Archive for: May 2009

With so many ways to market a small business today, it’s more important than ever to protect your reputation – especially your online reputation. The web today has become very conversational, with users of all types contributing to the overall picture of your business. It’s very likely that whether you currently have a social media presence or not, people are already talking about you, your products and services, or your employees online. With blogs, social networking sites, link sharing sites, etc., just about anyone can be involved in forming your company’s reputation, so you need to know what is being said about you online.

Here are five reasons you should monitor the conversation online:

1. If you don’t follow what’s being said online, it will be impossible to counter anything negative or untrue. Your reputation will be defined by what other people are saying about you, even without your knowledge.
2. If a reporter or a blogger has a negative impression of your products or has experienced a bad customer service incident, it could end up at the top of the Google search results. Even if the information is untrue or inaccurate, news sites often have lots of authority with Google, and also a large readership with lots of links. Your reputation could quickly spin out of control without an opportunity for you to clear up a misunderstanding.
3. “You ARE What You Publish,” according to online expert and best-selling author David M. Scott. Whatever you publish about your company, combined with what others online are saying about you, becomes your online reputation. Make sure you are intentional about what you do and say online, since it will become part of your company’s online story.
4. Things can change almost instantly online, so just because you did a Google search on your company’s name a month ago and everything looked good doesn’t mean that it still looks good today. Monitoring the conversation can help you find out important information sooner rather than later.
5. Negative news tends to travel fast and far on the web, especially with the popularity of social networking sites. It’s incredibly easy for someone to post something negative on a blog, which can then get picked up and shared on Facebook, or posted to Twitter, where it goes out to countless customers and potential customers all over the web. Monitoring your reputation makes it much easier to intervene and combat the negative before it gets out of control.

So now that you know why you should monitor what’s being said online, here are five free tools you can use to monitor the conversation and help keep your online reputation intact:

1. Google Alerts (www.google.com). This tool lets you set up certain words or phrases that you want to monitor, like your company name, product names, key employees, etc. Then each day Google sends you a report of each time it found these phrases online, including the links to the place where it was found.
2. Twitter Search (www.twitter.com). Twitter’s search feature enables you to find mentions of your company, brand, or products in almost real-time, enabling you to take swift and immediate action if necessary.
3. Monitor This (www.monitorthis.info). Lets you monitor mentions of your brand in 26 different search engines feeds at once. Simply enter the phrases you want to watch, then paste the list of feeds into your feed reader.
4. Twilert (www.twilert.com). Twilert is a Twitter application that monitors daily tweets and emails you a list of those that contain mentions of your company, brand, products, etc.
5. Who’s Talkin (www.whostalkin.com). This social media search tool allows you to search for relevant terms and phrases related to your business on 60 of the most popular social networking sites on the web.

The best way to protect your online reputation is to pay attention and monitor what is being said about you online, so you can be proactive if necessary to fix problems early or set the record straight. You obviously cannot control what other people say online, but you also cannot solve problems or defend your reputation if you don’t know what’s going on in the first place.

Most of us are well aware that the search engines frequently change their algorithms to improve search results for users (and foil spammers), which can make it challenging for small businesses just to keep up. But as web technology continues to evolve, it also creates new opportunities for small businesses to improve their SEO strategies and boost their rankings as well. Social media (sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Technorati, Digg, etc.) provide an excellent opportunity for small businesses to not only promote their products and services online, but also to gain significant ground in the search engine results.

One of the most critical components to getting top search engine rankings is the number of inbound links and link popularity a web site is able to build. Although there are several existing link building strategies available to small businesses (e.g., press releases, directory submissions, article syndication, etc.), social media can help create additional high-value, on-target inbound links that are essential to achieving top placements in the search engines.

For example, each time you use Twitter to publish a link to new content on your web site, that link gets “planted” on the Twitter page of each person following you, and has the potential to spread even further as your followers share that information with their own network of contacts.

Integrated Social Marketing (ISM)™
If you have properly integrated your social networking profiles together, that same Twitter “tweet” could then be fed via RSS to your Facebook business profile, your corporate blog, your LinkedIn account, and any number of other social sites that you have set up for your business. It’s not a far stretch to imagine the link you broadcast on Twitter could reach dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of other places on the web, all pointing back to your web site!

Quantity AND Quality
In addition to the sheer number of inbound links that are created through social marketing, the value of the links that are created is another important criterion that search engines consider. To be valued by the search engines, inbound links must be from relevant, “quality” web sites, and search engines today give social sites like Facebook and Twitter great value. These sites are highly visible to the search engines, and are constantly taking updates from users. Links tend to be shared according to subject matter, which means the search engines will see them as being relevant and on-target. All of these factors combine to create high-quality inbound links in the eyes of the search engines.

Online Visibility and Branding
Creating visibility for your business and your “brand” is really key when using social media for building links. The power of social media is realized when other users see your links or content, then share that information with their own network of contacts. Simply adding a bunch of links to your social profiles is not enough; you need to have a strong reputation and a brand that users trust so they will feel comfortable sharing your content with others. Brand recognition typically leads to natural link building anyway, which means your inbound links will end up coming from bloggers, colleagues, customers, and other people who are exposed to your links and find them useful enough to share with their own contacts.

The Proof is in the Rankings
A recent example from Website Magazine explained somewhat surprising results when they searched for their publication’s name in Google. As expected, their web site came up as the number one listing on the results page. But what was not expected was the number three listing on the results page was the magazine’s Twitter page. They then performed a number of Google searches for the terms “Chicago Tribune,” “Chicago Public Golf,” and “Daily Career Tips,” all with similar results in Google – the Twitter page for each of these terms came up near the top of the search engine results every time.

The conclusion was that given these results, Google must be giving serious weight to Twitter content, and I happen to agree. The search engines of course keep their ranking algorithms top-secret, so there’s no way to know how much weight (if any) is really given to Twitter or other social media sites. But results like those in the example above are hard to ignore!

A Great Opportunity
Social media is here to stay, and small businesses are beginning to use it to effectively promote their businesses, reach their customers, find new leads, keep customer mindshare, and instantly communicate with customers. But maybe one of the biggest benefits of adding social media to your marketing mix is the creation of high-value, on-target inbound links that can help improve visibility in the search engines and boost your business to the top of the search engine rankings.

If you’re like most small businesses today, you’ve probably invested a significant amount of time and money into building (and maintaining) a web site for your business. Maybe you’ve even taken steps to promote and market your web site, or invested in having the site professionally optimized to perform better in the search engines. So why doesn’t the site convert more visitors into customers?

There are perhaps dozens of reasons for poor web site performance, but whatever the reason, the goal is to figure out exactly what is not working on the site, and why it is not convincing visitors to take the actions you want them to take.

Here are six areas of your web site that may contain obstacles to converting web site visitors. With a little tweaking, though, these obstacles can be removed, clearing the way to better conversion rates for your web site.

1. Headlines – Web visitors tend to skim page content rather than read it, so headlines are vital to capturing your readers’ attention. Break up long blocks of text with sub headings, and try using various techniques for grabbing attention. For instance, use percentages (like “nine out of ten” or “90%”) to prove your point, or ask questions to get readers to take notice.
2. Call to Action – Be sure to include a clear call to action on each web page that uses action-oriented language, like “learn more” or “help me choose”. Replace boring button titles like “submit” with action phrases like “contact us” or “download now”.
3. Reassurance Points – When you are asking visitors to take some sort of action on your site – whether it’s making a purchase or signing up for a mailing list – they need to be assured that you are trustworthy. Always place guarantees, privacy policy, and other promises where visitors can clearly see them, preferably near the point of action you are asking them to take. For example, adding a link to your privacy policy beside your newsletter sign-up form lets visitors know that you will not misuse their personal information or give out their email addresses.
4. Contact Info – You need to make it easy and convenient for customers to get in touch with you, so be sure to include a link to your contact information on every page of your site (or better yet, link to a specific Contact Us page). Another simple change that could help convert visitors is moving your phone number from the footer of the page to the top of the page, and increasing the font size so visitors can’t miss it.
5. Page Download Times – Few things are more frustrating to users than a page that takes too long to download. In fact, studies show that users would rather click the “back” button and move on to another site than wait for a slow page to download. Optimize your site’s images so they download quickly, because visitors simply will not wait for a slow page to display.
6. Navigation Trail – Once visitors land on a web page, they typically skim the content to see if the page contains the answer to their question, or if it matches their specific interest. Make sure your navigation is consistent on each web page so visitors can move around the site with ease until they find what they are looking for. Visitors are fairly comfortable with their first click not providing exactly what they are looking for, but the second click must keep answering their questions and providing useful details, or they won’t stick around for a third click.

You’ve probably already put a lot of time, effort, and money into your small business web site, so of course you want it to convert visitors into customers and produce a positive ROI for your business. But if your site’s conversion rate is not currently what you’d like it to be, take a look at these six areas to see if there are hidden problems that could be standing in the way. By removing the obstacles, you can make it easier for visitors to take the action that you want them to take, and improve your site’s conversion rate and overall success.