Google Reviews mis-management

Sometimes I wonder who is looking after the web presence of some companies/organisations because sometimes it appears that there’s either no management at all.

One web-related area that needs management is Google Reviews and the following example shows why.   If you search Google for ‘private schools Canterbury’ this is highly prominent in the results:

Within that listing you can see a link to ‘4 Google reviews’ and if you click on that you get taken to the King’s School place page, which includes the reviews as shown below:

Those reviews can be best broken down as follows ..

1. One 5 star review with no text to back it up.  That has little value at all.
2. One review (Koo) that appears to be from a staff member, who hasn’t grasped that Google Reviews are for other people to post, not the school!
3. Two very negative reviews.

The nature of Google Reviews means that anyone with a Google account can provide a review.  It’s an open system and so people can review in any way that they like.  The issue here is that there appears to be no system in place that reviews what’s being said about King’s School.  This means that either:

1. A staff member has ‘web’ as a job and isn’t on the ball.
2. Whoever looks after ‘web’ for King’s School either doesn’t have a brief to keep an eye out for such things, or if they have, aren’t doing it.

What’s surprising here is that there’s no excuse.  King’s, being a private school, will not be short of money.   They presumably want to be gaining new pupils and so you’d think would be aware of what is effectively negative publicity that’s highly visible in Google.  The costs of getting someone to keep an eye on such things (plus keeping track of other online visibility) are negligible compared to the business they must be losing from such poor reviews.

What should they be doing?  These are the basics for any company/organisation that could potentially have Google Reviews written about them …

1. Have a diary note to regularly check the Google Reviews.
2. Build up a portfolio of customers who would be willing to post positive reviews when needed.
3. Having ensured that there are many positive reviews initially, if a negative review happens then use step 2 above to create an influx of positive reviews so that the negative starts to get lost.

King’s School is just the example here.  Many companies/organisations will have numerous people who could provide positive reviews about them, but who don’t take the initiative.   It’s stunning that King’s School has only 4 Google Reviews out of the thousands of pupils (and parents of pupils) who have been in and out of their doors over the years.

Let’s fast forward in time to roughly 2013.   A search for something like ‘private schools Canterbury’ will bring up more Google Places listings and those listed will have numerous Google Reviews, the majority of which should be positive.

Now is the time for geographically focused organisations/companies to be waking up to Google Reviews and capitalising on what is still a relatively untapped way to be visible in a positive way.

From 1 tweet to 38 eyeballs

This is for those who doubt the power of using Twitter AND have something that people want to hear about.

It started with a Custwin blog about using keywords in a domain name for SEO benefits that was picked up by Jo Dodds and tweeted onto her own followers.  You can see that tweet below …

Jo has a strong following (and if you’re interested in social media and blogging then you should follow her on twitter – @jododds and via her website http://jododdssocialmedia.com/).

That tweet brought 38 eyeballs to the blog during that day.  That’s 19 people (assuming all those people had two eyes).   Some of those 19 people went on to look at other blogs and a few went deeper into the Custwin website.

What’s been achieved there is an increased awareness of the Custwin name.  Although we don’t expect any of those people to be rushing to sign up for our services, we know that if they see the Custwin name in the future, then they may become receptive to interacting in some way (perhaps via signing up for the newsletter or maybe more).

What we see here is someone (Jo) who is very much known to be a ‘giver’, i.e. she shares her knowledge to many people, typically via social media, which builds trust in her own brand.  When Jo then expresses agreement with something someone else says (e.g. our blog) then her followers can view that as being an endorsement, which makes them more likely to click through to the blog than if such information was presented to them ‘cold’ from another source.

There are three key points here …

1. Blogging useful information is what builds trust.
2. Using systems like Twitter to impart that information is common sense.
3. Being linked to people who have a similar mindset leads to further views of the material you’ve produced.

Putting figures on it we know that most people are happy to grab free information but that very few actually go a step further to use the products or services on offer.  However, the more that trust is built up, the higher the potential to gain business from just the small percentage of people who could become business at some point in the future.

Whatever type of business you’re in it’s likely that you could have something worth blogging about, even if it’s fairly infrequent (e.g. 2-4 times a month).  If it’s useful and not a sales pitch then people will want to keep reading what you produce.

If you’re producing blogs at the moment and are tweeting those out, are you measuring the numbers of people who click through to look at what you’ve written?  If not, you should be – it will tell you a lot about how well you’re engaging with your audience.

Ensuring you get value from QR code advertising

QR codes have been around for some time now but how do you know what you’re getting from yours (if you have one)?

And if your QR code acts as a link into your website, do you link it to a specific page or does it just go to your home page?

There are many ways (some a bit techie) that you can automatically analyse what you gain from your QR codes visibility but there is also a very simple way of analysing:

Link the QR code through to a website page that is either dedicated to it or has virtually no people entering the website via that page.

So, take the QR code below for example …

If you scanned it you would be taken to a page about tree houses.  A page that has been created to use as a landing page from a QR code.   Therefore, the business owner, through some basic website analytics, will be able to see how many people landed on that particular tree  houses page and will be positive that the visits came from the QR code.

Where this becomes important is in advertising, particularly in print media.  Let’s say you put an advert in a magazine and it costs you £Xhundred for a few editions.  That advert includes your QR code linking through to one particular website page.   You will know, after a period of time whether people have been using the QR code.  If you’re really clever you’ll make the magazine advert have some sort of special offer that encourages people to type in a url that goes to a different website page so that you can determine whether that brings more visitors to your website from the advert than the QR code (which may also have the special offer).

The good thing about QR codes is that they’re free to create.  However, if you’re not linking them through to a unique website page (and you haven’t implemented a more techie way of tracking them) then you’re going to find it hard to measure what benefit they bring you.

Long-term business development online

At Custwin I’m happy to say that much business comes from long-term business development activity.  This is mainly done through a combination of 3 things:

1. Monthly email newsletter which gives free information and insights related to website success strategy.
2. Giving away free information in person.
3. Being seen to turn away business if we feel the potential client isn’t yet fully ready to benefit.

We’re not talking about a few weeks or a few months but what can often be years before someone we’ve ‘touched’ in some way (and usually on a regular basis) either becomes a client or refers us onto someone they know (because that trust has been built up).  Some wouldn’t say that’s business development because it’s non-pushy but in my view it is – a drip feeding of trust being built up.

Today I’d like to give an example of a company who is within the web business sector and who immediately come to mind if anyone says to me “who do you know that is really good at email newsletters design?”.

That company is Top Left Design and there’s been something very consistent about them over the years – a fantastic email newsletter.   First of all, a couple of screenshots from the current edition …

Those screenshots don’t really do them justice because there’s more than just the lovely design of the newsletter – it’s the feel of community within that company and the fact that they’re not stuffy.

I’ve known Keren Lerner (head honcho) for about 10 years now and although in recent years there’s been very little communication between us (I no longer do my networking in London), I still get the email newsletters, look at the design work they do and I always look forward to seeing what they’ve produced.

My point is that, through the consistency of that drip fed message to me each month, I’m always aware that I’d particularly recommend Top Left Design for email newsletters design.  Whether they would look at their own email newsletters as being ‘long-term business development’, I don’t know but for me, it works.

There are other people and companies who I keep track of, offering a wide range of services and there’s just a few who, if someone said to me “who do you know who ….” that I could make recommend based on long-term trust built up.   To be honest, there are not a lot of those types of people who would come to mind and there are many business sectors that I consider to be ‘gaps in my ability to recommend’.  For example, if someone said to me “who do you know who are a good legal firm to go to?” I really wouldn’t have an answer.

Whatever business sector you’re in, creating a strong presence online can help build up your name, especially if drip-fed in a non-pushy way through devices such as email newsletters.   No business has the excuse that they can’t do it – anyone can, regardless of business sector.

It’s a fact that there have been very few months in which the Custwin email newsletter hasn’t led to at least one signed-up new client, either through people who have received the newsletter for a long time or through people they refer us onto, who trust their judgement that we know what we’re talking about.

So where’s your opportunity for long-term business development via your online presence?

Please Sir give me a chance, I will try my best

Whatever forms of advertising you use in your business (online or offline) you generally only get one chance to win the business of people who end up on your website.

I was reminded of this via a recent experience with using outsourced contractors to do what I thought was a very simple job.  The short version was that we gave three outsourced contractors the chance to prove their skills and one of them performed spectacularly badly and when we ended their contract we got a long message from them saying plenty, but including those words:

“Please Sir give me a chance, I will try my best”

After I stopped laughing and having already explained (quite nicely for me actually) how bad the work was, I thought “what a cheek asking for more work when it’s been pointed out how he underperformed compared to other contractors”.

It’s not unlike the way companies use systems like Google to make themselves visible for when people are searching for their products or services.  For those three contractors imagine three businesses visible in close proximity, in the Google search results (paid or organic).

Day 1

Someone searches for the product or service and clicks through to a poor website.  They’re not impressed and they leave.  However they haven’t got the time to keep looking at this stage.

Day 2

The same person searches again and they see that same poor website company appearing in the Google results.  The search listing effectively says to them “Please Sir give me a chance, I will try my best” but the person already knows that the website is poor and so doesn’t click, preferring instead to look at other websites, which are hopefully better.

Every second of every minute of every hour of every day … people are visiting websites and are being underwhelmed.  There are no second chances in a world where people want to be quickly impressed.

You can see this for yourself by doing a relatively easy bit of analysis.  Use your website statistics analytics package and see how many people land on certain pages of your website, noting what they searched for.  Compare those to the numbers of enquiries/sales gained in the same time period.

Then ask yourself whether your website is acting like the underperforming contractor and whether opportunities for future business have been missed out on.

Using negative keywords to raise Adwords CTR

Whether ‘negative keywords’ or ‘CTR’ are familiar terms to you, if you spend money on Google Adwords (directly or outsourced) then this blog should be of interest.

CTR (Click Through Rate) is a vitally important factor in getting success from Google Adwords.  Don’t worry about the reasons for now, just accept that it’s important to have a strong CTR.

CTR, in simple terms, means that if your advert is visible 100 times in Google and you get 5 clicks, that’s a 5% CTR.

So let’s take an example to demonstrate …

You want to be visible in Google when people search for ‘security companies’ and in your Adwords campaign you have the phrase ‘security companies’ set up.  Your advert says something like:

ABC Security London
Experts in all types of commercial
security.  We cover all of London.
www.abcsecurity.co.uk

You run your advert for awhile and the Google system tells you that you’ve had 100 impressions (times visible) of your advert when people have searched for ‘security companies’.  However, you’ve only had 2 clicks (2% CTR).

You’ve done some things right, namely:

• Your advert is only visible within the London area for when people search for ‘security companies’
• Your advert has a reasonably high position in the Adwords results.

What the Adwords system hasn’t shown you though is that those 100 impressions weren’t purely from people who typed just the phrase ‘security companies’ but were from people who typed variations on that phrase.  For example:

• Jobs in security companies
• Security companies for house parties
• Manchester security companies
• Security companies in Cornwall
• Security companies vacancies

In the examples above, the words in bold are simply add-ons to the core ‘security companies’ phrases.   When people type those phrases and see your advert they will be thinking:

• They don’t cover my geographical area.
• They’re commercial security only.
• They’re not offering security jobs

In most cases, the people won’t click on the adverts.   If they don’t click then the CTR is reduced.  Let’s say that out of 100 times the adverts were visible, 50 were people who were looking for jobs, security in other areas etc. – that significantly reduces the potential to get clicks.

The answer here is to add negative keywords into the Adwords campaign.   Words such as:

• Job
• Jobs
• Vacancies
• Vacancy
• Manchester
• Cornwall
• Employment

What this does is stop the adverts from being visible when people use those words in combination with the ‘security companies’ phrase.  If the advert is not visible then it’s not in danger of missing out on a click, which means that the CTR is not damaged.  In the example here, just having negative keywords such as job, jobs, vacancies etc. can increase the CTR substantially because the advert is only visible when you really want it to be visible.

How to avoid time waster enquiries

There’s only one thing worse than not getting enquiries via your website: getting enquiries that eat up your time and don’t lead to anything.  They may look promising but how good are they really?

Our clients often benefit from being able to get a stronger understanding of each person that makes an enquiry via their website.  This is best demonstrated with an example from a client.   This client is an expert in Graphology (handwriting analysis) and the content of an enquiry received recently was as follows …

I am presently going through a divorce and have a problem with an anniversary card my wife sent to me, which she denies and has said I have altered. would you be able to provide a report to confirm her writing and provide an estimate of your charges?

It has the markings of being potential business because the enquirer knows that the handwriting issue could be pivotal in a divorce settlement.  In theory, quality of analysis should be more important than the fees to do the analysis (there are many inferior graphologists around who would charge low rates but not do a brilliant job).

Before the client responds to the enquirer, it’s worth digging deeper by looking at their path through the website, which can be viewed as follows …

So we know that he searched Google for ‘forensic handwriting analysis’ (which brings the client up high in the search results).  Therefore, he’s likely to have clicked through to the client website before any other website.  All good so far.

However, he’s spent a mere 3 seconds on the home page before going to the Contact page, has filled in the enquiry form (which took him 14 minutes), and then he’s backed out of the website to the Google search results.

What this shouts out (to the trained eye) is that he fully intends to get the handwriting analysis but he’s shopping mainly on price.  There’s no way he could have fully absorbed the client website and quality of service, based on 3 seconds on the home page.  He will hop from website to website just pasting in the same enquiry to several Graphologists.   He is highly likely to go with the cheapest one.

So what does this say to my client?

It says “be aware that he’s likely to be shopping on price and so respond to him quickly without too much effort”.  In this particular case, the client would be best-served to have some standard cut and paste text ready to send back, which focuses on the differing quality gained from Graphologists and the fact that ‘cheap is not good when it comes to proper handwriting analysis’.   This way, any similar website visits in future can receive the same cut and pasted response.  They may still go with the cheapest option but at least they’ve been made aware of the dangers, which could convince them to go with the quality option.

This principle applies to all types of businesses, regardless of sector.   For every enquiry gained, track it back to the website visitor path, assess how ‘serious’ they are, and respond to them accordingly.   Then, having not wasted too much time on time wasters, use that time for other business building activities.

The true cost of Google’s $9.72bn earnings

This month Google announced that their revenues for the quarter to September 2011 had risen 33% to $9.72bn, and profits had increased 26% to $2.73bn.

Big figures from a big company.

The vast majority of Google’s earnings come from Google Adwords, a system that, if used properly, can generate great levels of enquiries/business for advertisers.  However, used poorly, it becomes a money pit.

Unfortunately, the Adwords system is set up in a way that allows advertisers to squander money unnecessarily.  Working alongside that, any changes in the way that the organic search results work are designed so that companies are forced down the route of Adwords advertising if they’re to have any hope of visibility.

The more people using Adwords to advertise, the more costly it gets to pay for the clicks (because it’s basically an auction system).   If you sell widgets and pay £1 per click today and a competitor offers more cost per click allowance then tomorrow you could be paying more than £1 per click.  It becomes a never ending battle for Adwords positioning, out of which there is only one real winner: Google.

I could go on for literally weeks on the numerous ways that Google works against the interests of companies, while acting “holier than thou”.   For now though I can best summarise by saying that a huge proportion of the money Google makes is as a direct result of the Adwords system not being transparent enough, and allowing people to lose money.

This is no different to other media of course.  If you pay for a newspaper advert, which sends people to your website, and your website is rubbish, then that’s not the fault of the newspaper.  In the same way, Google will allow you to advertise your website and pay for clicks, even though your website may be woefully inadequate.  But is it ethical?

Let’s say that one company pays a relatively modest £300 per month in Google Adwords clicks. It generates them, say, 300 visitors (using round numbers of £1 per click) and out of those visitors, they gain 10 enquiries, which boil down to 3 sales.   Those sales may cover the clicks in terms of profits but are they worth having?  3 sales out of 300 visitors implies that something is wrong somewhere.  That could be:

1. Adwords is set up inefficiently (very common).
2. The website not being strong enough (also very common).

Usually, it’s a combination of the two.

Wouldn’t it be more ethical if Google ran some sort of system that, at periodic levels of Adwords spend, it asked the advertisers how well they’re doing from their clicks?  And if the answer to that is “not very good” then Google hold out a helping hand to help highlight where the weaknesses are?   Out of $2.73bn profit in the last quarter, surely a small proportion of that could be reinvested in helping Adwords customers gain some insights into where they’re going wrong?

Because so many companies are increasingly desperate for business, Adwords looks attractive to them because it can create instant visibility.  However, the vast majority of advertisers are wasting money because their Adwords campaigns or websites are inefficient.

How much of the $billions that Google makes could be linked to inefficient Adwords campaigns and/or websites?  The actual number would be scary but whatever that number is, so many companies are losing out through investing in Adwords clicks that can’t possibly get them the results they need, which impacts on money available within the business.

The really sad thing is that in a turbulent economy, companies who use Adwords are having to pay ever-higher click costs to attract ever fewer potential buyers.  While they do that, Google are becoming ever-richer from companies that don’t realise that they’re not benefiting in the ways that they should be.

Why pre-paid Adwords is dangerous

If you run Google Adwords Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns you have a choice of payment methods.  You can choose either to:

1. Pre-pay a certain amount, which will be used until it runs out.
2. Pay as clicks accumulate, working within a daily budget you set.

Pre-paid allows a bit more flexibility and can be useful when ‘testing the water’.  However, we never use it because we think it’s potentially damaging to business.  The graph below demonstrates why …

What that graph shows is a PPC campaign that was pre-paid by the client (against recommendations).  That client gains about 20 clicks per day and they have a conversion rate of roughly 25% leading to enquiries.  So, 5 enquiries per day, which typically lead to 3 sales per day, each worth roughly £200-300 profit each.

This particular client doesn’t pay Custwin a maintenance contract for their PPC campaign (we created it efficiently and then the client took it over) and so we are not in a position to monitor it.   A few days ago they contacted us to say their enquiries had dried up so we took a look.

What had happened was that their pre-paid balance had run out and the email reminder sent to them had ended up in their junk mail.  The graph shows that 8 days of clicks were lost, which equated to a loss of an estimated £4,800-£7,200 profit.   As you can see, after we identified the issue, their clicks started again and the enquiries started happening again instantly.

While we don’t expect all clients to want to utilise our skills and checking systems beyond having created a PPC campaign, this example shows that the client lost profits that would have covered our costs for the next 2 years!

The strange thing is that even after highlighting the issue, the client still wants to pre-pay their click costs and so the same thing could happen again in the future.

Our advice to anyone running PPC campaigns is to set a daily budget post-paid, and let Google take their fees when they need to.  But even then, still have a process that allows you to constantly watch how many clicks you’re getting each day (this can be automated) so that you quickly pick up on whether anything has gone wrong (for example, a credit card expiring).

Avoid wasting money & time on Russians

…. or anyone.

A client contacted me recently, saying that he’d noticed an increase in people asking for samples to be sent to them in Russia.

The samples were of a particular type of sash window glass.  Not terribly expensive to send as samples, but the postage makes it more expensive – particularly to Russia.

This particular client is very much switched on to the value of analysing website visitor patterns but on this occasion hadn’t used the tools at their disposal to dig deeper … so I did.

Noting that Russia was the area of concern, I picked out all visitors from Russia to work out why they were visiting his website.  If you click on the link below you can see a sample of those from the first week of October …

http://www.a1webstats.com/stats/view-report.aspx?ReportID=284F7F74-1C9F-4E74-A908-78B90EA65B74

Those 36 people came to the client website from the link http://paradiz.net/showthread.php?t=103895.  Feel free to look at that link but unless you speak Russian it’s not going to mean a lot to you!

A quick translation later and I could see that it’s a website for freeloaders – people who get a kick out of getting things – ANY things – for free.  And some kind Russian had posted a link to the client website.  You wouldn’t think there’s much demand for free samples of sash window glass but to some people, apparently there is.

So what’s my point?

In this case it was a company, who normally sends out free samples of their product, who needed help identifying that it was a complete waste of time and money to send to anyone from Russia.   If they didn’t have a strong website visitors analysis software solution in place then it would have taken a lot longer to work out what the problem was.  It actually took only about 5 minutes to uncover the mystery.

My point is that there are many people who will happily waste the time or money of those in business.   More typically common than samples being requested, are those people who make enquiries via websites, but who aren’t really serious buyers.   Take this scenario …

Someone makes contact with Widgets Ltd, asking for a quotation for 1,000 widgets.   The person at Widgets Ltd thinks it looks promising and invests time in creating the quotation and sends it off to them.  They hear nothing back and even when trying to contact them later on, they get nowhere.

That person who wanted 1,000 widgets was actually shopping around.  If the person from Widgets Ltd had looked at their website visitors statistics then they would have seen that the enquirer had spent only a few seconds on their website and spent less time on their enquiry form page than it would have taken to type out such an enquiry.  In short, the person was copy/pasting the same enquiry to multiple websites, just to get a price of interest to them.

Had the person from Widgets Ltd known this, they may have spent a lot less time on the enquiry and instead focused on other enquiries where the website visitors seemed to interact more with the website pages, which implied more interest.

There isn’t a business out there who hasn’t experienced responding to enquiries, and then getting no response back.  In many cases it’s purely people shopping around on multiple websites and they’re probably not the type of people you’d want as customers anyway.  By looking closer at each enquiry gained (through website statistics) any business can save chunks of time by sending very brief response to those who appear to be potential time wasters.