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You would expect your website to show up in the top position when people search for it. But what about the other 9 positions on the page, the ones where negative reviews or forum comments might show up? You can’t control them can you? Well actually you can.
Social Media pages
To start with, your social media pages have a good chance of being in the top positions. A search for WebEden will show our Twitter, Facebook and Youtube pages within these results. This means that not only can you have control of the top position, but you can probably show position 2 and 3 and maybe even 4. And since your social media pages should be full of the good will of your social networks, they show off your website in the best light possible.
Get good Reviews
As we’ve mentioned previously, It’s important for every small business to make sure they get good reviews, and to have a social media strategy. You first need to find the websites where reviews of your website are relevant. You can usually do this with a quick search in google for ‘your market + reviews’. Once you’ve compiled a list of websites where reviews could be posted, you need to start getting them! The easiest way to do this is when your website visitors or customers give you positive feedback, ask them to leave a review on one of the reviews website on your list.
OK, this won’t actually stop the bad comments show up in the Search Engine Results page. But if you take time to get involved in a forum where someone is moaning about you, it means that you are addressing their problems in a very public way. This shows great customer service, and anyone taking the time to read beyond the initial gripe will be impressed at your desire to solve problems. Other people on the forum might also give you respect, and let the original complainer know that they have been won over, It might well turn a bad situation into a good one.
Take control of your Google Local Business listing
As we’ve discussed before, a Google local business listing provides a great opportunity to be found for searches relevant to your business on Google maps. Google local business listings can also show up in the SERPs, particularly where a place name is specified. So this is another opportunity to control the SERPs.
Take control of your website profile pages
There are lots of websites out there that automatically create a static page that claims to ‘analyse’ your website. The page contains a small amount of information, usually obtained from the domain whois record, all about your website. This usually includes the website name, a small screen grab, the name on the whois register, and an assessment of the amount of traffic your website has.
These pages are usually created to attract traffic from search engines, since they are usually covered with Google ads. But they also give you the opportunity to take control and edit the information they hold about you, to keep it up to date. Due to the structure of these websites, they often appear in the SERPs for your brand searches. By taking control and editing yours, you are again controlling another result in the SERP.
Due to the power of the Wikipedia website, a Wikipedia page all about your business might be an option. This isn’t an easy one though. To start with, in order to qualify your business needs to pass the notability guidelines
And since a Wikipedia article can be edited by anyone, the page needs constant monitoring to check that no-one as added anything negative.
So a Wikipedia page might be an option for some but not all.
Finally
The worst thing that can happen when people search for you is for them to read a bad review, before they’ve even visited your website. By taking control of the whole SERPs for your brand you can push these reviews to the bottom of the page, or even page 2, where no-one is going to see them.
Of course there’s a positive side too. By controlling lots of the SERPs for your brand searches, you have a real opportunity to show your website and company off in the best light possible.
Try setting up a few of these options and see how they get into the SERP. And then leave us a comment below.
The latest UM ‘Power to the People’ study has revealed that the number of people now online has hit 625million. Of these, nearly two thirds have joined a Social Networking site such as Facebook, Twitter or Myspace.
The growth of social media has been of particular focus to the study. The study questioned 22,729 internet users in 38 countries, which makes it the largest global analysis of social media usage.
It shows that not only are people using social networking sites more and more, but they are using them to do far more things. Users are more likely to use social networks to blog, upload photos & videos and to use their widgets too.
In terms of specifics: 76% of social networkers upload photos; 33.1% now upload videos; 29.1% now write a blog; and 34% install widgets on their profile page.
“Social media is a very fast evolving landscape and one that’s taking an increasingly important role in consumers’ digital lives”, said Glen Parker, research director at UM EMEA.
What does this mean when you’re building a website with WebEden? At the very least, it shows the potential power of people’s online social networks to recommend websites and products. The latest WebEden release allows you to integrate your website with both Facebook and Twitter; invite people to become ‘members’ of your website’; and to update your status from your WebEden website. These call all help you start to harness the power of social networks, in order to drive visitors to your website.
Who has so far had success integrating their site with their social networks? Leave us a comment below.
Here’s a story that might surprise the marketing people: despite social networking sites such as Facebook, Myspace and Twitter being aimed at ‘young things’, a recent study has shown that it is the older generation who are adopting social media at the fastest rate.
Research from online measurement company comScore has shown that people over 55 are more likely to spend their time on Facebook than visit a travel, business or technology website.
In May, almost 70% of those over 55 visited Facebook, Myspace or Twitter.
That being said, these figures still lag behind a younger demographic: 89% of 25 to 34 year olds spending time catching up with friends on social networking websites.
Social Networking for older people is more than just a passing fad, or a quick glance: the average 55 and over spends 3.7 hours per month on Facebook.
Mike Read, MD of comScore Europe said: “There continues to be a misconception that social networking is the preserve of the young. While those under 35 years old are certainly the more prevalent users, there is both a sizeable and heavily engaged audience of those 35 and older as well”.
What does this mean if you’re building a website that targets this demographic? Well to start with, you might want to consider advertising on Facebook. Facebook has a self serve advertising program that allows you to reach people based on not just their age, but their gender and interest group too.
Mike Read confirms the idea: “Advertising on social networking sites has a better chance of reaching these older demographics than site categories such as business and finance, which is a critical insight that might be lost for those trying to optimise their campaign against target audience segments.”
We’ll be showing you how to advertise on Facebook in an upcoming tutorial.
The second is that this should encourage you to get to grips with the new social networking tools available within WebEden. We’ve made it really easy for you to reach out and market to people in your social networks; invite them to become members of your site; and update Facebook from your WebEden website.
Even if you thought you are targeting people ‘who wouldn’t be into that social networking thing’, this research indicates you might be wrong.
Is social networking trans-generational? Are you using your social networks to create interest in your website? Leave us a comment below.
In part 1 of ‘what are your customers saying about you‘, we looked at some research from digital communications company Quba showing that not enough companies are monitoring what their customers say about them online. Doing this – and responding to them – is called having a social media strategy
So what can you do to develop your own Social Media strategy?
The first thing is to find out what your customers are actually saying about you online. If you have a blog or a forum on your website then getting customer feedback is quite easy – the happiest and least happy will be sure to share their feedback with you directly.
But what about those people who will simply give feedback elsewhere on the web, or on their social networks?
There are two separate tools you can use to find out what they’re saying. First, set up a few ‘Google Alerts’ using your company name, and your domain name. If you think there’s a chance that people will discuss you personally then set up a Google Alert for your personal name as well.
With a Google Alert, every time Google comes across a new mention of your company, domain or name as they crawl the web, they will send you an email with a link to where your company is mentioned. You can set up a Google Alert here.
This won’t necessarily give you up to date mentions of your company name since Google can take up to 3 months to trawl every website.
The second thing to do is to search on Twitter for mentions of your company name. The great thing about Twitter search is that you can instantly find where your customers are mentioning you. However, you probably don’t have time to constantly search for mentions of your name on Twitter! To save time, use a service like Tweetbeep.com to send you a daily email with all new mentions of your company name. Its free.
And what exactly do you do when you find people mentioning or talking about you or your brand?
The short answer is: get involved!
If people are criticising your company, then enter the conversation and let them know you’re sorry they had a bad time. Find out what went wrong. Is there anything you can do to rectify it? It often doesn’t take much to turn a negative reviewer into a positive one, once that person knows they’re not being neglected. And you get to publicly show your customer service skills to other people reading the thread.
That doesn’t mean you have to concede that the customer is absolutely right in what they’re saying. If you put your side of the story, and it seems fair, then anyone viewing the thread will see that you have a reasonable point of view.
If customers are saying good stuff then you might want to thank them for their feedback. You need to make a judgment as to whether or not you can add anything to the conversation – sometimes its better to let customers speak for themselves, so as to appear more impartial.
If you can identify the customer then it might be a good idea to send them a personal email thanking them for their comments.
The other good thing to do with positive comments is to channel them towards the better known reviews sites for your market. If you do get positive feedback – either as an email, a comment on a blog or forum, then ask that customer to share that on reviews websites you think influence users most.
We’ve talked about reviews sites before. They are increasingly important in influencing customer decisions: people are more likely to take the opinion of an impartial reviews site than a customer service agent. And in our ‘Google the Innovator’ series we showed how Google itself is increasingly displaying the results from Reviews websites.
Here a are a list of well known reviews websites; you probably know a few for your industry too.
Before the Internet came along, it wasn’t always easy for companies to find out what their customers were saying about them. If a customer had a good or bad experience, the most they would probably do is share that with a few friends down the pub, or mention it over a meal with the family.
If companies wanted feedback they had to ask customers to fill out a ‘customer feedback’ form; and ask their customer service agents what customers were actually saying about them.
Both these channels give a very partial view. People giving feedback would be at either end of the spectrum: they had either loved dealing with your company, or had completely hated it.
Now of course, in the era of social media, customers have lots of channels to spread both their good and bad experiences of dealing with a company. Aside from leaving comments on that company blog, they can submit reviews to reviews websites, leave posts on relevant forums, and of course give feedback through Facebook and Twitter of their experiences.
This makes it so much easier for companies to find out what their customers are saying about them. And it means there is a lot more ‘colour’ and texture to their feedback, rather than a polarised view of ‘brilliant’ or ‘rubbish’.
And apart from finding out what customers are saying, it also gives companies the opportunity to take part in that conversation. If its a good comment, then a company can give thanks; and if its a bad one they can respond by trying to resolve that customers’ issue, or at least put their side of the story.
And from a product point of view, listening in to what your customers are saying about your product has to be one of the best ways to find out what you need to do to improve that product.
Despite all these opportunities, research out this week from digital communications company Quba has revealed that only half of businesses monitor what people are saying about them on the web. Just a third of businesses have someone who actively manages their online reputation.
Here’s a graph showing it all, published in New Media Age magazine:
For reasons we’ve stated, the reality is that all business should monitor what people are saying about them, and respond to it too. Doing this is called having a ’social media strategy’.
As you are by now probably sick of hearing, the latest release from website maker WebEden allows you integrate your WebEden website with both Facebook and Twitter. This allows you to update both Facebook and Twitter from your WebEden site, and also invite people in your social networks to become a ‘member’ of your WebEden website.
And with the HTML widget, you can also display your Tweets on your WebEden site too.
But can you really measure the effects of all this social stuff?
Well, to start with, you can use Google Analytics or other link tracking tools to measure how many clicks and sales you make from the links you post in Twitter. (If you’re interested in finding out how to add Google Analytics to your website, then please let us know using the comments box below.)
Dell proudly announced recently that they had made more than $3m of sales from links that they placed in Tweets. The Dell account @delloutlet has over 600k followers, and whenever they have a good offer they Tweet a link to it. Dell reckoned that the people clicking on these links have bought more than $3m worth of PCs from them.
But many others are saying that the development of a social community around your product or service cannot be directly tracked to a boost in the bottom line. Social networks such as Facebook and Twitter should be about listening to customers, interacting with them on an informal basis, and finding out how they want your product to change and develop. It should also be about supporting customer needs, and communicating with them in a way they want to be communicated with.
Because all this touchy-feely interaction should ultimately lead to a recommendation and a good review. It’s that word of mouth stuff that is the jewel in the marketing crown. It just so happens that it is the most immeasurable thing too.
And maybe there is a flaw too in even trying to attribute the bottom line benefits to your social networks. It could be argued that in the example above everyone who was following Dell would have probably bought from them anyway, its just that they happened to click on the Twitter link. In fact, maybe they were going to buy a full price Dell but were lucky enough to get the same product for less because they saw the Twitter post.
Have you tried utitlising your social networks to connect new people with your WebEden website? Have you seen any direct or indirect benefits from Twitter or Facebook? Let us know about your experiences below.
Lots of you have grabbed to new social networking features of the WebEden Website making system with both hands. Last week we showed you how to send out membership invitations to your website. This time around we show you send updates from your WebEden website to your Facebook and Twitter accounts. This really is exciting stuff!
Members only areas or client only areas can be useful ways of providing privileged information to a select group of your site visitors. This can allow you to create better relationships with these people and use your website to present or distribute information privately with a guest list that you directly control. It’s one of the features that makes WebEden unique among other website builders, and extremely powerful.
We’ve also been asked about ‘paid membership’. By using Groups to create a set of VIP members it is possible to charge a fee before adding a member to that group, though this has to be done manually. So here’s how to do all of these things.
Members only pages
Creating members only areas is reasonably easy and very powerful. It also means that anyone who joins your site will immediately get access to that page so there is no manual work to update the permissions with each new member.
Once again I’ll be using my favourite and highly ranked taxi website www.joeslondontaxis.com. (some of you will remember this from our series of SEO Guide articles).
To create a members only area first click on ‘People’ in the Toolbar and then the ‘Permissions’ tab. Here you will see a list of all your pages on the left, and the permissions settings of the selected page (or pages) on the right.
Every page can have its permissions set individually, or you can change the permissions for multiple pages as once (use the ‘control’ or ‘shift’ keys while selecting pages to select several at once).
I’ve created a page called ‘members welcome page’ which allows me to give a special welcome to my members. If I position this top of my pages list, then this will actually replace the normal ‘welcome’ page for members when they visit the site. Clever eh?
To make the page members only select the page from the list on the left, then change the ‘view’ settings for that page to ‘members only’. And that’s it.
Client only areas
Creating and managing Groups is the key to client only areas. Groups can have permissions set as a whole, and any member who is part of that group will get those permissions. You can add or remove members from Groups at any time.
If you don’t have any Groups you will need to go to the ‘group’ tab first and set one up. I’ve created two groups, one called ‘Clients’ and one called ‘Drivers’.
Next go back to the ‘Permissions’ tab and select the page that you wish to edit from the list on the left, then change the ‘view’ settings for that page to ‘Group’ and you can then choose which Group can see that page, e.g. Clients. I’ve done this for my ‘clients’ page, and also my ‘drivers’ page.
You can then add or remove individual members from that Group to control which ones can see that page. Here I have added 2 of my clients into the ‘Clients’ group, and selected the third in preparation to add him too (or her ;-). This would be the same process if you were creating a VIP section of selected members only.
You can also create members directly for clients by going to the ‘members’ tab and clicking ‘create member’. You can then define a username, password and email for the this client when you create the member. Once the member is created you can add them to a Group on your site so they have the correct permissions. Finally you can email your client with their username and password and a link to the login page. The ‘create member’ function makes it easy to setup client only areas without the client having to do anything themselves.
There are numerous ways you can use this kind of functionality, so have a go and let us know what you think!
We’ve talked about Twitter, Facebook, and other social media quite a bit on this blog. Lots of the issues raised have been about whether or not it is possible to use social media websites to promote your own website.
But if you’re not entirely sure about how to launch your social media campaign, then you’re not alone. Research by McCann Erickson Bristol published this week indicates that two-thirds of marketers don’t have a clue where to start. The research says that marketers recognise social media websites to be more than just a fad, but just don’t know how to best make use of them to promote their own website.
Around 50% of marketers surveyed said that social networking sites – like Twitter and Facebook – were blocked by their IT departments. It’s a bit difficult to market your product using Twitter if your company doesn’t let you use it!
Just over half were using social media ‘profile raising’, 48% for networking and 30% for advertising.
Here’s a table that shows it all:
The advertising agency running the survey was quick to say that brands needed to use social media: “Word of mouth is now more powerful than ever - opinions can be shared with a global audience at the click of a button.” And how best to make use of social media? Presumably the agency think that one way around this is to pay them a large amount of money…
But all cynicism aside, how exactly are you supposed to make use of social media? We’ve covered one possible way to use Twitter. But how about Facebook, Myspace, Bebo and all the others?
If you’ve got a good idea you can share, or have an opinion, leave a comment below.
The website builder blog from webeden.co.uk contains news, tips and information for any person who wants to build a website using the online sitebuilder tool webeden.co.uk. The blog will include the latest website design tips for the sitemaker system, it will also let users know about product updates and new features on the build your own website mechanism. The create your own website blog will have interesting news from relevant internet stories too. And finally we’ll be including video tutorials on how to make your own website using webeden.co.uk.
In wednesdays post we discussed the problem of negative comments and feedback featuring in the Search Engine Results page when people search for your company or website. Today we’ll show you how control the SERP so these comments are pushed to the bottom of the page, or even onto page 2.
