that behavior, the common peasant webmaster must proactively monitor the rest of the web to ensure he stays in the graces of his Lord Google.
DMCA Spam
You have to police your user generated content, or you risk your site being scored as spam. With that in mind, many big companies are now filing false DMCA takedown requests. Sites that receive DMCA complaints need to address them or risk being penalized. Businesses that send out bogus DMCA requests have no repercussions (until they are eventually hit with a class action lawsuit).
Remember how a while back Google mentioned their sophisticated duplication detection technology in YouTube?
There are over a million full movies on YouTube, according to YouTube!
The other thing that is outrageous is that if someone takes a video that is already on YouTube & re-uploads it again, Google will sometimes outrank the original video with the spam shag-n-republish.
In the below search result you can see that our video (the one with the Excel spreadsheet open) is listed in the SERPs 3 times.
The version we uploaded has over a quarter million views, but ranks below the spam syndication version with under 100 views.
There are only 3 ways to describe how the above can happen:
- a negative ranking factor against our account
- horrible relevancy algorithms
- idiocy
I realize I could DMCA them, but why should I have to bear that additional cost when Google allegedly automatically solved this problem years ago?
Link Spam
Unlike sacrosanct ad code, if someone points spam links at your site, you are responsible for cleaning it up. The absurdity of this contrast is only further highlighted by the post Google did about cleaning up spam links, where one of the examples they highlighted publicly as link spam was not a person's spam efforts, but rather a competitor's sabotage efforts that worked so well that they were even publicly cited as being outrageous link spam.
It has been less than 3 months since Google launched their disavow tool, but since it's launch some webmasters are already engaging in pre-negative SEO. That post had an interesting comment on it:
Well Mr Cutts, you have created a monster in Google now im afraid. Your video here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWJUU-g5U_I says that with the new disavow tool makes negative SEO a mere nuisance.
Yet in your previous video about the diavow tool you say it can take months for links to be disavowed as google waits to crawl them???
In the meantime, the time lag makes it a little more than a "nuisance" don't you think?
Where Does This Leave Us?
As Google keeps adding more advanced filters to their search engines & folding more usage data into their relevancy algorithms, they are essentially gutting small online businesses. As Google guts them, it was important to offer a counter message of inclusion. A WSJ articles mentioned that Google's "get your business online" initiative was more effective at manipulating governmental officials than their other lobbying efforts. And that opinion was sourced from Google's lobbyists:
Some Washington lobbyists, including those who have done work for Google, said that the Get Your Business Online effort has perhaps had more impact on federal lawmakers than any lobbying done on Capitol Hill.
Each of the additional junk time wasting tasks (eg: monitoring backlinks and proactively filtering them, managing inventory & cashflow while waiting for penalties tied to competitive sabotage to clear, filing DMCAs against Google properties when Google claims to have fixed the issue years ago, merging Google Places listings into Google+, etc.) Google foists onto webmasters who run small operations guarantees that a greater share of them will eventually get tripped up.
Not only will the algorithms be out of their reach, but so will consulting.
That algorithmic approach will also only feed into further "market for lemons" aspects as consultants skip the low margin, small budget, heavy lifting jobs and focus exclusively on servicing the companies which Google is biasing their "relevancy" algorithms to promote in order to taste a larger share of their ad budgets.
While chatting with a friend earlier today he had this to say:
Business is arbitrage. Any exchange not based in fraud is legitimate regardless of volume or medium. The mediums choose to delegitimize smaller players as a way to consolidate power.
Sadly most journalists are willfully ignorant of the above biases & literally nobody is comparing the above sorts of behaviors against each other. Most people inside the SEO industry also avoid the topic, because it is easier (& more profitable) to work with the elephants & attribute their success to your own efforts than it is highlight the holes in the official propaganda.
I mean, just look at all the great work David Naylor did for a smaller client here & Google still gave him the ole "screw you" in spite of doing just about everything possible within his control.
The linkbuilding tactics used by the SEO company on datalabel.co.uk were low quality, but the links were completely removed before a Reconsideration Request was filed. The MD?s commenting and directory submissions were done in good faith as ways to spread the word about his business. Despite a lengthy explanation to Google, a well-documented clean-up process, and eventually disavowing every link to the site, the domain has never recovered and still violates Google?s guidelines.
If you?ve removed or disavowed every link, and even rebuilt the site itself, where do you go from there?
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Source: http://www.seobook.com/google-wins
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20+ More Bloggers to Watch: The Readers? Choice
It’s been nearly a month since Bloggers to Watch in 2013 was published. We had a fantastic response, including some compelling recommendations via the comments section and around the web. This post presents all the bloggers that people have highlighted over the past few weeks. Mark Richards If you want to read a genuinely very [...]
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
20+ More Bloggers to Watch: The Readers’ Choice
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ProbloggerHelpingBloggersEarnMoney/~3/5y7hH7Dy60Y/
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Checkout-less Commerce: Amex Lets You Pay With a #Hashtag
Until now, Twitter-commerce was only possible through referral links, with conversion rates somewhere around 0.5%. But Amex has come up with an innovative way to sell socially — without a checkout process. Amex Sync lets you buy with just a #hashtag. (Email subscribers, can’t see video? View this post on the Web) How it works [...]
Source: http://www.getelastic.com/hashtag-commerce/
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Video SEO for Wistia & Vippy
As promised in my post yesterday, today marks the day for a new release of my Video SEO plugin. This one brings support for yet another few plugins�and some more: two new video hosting platforms: Wistia and Vippy. Wistia support: embedding and�SEO The support for Wistia that is added in this release was on the…
Video SEO for Wistia & Vippy is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites. A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/xy9iuCVh1bk/
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How a 1970s Discount Store Can Increase Your Conversion Rate
Posted by Phil Sharp
This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.
I want to tell you a true story about a discount store from the 1970s called D.B. Sales.
Now, before you start yelling…
“Join me in the 21st century, Grandpa! We have the Internet, Snuggie blankets and millions of cat videos to watch.”
…give me a chance to explain. I promise to make it worth your while.
D.B. Sales was run by Morris and Tessie Benatar -- friendly, hard-working folks who were trying help their small business succeed. The problem is, in the mid-70s, their business wasn’t doing too well. Sales were down, money was tight, and tensions between Morris and Tessie were rising.
Sure, they look nice, but you wouldn't want to get Tessie angry. She had a mean right hook.
Like any good businessperson, Morris doggedly tried everything he could think of to increase sales. He changed the window displays, ran promotions, offered free delivery, and placed ads in local newspapers. But, nothing worked.
Then, one day, everything changed.
Morris finally had a promotion that worked. In fact, the promotion worked so well that he ran it year after year for the next 10 years:
You don't actually have to go out of business to have one of these sales, do you?
Now, why did I tell you this story? Because I think it contains a valuable lesson about how to increase the conversion rate of your website.
Morris spent a lot of his time testing out different ideas until he finally (and luckily) came across something that worked. As online marketers, we do the exact same thing.
We test different button colors, call to actions, headlines, images, and everything else we can think of. Occasionally, on our good days, we come across something that works and we feel good about ourselves.
However, we should learn from Morris. He could’ve saved himself a lot of money, stress, and dirty looks from Tessie, if he would’ve talked to his customers. They could’ve helped him answer one of the most important questions:
Why aren't people buying from me?
This was an easy question for Morris to ask because customers would walk right into his store. But, as people who manage websites, how do we find out why people aren’t buying from us?
In my mind, this is what a website visitor looks like. It makes life more exciting.
That’s why I want to share with you my patent-pending approach* to finding out what your website visitors are thinking.
*Okay, you got me, it’s not patent pending. Does that make it “patent pretending”? <Insert Drumroll>
Five ways to find out why your customers aren't buying from you
1) Chat transcripts
If you have a chat feature on your website then you can get really helpful feedback RIGHT NOW by simply reading through your chat logs. Whenever we’re going to revise a page at UserTesting.com we always start by searching for all of the chats that happened on that URL.
This is an easy way to learn about your customers’ main questions, concerns and objections.
If you don’t have chat on your site, but are considering adding it, then check out SnapEngage. They’re who we use and we’ve been very happy with them.
Chat logs make it easy to find out what questions your visitors ask on specific pages.
2) Surveys
If you have a question for your visitors, or want some feedback, then often times the best thing to do is ask. Use tools like Qualaroo, SurveyMonkey or 4QSurvey and ask open-ended survey questions like: “If you didn’t sign-up, can you tell us why not?”
Sometimes the easiest thing to do is ask.
3) Talk to your sales and customer support people
Your sales and customer support people spend all day communicating with your site's visitors. This means that 1) they’re amazing people and 2) they understand the objections of your web visitors better than anyone.
So go talk with your sales and support people and ask them how they overcome the common objections. You can then take this learning and apply it to your site.
4) Eat your own dog food
Spend time pretending to be your customer and use your website and product. At UserTesting.com we have one of our team members pretend to be a customer each and every month, write up their suggestions for improvement, and then email them directly to our CEO.
This isn’t quite as good as unbiased feedback from someone in your target market, but you’ll be surprised at the amount of good ideas your team will come up with.
5) "Think aloud" testing
Look, I’m biased, but this is definitely my favorite way to find out why customers aren’t buying. With “think aloud” testing you can watch people in your target market speak their thoughts out loud as they try to accomplish common tasks on your website or mobile device.
When you run this kind of test you can see with your own eyes where your users get stuck or have problems.
You just think you know your users.
Remember, the people visiting your website are actual human beings – they’re not “uniques” or “pageviews”. To understand how to make your website better, you need to learn from Morris Benatar: either pretend to always be going out of business, or talk to your customers.
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Manage Your Reputation
How much value do you place on your good reputation?
If we looked at it purely from a financial point of view, our reputations help us get work, make money, and be more influential. On a personal level, a good name is something of which you can be proud. It is something tangible that makes you feel good.
You're Everywhere
As it becomes increasingly easy for people to make their feelings known and published far and wide, many businesses are implementing reputation management strategies to help protect their good name.
This area used to be the domain of big business, who employed teams of PR and legal specialists to nurture, defend and promote established brands. Unlike small business, which didn?t have to worry about what someone on the other side of the country might have said about them as it didn?t affect business in their locality, larger entities were exposed nationally, and often internationally. It was also difficult for an individual to spread their grievance, unless it was picked up by mainstream media.
These days, everything is instant and international. Those with a grievance can be heard far and wide, without the need to get media involved. We hear about problems with brands across the other side of the country, or the world, just as easily as we hear about them in our own regions, or market niches. If someone is getting hammered in the search industry, you and I probably both hear about it, at roughly the same time. And so will everyone else.
Media stories don?t even have to be true, of course. False information travels just as fast, if not faster, than truth. Given the potential, it?s a wonder reputation problems don?t occur more often that they do.
This is why reputation management is becoming increasingly important for smaller firms and individuals. No matter how good you are at what you do, it?s impossible to please everyone all the time, so it?s quite possible someone could damage your good name at some point.
Much of the reputation management area is obvious and common sense, but certainly worth taking time to consider, especially if you haven?t looked at reputation issues up until now. When people search on your name, do they find an accurate representation of who you are and what you?re about? Is the information outdated? Are you seen in the same places as you competition? How does their reputation compare to yours?
Also, some marketers offer reputation monitoring and management as an add-one service to clients so it can be a potential new revenue stream for those offering consultancy services.
The Indelible Nature Of The Internet
In some respects, I?m glad the internet - as we know it - wasn?t around when I was at school. There were far too many regrettable nights that, these days, would be recorded from various angles on smartphones and uploaded to YouTube before anyone can say ?that isn?t mine, officer!?
You?ve got to feel sorry for some of the kids today. Kids being kids, they sometimes do stupid things, but these days a record of stupidity is likely to hang around ?forever?. Perhaps their grand-kids will get a laugh one day. Perhaps the recruiter won?t.
Something similar could happen to you, or your firm. One careless employee saying the wrong thing and the record could show up in search engines for a long time. If you?re building a brand, whether personal or related to a business, you need to look after it, nurture it, and defend it, if need be. We?ll look at a few practical ways to do so.
On the flip side, of course, the internet can help establish and spread your good reputation very quickly. We?ll also look at ways to push your good reputation.
Modern Media Is A Conversation
People talk.
These days, no matter how big a firm is, they can?t hide behind PR and receptionists. If they don?t want to join the conversation, so be it - it will go on all around them, regardless. If they aren?t part of it, then they risk the conversation being dictated by others.
So a big part of online reputation management is about getting involved in the conversation, and framing it, where possible i.e. have the conversation on your terms.
Be Proactive
Most us haven?t got time to constantly monitor everything that might be said about us or our brands. One of the most cost-effective ways to manage reputation is to get out in front of problems before they arise. If there is enough good things said about you, then the occasional critical voice won?t carry as much weight by comparison.
The first step is to audit your current position. Search on your name and/or brand. What do you see in the top ten? Do the results reflect what you?re about? Is there anything negative showing up? If so, can you respond to it by way of a comment section? This is the exact same information your customers will see, of course, when they look you up.
If you?re not seeing accurate content, you may need to update or publish more appropriate content on your own sites, and those sites that come up in the top ten, where possible. More aggressive SEO approaches involve flooding the SERPs with positive content in an attempt to push down any negative stories below the fold so they are less likely to be seen. This is probably not quite as effective as addressing the underlying issues that caused the negative press in the first place, unless the criticisms were malicious, in which case, game on.
Next, conduct the same set of searches on your competitors. How does their reputation compare? Are they being seen in places you aren't? Are they getting positive press mentions that you could get, too? How does your reputation stack up, relatively speaking?
Listen
You can monitor mentions using services such as Google Alerts, Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, and various other tools. There?s another big list of tools here. Google runs "Me On The Web" as part of the Google Dashboard.
Monitor trends related to your industry. Get involved in fast breaking, popular trends and discussions. Be seen where potential customers would expect to see you. The more other people see you engaged on important issues, in a positive light, the more credibility you?re banking for the future. If you build up a high volume of ?good stuff?, any occasional critical voice will likely get lost in the noise, rather than stand out. A lot of reputation management has to do with building positive PR ahead of any negatives that may arise later. You should be everywhere your customers expect to see you.
This is a common tactic used by authors selling on Amazon. They ?encourage? good reviews, typically by handing out free review copies to friends, in order to stack the positive review side in their favor. The occasional negative review may hurt them, but not quite as much as if the number of negative reviews match the number of positive reviews. Some of them overdo it, of course, as twenty 5 star reviews, and nothing else, looks somewhat suspicious. When it comes to PR, it's best to be believable!
Engage
Create a policy for engagement, for yourself, and other people who work for you. Keep it simple, and principle based, as principles are easier to remember and apply. For example, a good principle is to post in haste only if what you are saying is positive. If something is negative, pause. Leave it for a few hours. If it still feels right, then post. It?s so easy to post in haste, and then regret it for years afterwards.
Seek feedback often. Ask people how you?re doing, especially if you suspect you've annoyed someone or let them down in some way. If you give people permission to vent where you control the environment it means they are less likely to let off steam somewhere else. It may also highlight potential trouble-spots in your process, that you can fix and thus avoid repeats in future. I?ve run sites where the sales process has occasionally broken down, and had customers complain. It happens. I make a point of letting them vent, giving them more than they originally ordered, and apologizing to them for the problems. Not only does going over-and-above expectations prevent negative press, it has often turned disgruntled customers into advocates. They?ve increased their business, and referred others. Pretty simple, right, but good customer service is all part of the reputation management process.
Figure out who the influential people are in your industry and try and get onside with them. In a crisis, they may well help you out, especially if they see you?re being hard done by. If influential names weigh in on your behalf, this can easily marginalize the person who is being critical.
Security
Secure your stuff. Check out this awful story on Wired:
In the space of one hour, my entire digital life was destroyed. First my Google account was taken over, then deleted. Next my Twitter account was compromised, and used as a platform to broadcast racist and homophobic messages. And worst of all, my AppleID account was broken into, and my hackers used it to remotely erase all of the data on my iPhone, iPad, and MacBook.
Explaining what happened and getting it published on Wired is a pretty good crisis management response, of course. When you look up ?Mat Horan?, you find that article. Separate your social media business and personal profiles. Secure your mobile phone. Check that your privacy settings are correct across social media. Simple stuff that goes a long way to protecting your existing reputation.
What To Do If You Do Hit Trouble
We can?t please everyone, all the time.
A critical factor is speed. If you spot trouble, get into the conversation early. This can prevent the problem festering and gathering it?s own momentum. However, before you leap in, make sure you understand the issue. Ask ?what do these people want to happen that is not currently happening??.
Also consider who is saying it. What?s their reach? If it?s just a ranter on noname.blogspot.com, or a troll attempt, it?s probably not worth your time, and engaging trolls is counter-productive. Someone influential, of course, requires kid glove treatment. One common tactic, especially if the situation is escalating beyond your control, is to try and take it offline and reach resolution that way. You can then go back to the online conversation once it has been resolved, rather than having the entire firefight a matter of indelible public record.
It?s illegal for people to defame you, so you could also consider legal action if the problem is bad enough. You could also consider engaging some PR help, particularly if the problem occurs in mainstream media. PR can be a bit hit and miss, but reputable PR professionals tend to have extensive networks of contacts, so may get you seen where it might be difficult for you to do so on your own. There are also dedicated reputation management companies, such as reputation.com, reputationchanger.com, and reputationmanagementagency.com who handle monitoring and public relations functions. NB: Included for illustration purposes. We have no relationship with these firms.
Practical examples of constructive responses to negative criticism can often be seen in the Amazon reviews.
For example, a writer can respond to any reviews made about their book. A good approach to negative statements is to thank the reviewer for taking the time to provide feedback, regardless of what they said, and address the issue raised in a calm, informative manner. Future customers will see this, of course, which provides yet another opportunity to sway their opinion. One great example I?ve seen was when the writer did all of the above AND offered the person providing the negative review an hour of free consulting so the reviewer could get the specific information he felt he was missing! One downside of this strategy, however, might be more copycat negative reviews aimed at getting the reviewer free consulting!
The same principle applies to any negative comment in other contexts. When a reader sees your reply, they get editorial balance that would otherwise be missing.
It?s obvious, yet important, stuff. If you?ve got examples of how you?ve handled reputation issues in the past, or your ideas on how best to manage reputation going forward, please add them to the comments to help others.
I?m sure they?ll remember you for it :)
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Source: http://www.seobook.com/manage-your-reputation
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SES New York Keynote Speaker Says Internet is TV?s Best Friend
According to Mike Proulx, the Internet has become TV?s best friend. Proulx, the opening keynote speaker at SES New York 2013, will explain how you can reach and engage audiences by connecting TV to the web, social media, and mobile. 
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