Category: Tips

Posted on

Keeping Your Website Clean

Some people get so absorbed in spending time driving traffic to their site that they forget about the functionality of the site itself. In order to ensure the maximum amount of possible conversions from your Internet marketing efforts, your site needs to have completely usable functions and features.

Sites that are loaded with broken links, calls to action that result in 404 errors and contact e-mail addresses that return messages undelivered are not going to do very well in terms of conversions. Even if you double the incoming traffic to your website, your conversions will still suffer if your website isn’t functional.

It’s important to regularly examine your site in order to be sure that everything is functioning exactly as you would want it to if you were a prospective customer visiting for the first time. Make sure all of your links, calls to action and landing pages are functioning properly. Take the time to fill out and test the contact form to ensure that the message actually gets delivered to the intended person. If any of these aspects of your website aren’t working properly, make it a point to fix them, or have them fixed immediately.

Any prospect that ends up on your website for any reason isn’t very likely to place an order on a site that isn’t functioning properly. You can also forget about first time visitors becoming regulars or directing their friends to websites that don’t function properly.

For every day that an integral aspect of your site isn’t functioning, you are losing sales. It doesn’t matter how much work you put into your Internet marketing efforts if your prospects can’t take the next step do to a poorly functioning site. We carefully monitor and test all contact forms and work hard to improve our user’s experience.

Posted on

Responding to Unfavorable Online Reviews

Getting a bad review online can be maddening, but don’t make it worse by responding without putting in a lot of thought to how your own response will be perceived by other future customers.

I have a client who had a very poor review. When you are in business, you can’t please everyone, but in this case the office manager shot off a rebuttal that when I read it, I just cringed. It made a bad situation much worse. It portrayed the office staff as angry, resentful, argumentative, and vindictive. OUCH!

Sometimes a bad review can be a wakeup call. When you get a bad review, step back and look at it, could it be truthful, or have a grain of truth to it? It is very important to take a careful look to make sure that there is not a change needed on your part such as a change in office policy, customer service, or staff retraining.

If you feel that a rebuttal must be made. Focus on the positive, express concern for a problem, offer special attention from top management to repair the situation. Encourage the reviewer to recontact the office for a refund, redo, or credit on future service. Don’t write a hot rebuttal that trashes the reviewer or accuses them of being unfair or dishonest. This will only work to hurt you and make you look like the review was really true based on your hot angry response.

You can’t fight unfair reviews, but you can work to soften the blow and maybe even become better by taking the review as constructive criticism. Just be careful in your response and work to repair a poor situation not to make it worse with your own comments.

Posted on

EchoSign for Fast Online Contract Signatures

I lost a project with a client last week as the client said that signing a contract and faxing his copy was too archaic and troublesome for him as he is totally digital. I hate to lose any project for any reason and I thought “hmm, maybe the client has a point?” With our firm serving clients worldwide it can be troublesome for some to fax long distance, some clients may not have a scanner to send a copy by email, so I started looking for alternatives.

Here are two sources that I have found that you may want to check out too if you are faced with the same issue:

EchoSign
This is the site that I will be using as I am allowed to use the service free for a set number of signatures a month. Once I find out I like it and use it, I may move to the basic paid program of $14.95 per month. (The will pay me a commission if you click my link and buy, but that is not why I am mentioning them to you.)

I like the interface, it is super easy to use and works fast and sends you and the signer copies that can be printed when the signing process is completed. If you sign up for the free account, you can get five signatures a month free. This allows you to try it out send a few to yourself as tests. If you connect your Twitter account to the application to shout out when you close a contract, you get ten more free signatures to use. I think that this is the perfect solution for my sometime situation.

RightSignature
I really liked the look and feel of this application, but for me on a free trial the document would not load. Never moved past 10% loaded with a Word document or PDF file. If they get this kind worked out, this one could be good.

DocuSign
I really liked this application and if I do a lot of online signing, I will most likely move to this application but with a fee of $24.95 a month it was too rich for me to use when I am not sure I will use it frequently. What I liked was the ability to add a phone number verification before the client could open the document. This makes knowing who you are dealing with much better. Although the interface is much more complicated to use, it seemed more secure, allowed for mouse signature signing (you write your signature by moving your mouse), and just overall seemed more robust and a good match for lawyers and real estate agents.

I don’t want to ever lose another sale by making our sign up process too complicated. You may want to consider this as an alternative for your contract signing process too.

Posted on

Google: Get Over PageRank – Move On!

June 30th, on the Google Webmaster blog talked about how webmasters and site owners should move on beyond measuring site success by the Google Toolbar PageRank. The post explains that Toolbar reported PageRank in NOT the same as their patented algorithm PageRank which determines organic placement.

Susan tells webmasters:

“If you look at Google’s Technology Overview, you’ll notice that it calls out relevance as one of the top ingredients in our search results. So why hasn’t as much ink been spilled over relevance as has been over PageRank? I believe it’s because PageRank comes in a number, and relevance doesn’t. Both relevance and PageRank include a lot of complex factors—context, searcher intent, popularity, reliability—but it’s easy to graph your PageRank over time and present it to your CEO in five minutes; not so with relevance. I believe the succinctness of PageRank is why it’s become such a go-to metric for webmasters over the years; but just because something is easy to track doesn’t mean it accurately represents what’s going on on your website.” Read the full article.

The bottom line is that you totally should disregard the Google Toolbar PageRank as an indicator of health or success of your website. Instead you should focus on the following:

  1. Bounce Rate
  2. Click Through Rate
  3. Conversion Rate

A website owner can track all of these metrics using Google Analytics or other premium website statistics program. As Google now only updates the Toolbar PageRank once to twice a year and it is not an accurate representation of what is really happening on your website, now is the time to make a paradigm shift and focus on what is really happening that you can see yourself on a daily basis back on your website using statistics YOU can read.