How Facebook’s Changing User Base Affects Your Business
Posted by Rory Martin in Social Media Marketing, Social Networking on April 19, 2016
Most of us who spend any significant amount of time on Facebook can tell that the media, social habits, and content found on the platform has changed significantly over the past few years. While very significant for personal profiles, where users are often asked to add coworkers and bosses, as well as close family including their parents and grandmothers, this shift from open public sharing to more private media sharing is an important one for businesses as well.
Four years ago, your boss probably didn’t have Facebook, and if he did, he probably didn’t want you on it. Today, companies often ask to look at your profile, sometimes from your account, before they will hire you. That puts a huge amount of pressure on users to control what they share, how they share it, and when they do. And the result, Facebook isn’t really about social sharing anymore, it’s more of a media gathering network, where people check up on events, play games, check into their favorite pages, and even check the news. Independent studies by Bloomberg and the Independent each confirm that Facebook’s social sharing has dropped by 21% since mid-2015, despite Facebook’s efforts to increase it through additions of trending topics, on this day, and new sharing features. Facebook is also working on the Facebook Live feature, which is available to celebrities and brands for now, but could soon be available to regular users.
Instead, social conversations are moving off of Facebook and into private chat. And that has a lot of repercussions for business owners.
Less Social Sharing – More Content
Less social sharing means that more people are less likely to share personal information. This means you will see fewer “I’m at a party” posts and likely very few “I missed the bus” notifications. This means that users are less likely to share products, giveaways, and sales from brands, simply because it says something about them as a person. Instead, users are sharing content, which has positive repercussions for businesses who create content. Where sales and giveaways are less shareable, facts, inspirational photos, and how-to’s, articles, or other information that offers value to the reader is significantly more shareable. Because Facebook is quickly becoming a place where social circles integrate into each other, users want to establish personal information authority, even if it’s just on sharing great photos of the food they cook. While not everyone has these concerns, Facebook’s changing trends definitely point in this direction.
What This Means For You – Use informative posts along with pictures, offer tips and advice, and give your followers information that will make them feel special, informed, or like they should pass this on to their network. The focus is on value, and on information authority.
Private Chat
More and more users are moving away from posting on their wall and into private chat, where they can have conversations without worrying about their boss, or future boss seeing them. This is also translating towards businesses. For example, Facebook is now integrating a QR code program that pages can use to share their social media chat with their followers, to allow for faster conversations, customer service, or other chat.
It also means that it’s easier to get people talking about your brand. Where it’s fairly difficult to get people to discuss your brand on their public wall, it’s significantly easier to get them to share a photo directly to a friend’s Messenger inbox, and that’s a function Facebook offers. Using calls to action to remind users about sharing with friends can be helpful, but don’t overdo it, or you might sound repetitive. Most importantly, if you’re sharing informative or fun content, you probably won’t need to ask.
While the conversation is most definitely moving off of Facebook, the platform isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. In fact, many people use it to sign up to dozens of other applications, so it’s literally part of their lives. Changing Facebook norms do require different strategies, and you should adapt yours to meet the needs and wants of your followers.
Great social management can improve your business, and your return on investment. If you need a professional Seattle social media manager, contact Rory Martin for a quote on your social pages.
SEO For Businesses – What You Do & Do Not Need
Posted by Rory Martin in Search Engine Optimization on April 6, 2016
SEO is a buzzword that almost everyone knows but few people actually understand. And, for the most part, that’s okay. Specialized internet marketing tactics aren’t really your business, and they shouldn’t have to be. But, it is important that you understand enough of SEO to make the right choice when hiring a search optimization or search marketing company to help you market your business.
First, unless your business is not making any money, you probably won’t have the time to run a complex search engine optimization strategy for your website. But, you should know the basics.
Search Optimization Is Just the Beginning
The first and most important thing to understand about your search optimization is that it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Many people mistakenly assume that SEO is a matter of using the right keywords, ketting backlinks, and you’re done. That isn’t true, although it may have been in 2009.
Google’s most recent search algorithm, Hummingbird, used a wide variety of data and signals to direct searches, and your keywords are just one of those.
You also have to utilize other marketing strategies including:
Mobile Optimization – Check your mobile optimization, and consider using Google’s free tool to test mobile load times, speed, and other data.
Content Marketing – A quality content strategy will drive traffic, help you to convert leads, and will build your reputation as a voice or brand authority in your niche. It’s also a great basis for starting your search optimization strategy.
Brand Strategy – Your brand strategy is crucial to making a sale once you get traffic. If you can’t convert leads into sales, there is no point in creating them in the first place.
SEO ties into each of these strategies, in Google’s Hummingbird, Yahoo Search, and Bing Search.
What About Keywords?
Keywords are becoming less and less important as algorithms are able to increase their ability to scan content to see what it is about. You still want to make sure that readers and search engines know what content is about, but keyword optimization is significantly less important than it used to be.
And Backlinks?
Backlinks are still important, but if you do it the wrong way, you will likely be blacklisted on Google. If your SEO firm is offering hundreds of links a day or mentioning directories and comments, back away quickly and save your website. Black hat tactics like link farming are extremely harmful to your site, and are unlikely to ever be beneficial in the future. The best practice, build natural relationships to build links.
So What Is Involved in SEO?
Search engine optimization involves over 200 different practices including content optimization, search marketing optimization to improve click through rates, content wording, offering quality content, understanding user needs and what Google thinks those users need, backend optimization, website speed, website quality, inbound links, social media, and much more. Moreover, because these signals are constantly changing, it’s important that you have you someone who knows what they’re doing, and has the time to stay updated, on your marketing team.
Choosing the right SEO company to help you out means paying attention to their strategies, what they’re offering, and making sure that they stay up to date on changing Google and Bing search engine optimization strategies. You want someone who knows that SEO is more than keywords and backlinks, and who can show you their results from their previous clients.
If you want to learn more about our processes, see some of our case studies, or get a quote for your search optimization, contact Rory Martin
What is Negative SEO Linking & What Can You Do About It?
Posted by Rory Martin in Search Engine Optimization on March 1, 2016
Most business owners have enough trouble with SEO without stopping to consider that negative SEO is a thing, but it is. While you can use search engine optimization best practices to increase the likelihood of coming up first on Google (or at least on the first page), your competitors, enemies, and even people you don’t know exist can use SEO worst practices to get your site flagged, lowered in SERPS (Search engine results pages), and otherwise blacklisted by search engines.
This process usually involves links, which were formerly a great way to boost your ranking. Today, having hundreds of links coming in from spammy sources and comment boxes can actually hurt your ranking a great deal. That’s why it’s called negative SEO.
You most often see it in competitive niches, so if you’re local to Seattle, your competitors aren’t media savvy and aren’t going to stoop to that level, and you don’t operate on an international level, then it’s not something you have to worry about. But, you should still know what to look for, and what you can do about it, because negative SEO can and will hurt your ranking. These tips from Seattle SEO experts will help you get started.
How to Stop a Negative SEO Attack
A negative SEO attack is mostly visible when you see dozens or hundreds of inbound links, mostly coming from low quality sites. You can see this if you regularly check your inbound links. Alexa Tools, Ahref, Open Link Profiler, Moz’s Open Site Explorer and Link Profile Tool, and a number of other sites all allow you to check your backlinks.
You can also get notifications if you’re being flagged for spammy inbound links by going to Google Webmaster Tools and enabling email alerts for all issues under Preferences.
You can monitor these links, and then use Google’s Disavow tool to tell Google that you want to completely disregard them linking to your site. You can do this simply by copy and pasting the URL into the Google Disavow tool located here. However, you should keep in mind that this could hurt your site ranking, especially if any of the inbound links you disavow was hurting it.
You’ll also want to watch your existing links, because companies that are willing to pay link to you from spammy sites are probably willing to create fake accounts similar to your own and message your existing backlinks and ask to remove the link. This is rare, and not as big of a problem, but it’s always good to monitor your inbound links.
Links can make or break your site’s value. Google’s complex search engine algorithm weighs the value of your site based on the number of inbound links, the quality of the site linking to you, and the sharability of your content. If you only have a few thousand inbound links and someone starts even a small negative SEO campaign against you, it could actually hurt your ranking. The best policy is to be careful, don’t make enemies, and don’t use these techniques yourself, because it will invite others to use them on you.
If you want to know more about search engine optimization strategy, or need help with your own brand’s optimization, contact Rory Martin, a local Seattle search engine optimization company, for more information.
How to Use Facebook to Improve Your Customer Support
Posted by Rory Martin in Social Media Marketing, Social Networking on February 16, 2016
Customer support is becoming increasingly important as consumers demand better and better service. Where once, it was okay to reply back within a few days, the gap has now narrowed to within a few hours, or the consumer will most likely become frustrated, or look for a similar product elsewhere. Consumers want information, and they want it quickly, so they can move on with their purchase, which is beneficial to you because it means you can sell more, more quickly. Local Seattle customers flock to social media to ask questions about products, about sizing and fit, in store availability, and much more. In fact, in one study by Oracle, 43% of consumers would rather reach out through social media, rather than emailing, calling, or using an on-site chat box.
Social media allows you to interact with your consumers quickly, efficiently, and for nothing more than the cost of your time or that of your social media manager. The following tips from local Seattle social media company Rory Martin will help you to get started.
Respond Quickly
Most Facebook users contact companies on Facebook for a quick response, and in fact, the company now supports this feature. If you respond to most messages within 3 minutes during online hours, you get a badge that consumers will see. While this might be a lot of pressure, it is a great tactic for improving consumer relations. How can you keep up? Either have someone dedicated to handling chats, or integrate Facebook into your CRM so you can easily see chats while ringing up sales, or managing your warehouse.
Make Sure Someone Knowledgeable is In Charge
One of the worst things you can do to your customer service is put just anyone in charge. Great customer service means the respondent has to be highly familiar with your products, services, policies, and offerings. If something isn’t right, they have to know it, and they have to be able to answer key questions like “Do you have this in blue”.
Acknowledge Feedback
Whether good or bad, you should be responding and within a few hours to most feedback left on your page. Take a moment to say thank you to those who rave about you, and offer to help fix the issue if someone left negative feedback. If someone has a problem with an order, fix it, and do so publicly.
Be Professional
Professionalism is key to any successful customer service, and social media is no different. Maintain your professional image, stick to branding decisions, and treat every chat like the user is going to take screenshots and post them publicly, because they very well may.
Be Transparent
If you’re having issues, let customers know. Social Media is a great way to get the word out quickly, can help you to allay any problems, and will reduce the demand on your technical support as well.
Make Time
It is crucial that you have the time to quickly respond to and help anyone contacting you over social media. This means setting aside a certain amount of time to respond to people, checking your messages whenever you have a break, and seeing it as an important responsibility.
If you don’t have the time, and don’t have the budget to bring in a full time social media manager, consider outsourcing. Local Seattle social media management company Rory Martin can help. Contact us to ask for a free quote, or to learn more about our social media services.
How to Use Search Marketing to Boost Site Traffic – Seattle SEO Tips
Posted by Rory Martin in Search Engine Marketing on February 2, 2016
Any Seattle business with a web presence is most likely already using at least some form of search optimization, whether just for Google, or for all major search engines. SEO is a great way to build your traffic by making tweaks to help search engines see and rank your content. But, one thing traditional SEO often leaves out is making that content appeal to the reader as well as to the search engine, and that’s where search marketing comes in. Because it doesn’t matter how many impressions your page gets if it’s not getting hits.
What is Search Marketing?
Search marketing is the process of making your content, landing pages, and web pages more appealing to visitors, so that they want to click through on the page, and so that they read it all the way down, spend some time there, and possibly even buy something.
How Does Search Marketing Work
Where SEO is all about tweaking the back end of your site, and using keywords and phrases to tell search engines what you’re talking about, search marketing is all about content. Everything, from photos and videos to the title and meta description counts, and it’s very important.
Titles – Titles help Google find your content, but they also have to be clickable. This usually means keeping your title under 60 characters so the whole thing shows up in search, avoiding click bait titles, but making the title informative and intriguing. This can be a difficult balance to achieve, and if you’re trying to decide between intriguing or informative, always go for informative.
Meta Description – A lot of people skip the meta description since Google’s announcement that they don’t really use it in search ranking anymore, but this is a bad idea. Curating the content for your meta description allows you to control what readers see in search before they clip. Google automatically previews the first few lines of the page, these lines aren’t often very inductive to clicking, and might include a repeat of the title. Use meta descriptions to write a short description, and to tell people what they will learn after clicking. Just don’t give them so information that they don’t have to click.
Content – Content is king of search marketing, but it doesn’t have to be written content. Any content, including audio, video, photos, and text are all great, so long as you include keywords, metadata with searchable information, and a searchable description. A combination of different types of media is always a good way to go. Your content should be high quality, aimed at the reader rather than Google or Bing, and only really mention keywords when they naturally fall into the topic. You can use keywords in titles and subtitles as well, but make it natural, and use stop words like of, the, and to when naturally included in the topic.
Optimizing your pages for your visitors, rather than just for Google, is always a great idea, because it improves every aspect of your search marketing. When your pages are optimized for users, your click-through rate goes up, your bounce rate goes down, and these factors both boost your search optimization.
If you want to learn more about search marketing, contact Rory Martin, a local Seattle SEO company, for a free estimate on your search project.
Does Social Media Marketing Work for B2B? – Seattle Business Tips
Posted by Rory Martin in Social Media Marketing, Social Networking on January 12, 2016
Social media is a powerful marketing tool that most of us are familiar with for marketing to customers, especially in fashion niches, but does it work for B2B companies? Marketing to other businesses can be tough, especially with the dropping success rates of banner and text ads. Social media can be a great, and affordable way to reach other businesses, but only if you use it correctly. These tips from the experts local Seattle social media company Rory Martin will help get you started.
Use the Right Platforms
Every user demographic has their own platforms, and some platforms have more demographics than others. If you’re a B2B company, you have to choose your social media platforms carefully. For example, any business on Snapchat is marketing to customers, and they don’t really want to be marketed to. On the other hand, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google Pages are all great for marketing to other businesses, because not only do people look for business services there, they can see reviews, go through customer opinions, and see your location and business niche very easily.
Drive Opt Ins
Social media platforms can be extremely valuable, but an opt in list that gets business owners to sign up for your newsletter or a free course is even more valuable. Make sure you understand your target demographic, and then use Facebook’s Call to Action Button to create a signup, and add one on your website as well. This can create a valuable list of people who are actually interested in your content.
Market on Your Social Media
If you’re just sharing funny photos and helpful posts, you’ll probably build up followers. This is great, and it’s a great tactic to keep up. But you also want about 1 in 5 or 1 in 10 of your posts to be promotional. This means telling consumers directly about your content, featuring your existing customers, or otherwise highlighting your services. Offering coupons and sales is also great, but don’t do this too often, or users won’t be tempted to buy, because they know there’s another sale right around the corner.
Reach Local Businesses with B2B Events
Facebook events are a great way to get local Seattle businesses involved, because you can create an event, invite your existing customers, and then have them help you spread the word. What should your event be about? It does depend on your exact B2B niche, but education, product demonstrations, a networking party, or even an online webcast (so long as it’s valuable to your potential clients) can net a great response. Just make sure you put some marketing effort into it, and contact local neighborhood magazines to make sure that people show up.
Share Business Culture
Small to medium businesses are run by people, and like regular shoppers, they want to identify with the businesses they work with. Sharing your business culture, showing your ideals, and even photos of your office and products is a great way to boost trust in your business right on social media.
Want more help with your social media marketing? Whether you’re B2B, B2C, or even C2C, Rory Martin, a local Seattle social media company is here to help. Contact us for more information, or a quote. It’s on us.
How Reputation Management Affects Your Search Engine Results Pages
Posted by Rory Martin in Search Engine Marketing on January 5, 2016
Whether you’re running a local, international, or even online only business, your website rankings in search affect your traffic and your sales. Even if you’re just marketing to local consumers who look your business up online with their phones shortly before visiting your brick and mortar shop, you need to come up in search engine results pages (SERPS) and you have to look good in those SERPS.
Reputation management is one way to work towards achieving both at once, and while management is not the end of your SEO dilemma, it will help your optimization process.
What is Reputation Management
Reputation management is the process of attempting to control the information online about your brand so that if anyone searches for you, they see good things. This can involve working to improve your brand and improve customer support to naturally generate a great brand image, spot correcting or working issues out with unhappy customers, replying to bad reviews online, getting bloggers and social media gurus to review and talk about your products, improving your SEO so that your pages and not your competitors pages come up first in search, and using reviews as part of your strategy.
Using Reviews – Reviews are the easiest part of reputation management for SEO providing you have a great product or service. All you have to do is distribute your products out to people with blogs (trafficked blogs, don’t waste your money on random blogs), YouTubers, Instagrammers, and anyone else with influence. If you’re a local company in Seattle, you do, of course, want to approach local bloggers and influencers, and you can use a variety of sites like Klout and Tomoson to find them. You can ask for reviews on Amazon, any of your sales platforms, your website, Google Plus, your Facebook page, and on blogs, just try not to ask for everything from the same person.
Solving Problems – It’s also important that you work to manage and control problem posts that come up in search. For example. If you’ve purchased a business and you have a bad review from 5 years ago on the top of search, users reading that review won’t have any idea that you’ve changed management, or policies. You’ll have to correct the issue, which in that particular case, means getting your pages and other reviews on top of search instead of that bad review.
- Approach any customer complaint as seriously as possible as soon as they voice it. Try to solve the problem before it becomes a major issue.
- Get everyone involved, and ask customers how they would rate their experience before they leave your store or website. Just don’t be annoying.
- Offer free returns or replacements on products if they are broken, damaged on arrival, or not what was expected.
Getting Help from a Local Seattle SEO Company
Search engine optimization is a lot of work, and unless you’re not doing anything else, you probably don’t have the time or the experience to do it correctly. Local is also the best way to go, because you’ll be able to meet in person, hold the company accountable, and ensure that you’re on the same page without having to worry about time zones, not being able to get in touch, or similar issues. A local Seattle SEO company will also be able to help you with local trends, search terms, and location and micro location based terminology, which will help your site. They could also be familiar with your local competitors, local reviewers, and local websites you can contact to get reviews or a mention.
Want help with your search optimization? Contact Rory Martin for a free quote on your SEO.
How to Plan Your New Year’s Website With Your Web Development Team
Posted by Rory Martin in Web Design and Development on December 22, 2015
The New Year is fast approaching, and in Seattle, that often means businesses get productive by starting plans for the new year, and often, redesigning or launching their online websites. If you’re planning a new website, then you need a web development team, and hopefully a local one based right in Seattle. However, you still need plans of your own, and here’s how to get started.
How to Get Started: Creating Ideas
If you’ve already found a local Seattle web development team to get started with, they will likely help you off with a kickoff meeting. However, you should have a list of ideas, wants, needs, and preferences when you go in. Much like if you were building an extension on your house or having a company renovate your kitchen, your web design team has to know what you want, why you want it, and what features you need. If they’re developing blind, they likely won’t even come close to what you need. A good start is finding websites that have a similar look and feel to what you want, writing down a list of features, why you need those features, a timeline (when you have to launch), color palette, business branding, and preferred style. You can use this information to get a quote, so you can find and choose a great local web developer.
For the Web Developers: Needs Assessment
At the same time, your web developers should be performing a needs assessment on your business. They will likely ask you questions, check your business, and decide what you need. This should involve demographic assessment, competitor overview, product and size assessment, and a search optimization assessment if your website is currently online and they also handle SEO.
The Kickstart Meeting
Once you both have notes, you’ll both get together (in person if you have a local Seattle team) and discuss your ideas, exchange notes, create new ideas, and look at concepts or themes. Most of the time the web developers will go over your preferred features and discuss them with you, decide which ones you really need, and point out if you missed anything. You’ll discuss style, and choose a website that works well with your user demographic, your business branding and style, and your personal preference.
Here, you will make most of the final decisions on ideas, but there are still a few more steps. Once you’ve approved the initial planning, you’ll still have to go through and approve mockups and wireframes for your site before they’re brought to life. You may also have to chose hosting, security features, and items like whether or not you want a blog or a comment system.
From there, all you have to do is wait to see your website for approval.
Why Is It important to Plan?
Taking the time to create a plan, strategize when and where you want to launch, and deciding on exact features and styles in advance can seem like a headache, but it will save you a lot of time and hassle in the future. It also makes the web developers job easier, as they won’t have to guess what you want or when you want it.
Are you planning to launch a new website or website redesign in 2016? Contact Rory Martin, a local Seattle web development team, for a quote, and we’ll get you started with your planning.
The 10 Web Design Trends You Need to Know for 2016 – Seattle Web Design
Posted by Rory Martin in Web Design and Development on December 16, 2015
Building a website, or hiring a Seattle web design team to do it for you, requires a lot of work, but more importantly, it requires a lot of important design decisions. Choosing what you want partially involves making decisions based on your brand and partially involves choosing what your customers expect and want to see. These top 10 web design trends include some of the best and most recent website technology that you can use to make your website look modern, appealing and easy to use.
1. Minimalism
Minimalistic websites are extremely popular for a number of reasons. While many people suggest that multi-page websites do best in search, they can be complicated and difficult to navigate for your readers. Taking a minimalistic approach, cutting out everything that you don’t need, and including more blank space than menus and headers, will ensure that the reader gets a great experience. If you need more pages for search, you can always install a blog.
2. Responsive Design
Mobile is here to stay, and in fact, it’s surpassed desktops in search volume. Unfortunately, mobile doesn’t come in just one screen size, so responsive design is here to stay. You want to optimize your site for slow internet on mobile devices, multiple screen sizes, and short attention spans.
3. UX/UI
Planning your user experience and user interface is something we should have been doing all along. It’s important that your Seattle web design team takes UX into consideration when designing your site.
4. Hidden Menus & Hamburger Menus
Hidden menus and hamburger menus get a lot of criticism, but they’re here to stay. They also help to prevent a cluttered mobile page because the menu is tucked neatly out of site. THey’re also common enough that almost everyone know what they are.
5. Large Images
Big Hero images and image backgrounds are extremely popular, but they have to be high resolution to extremely high resolution, and mainly monochromatic. Using an image as your background, or for most of the page, captures attention and keeps it, and is better than using a small banner.
6. Ad blocking
Ad blocking may not be a web design trend, but with 144 million ad blocker users, it’s here to stay. That means web designers have to create sites around users who could be blocking ads, which can be difficult for sites that make money off of advertisements.
7. UI Patterns
UI patterns are increasingly popular, because they allow you to create an entire user interface using an existing pattern, which makes it easier for consumers to use, and easier for the designer. Most importantly, each one can be tweaked and adjusted to create something completely unique, which is better for your business recognition.
8. Rich Animation
Rich animation, such as animations and illustrations, moving buttons, and animated anything on the website are back in style, and they haven’t been as popular as they are now since the days of Flash in 2012. They take a little bit more work, and they aren’t always a good idea (I.e. if a large portion of your traffic is mobile), but they can be exciting, fun, and unique.
9. Web Design Layouts
Long Scroll – Long scroll websites allow you to tell your entire story on a single page, and you can replicate the appearance of a multi-page website by dividing content into sections. This is also great for mobile users. If you’re worried about people not scrolling, don’t. It’s been proven that the trend of not scrolling below the fold is over thanks to mobile users having to scroll anyway.
Card – Card designs break the website up into smaller portions, which are easier for readers to digest, and can be rearranged to your preference on smaller screens.
Dynamic Grid – Think Pinterest. These sites are perfect for shops and anyone that relies on images or video, and work extremely well on mobile devices.
10. Video
From video headers to profile images to video backgrounds, video is becoming a huge trend in web design, and is set to keep growing for 2016. Like animation, you should be cautious with using it if most of your users are on mobile, but it can be powerful, creative, and interesting.
Web design trends are essentially what’s hip in the world of web design. If you want to know more, or get a quote on your website, contact Rory Martin, a Seattle web design company.
How Reviews Benefit Your SEO & Your Social Media Marketing – Seattle Marketing Tips
Posted by Rory Martin in Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing, Social Networking on December 8, 2015
Building your digital marketing strategy usually requires working in a great deal of different marketing techniques, and SEO and social media marketing are both very complementary to each other. While you probably already know that, one strategy affects both, as well as conversion and sales, and could be one of the most important strategies for companies with products to sell. That strategy? Reviews.
Whether you’re hiring a Seattle social media company to drive traffic and leads, or doing it yourself, your reviews greatly affect every part of your online marketing efforts, which makes them incredibly important.
How Reviews Affect Search
If you have a quality SEO company, then they’ve probably already put you on Google Local, and have likely started generating review strategies for your Google Plus and for your Facebook page. When users search for businesses in a specific location (I.E. Digital Marketing Company Seattle, Washington) on Facebook or on Google, they get back local search results based on businesses that have put their locations into the database. Here’s the important part. Your customer reviews show up in live search. If you have good reviews, this can greatly increase your conversion rate, because you automatically look more trustworthy.
How Reviews Affect Social Media
You probably already have some idea that reviews affect your social media. Social justification, or visible support for the brand, makes consumers much more likely to purchase, even if they’ve never heard of your brand before. For example, Amazon made more than $1 billion after introducing the “Was this review helpful” button, because users felt that individual reviews were that much more powerful. Pages with more reviews show up as more authoritative and more trustworthy, because users like popular opinion. Whether these reviews are on products, the entire business, or services doesn’t really matter.
How to Generate Reviews
The most important part of using reviews as part of your local Seattle social media or SEO strategies is that you shouldn’t use fake reviews. High quality reviews, from people who have actually used the product or service, are much better than any amount of fake, glowing reviews. If you’re on a social platform like Google or Facebook, the fake reviews can be removed, your account can be suspended, and you lose trust with your buyers if they catch you. Instead, using techniques like following up on an order with an email asking for a review, offering incentives in exchange for a review, using a slip or form in the package to remind users to review, or asking people in person is the best way to go. No, not all of your reviews will be glowing, but in an age where consumers know about fake reviews, it’s actually better for sales to have a small amount of negative reviews than to have all 5 star reviews. So, real reviews actually benefit you more than fake ones, even if they’re 3 or 4 star instead of 5.
Do you want to learn more about tactics for boosting your leads or sales? Talk to Rory Martin, a local Seattle social media company, and ask for your quote, or a consultation.
Recent Comments