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When it is Time to Say Farewell to a Customer

by Andrea Kropp
February 7th, 2013

Funny story to share…

First of all, let me start off by saying that I hate Customer Support. The reason I offer a lot of private label products and services is so that I don’t have to deal with the customers that buy them but can’t figure out how they work. Today I decided I would spend some time ‘in the trenches’ and respond to some support calls myself.

This gentleman has sent a nasty email to our support inbox explaining that he wasn’t able to use our product because we sent it to him as .doc and .txt files and would we please only send PDFs. To understand the irony in this, you have to realize that A) the product he had purchased was private-label web content which gave him the rights to modify it and claim it as his own work, and B) The PDF he is asking for doesn’t allow any editing and a .txt file is probably THE most compatible way of sending text to anyone worldwide on any computer.

I get on the phone with him and rather quickly diagnose that he has no idea what a zip file is and believe this is the root of his problem. I launch into an ever more and more simplified discussion of the ‘little icon with the open folder’ versus the ‘little icon with the zipper on it’. He claims he doesn’t see any zippers and I feel I am losing him.

I invite him to an instant webinar so I can share my screen and show him the zipper folder. Ten minutes go by while he figures out how to connect… I make idle small talk on the open phone line.

I start sharing my screen showing him how to unzip the folder, when i realize the issue is further back. He is watching me and it becomes clear that he doesn’t understand the concept of downloading an item attached to an email. I diagnose that he is trying to open a zipped folder attached to an email without downloading or unzipping.

At this point I realize that him watching me isn’t going to solve the issue. I need to watch him.

I make him the presenter and he figures out how to share his screen with me.

At this point I’m seeing his computer. He is a gmail user and the toolbars on his web browser are taking up half of the page. I watch him save the email attachment. I teach him about right clicking and extracting. So far so good.

After unzipping, he tries to open one of the .doc files. I see a Word 97 box flash in front of me. I let out an involuntary giggle. Error messages start flying all over the place. He is trying to read each one when I blurt out “This software is 16 years old!” I think we just found your problem.

He gets defensive about his computer claiming it is only 3 years old.

It is running Windows XP and Word 97. I try to explain to him the difference between hardware, operating systems and software. He isn’t following me; just keeps saying the computer is 3 years old.

Then an Asian porn website pops up in a new window. (He is still screen sharing with me). He is not phased by the fact that he is now screen-sharing porn. There is no change in his voice at all. All he says is “I thought computers were smarter than this…that’s not even my type.”

The call was over about 30 seconds later. I told him we would gladly cancel his subscription. Now that he had learned how to unzip the folder he should have plenty of content. I encouraged him to take his computer for an upgrade and virus scan and wished him well.

After having hanging up and having a good laugh, I reflected.

We cannot possibly afford to serve a customer like this. He made a $27 purchase and was furious at us because ‘it doesn’t work’. As I watched him on the screen share, he had trouble opening and closing windows and knowing how to save an attachment. At the end of the call I wished him well and told him to come back if we could help him with anything else. But I don’t mean that. Sometimes to grow a business you have to be willing to say no to a customer or even fire a customer.

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Uncategorized
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Are You Confused About Google+? You Aren’t the Only One

by Andrea Kropp
February 5th, 2013

The world of Google+ is terribly confusing to business owners for 2 main reasons (in my opinion).

  1. All the services now called Google+ used to go by various other names; the implication is that Google+ isn’t just one thing – it is many things
  2. Most of what you read about Google+ is geared toward individual users of a social network, not toward business owners

In this post I’ll try to highlight the key things for small business owners to know about Google+

Google+ Naming Conventions

  • Google+ – An individual social profile. Must be associated with a First and Last Name and a birthdate. If you are a Facebook user, this is akin to your personal profile.
  • Google+ Local – (Formerly named Google Places). These are profiles for bricks & mortar local businesses. Google+ Local provides directions, reviews, pictures and hours of operation. If you had a page on Google Places, it was automatically converted into a Google+ Local page back in June 2012.
  • Google+ Business Pages – These are akin to Facebook Fan Pages that can be created for a local business, a large brand (e.g. Dell Computer), a cause (e.g. American Cancer Society), a school (e.g. University of Oregon), etc… Google+ Pages allow you to share posts, photos and videos with people who are following your page.
  • Merged Google+ Local Business Page – This is only available to local businesses and is a page type that can be created from requesting a merger of your Google+ Local and Google+ Business Page. The merged page will offer all the functionality of the Local page – directions, reviews, pictures and hours of operation – plus the functionality of a Business page – sharing posts, photos and videos and allowing people to follow your page.

Confused yet?

A substantial part of the confusion arises from the fact that most local business want to be able to collect and share reviews (a feature of Google+ Local) and also distribute posts and updates to followers (a feature of Google+ Pages). Then business owners will write to ask me about Google Authorship where a thumbnail picture appears in search engine results new to articles they write. Google Authorship is a feature of Google+ (the vanilla kind for individual people).

The Right Way to Set it Up

  1. As an individual person, create a Google+ profile using your first and last name. Connect it to an email address that is independent of your employer – even if it is your own business. Your personal Google+ account will follow you across your career and into retirement. It is connected to you as a person. This is the account you want to use to set up your Google Authorship of everything you will write across your lifetime whether it is for a business site or a personal project. Fill in all of the profile details and be sure to list your company website in the section where is says “Contributor To”
  2. Have your webmaster help you establish Authorship. Send your webmaster the link to your personal Google+ page and ask them to establish Authorship for you for your entire website. Tell them that you have already listed the site on your Google+ profile as a site that you contribute to and that they should follow these instructions for adding a piece of code to your website.
  3. Find your starter Google+ Local listing. Most local businesses have a starter page on Google waiting to be claimed and improved. Go to maps.google.com and search for your local business by a) business name, b) phone number and c) address. If you are lucky you’ll get one result each time. If you get more than one result pick the one that is closest to correct (or has the most reviews on it) and consider that your main listing. This is your starter Google+ Local page. On the right hand side you should see a button or link to begin the process of claiming the listing as the business owner. Do that using an email address that can be transferred with the sale of the business. Something like admin@mycompany.com is ideal. Don’t use a personal email account.
  4. Stop there unless….if you are really truly serious about social media and posting, sharing and developing a following, then create a Google+ Business Page. Be sure to select Local Business as the type or you won’t be able to merge the listings later. Then refer to these excellent instructions for merging listings.

 

 

Categories Google+, Local Search
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Online Patient Review Strategy Tips for Local Healthcare Practices

by Andrea Kropp
February 2nd, 2013

Are you a dentist, chiropractor, physical therapist, optician, veterinarian or another type of healthcare practice that markets directly to consumers? Then you need solid patient review strategy that is integrated into your business operations. Here are some tips and strategies for online patient reviews gained from my experience working with 400+ local healthcare practices.

Why Are Reviews Important?

Reviews are an important part of your online presence. Not only do they help your profile pages (on Yelp, SuperPages, Google Plus Local, etc… ) rank better, they also make it more likely that a patients will consider your services. Collecting and publishing positive reviews that demonstrate a track record of success across many patients and conditions is a long-term investment in your practice success.

Online Reviews versus Paper Reviews

As a practice owner, it is important for you to understand the difference between collecting patient reviews online versus collecting forms on paper in your office. The biggest difference will be how your practice performs in local search.

Local search engines use the quantity and recency of patient reviews on your Google, Yelp, Yahoo, and other third party pages as a signal for how 'relevant' you are for a specific keyword. All else equal, the practice with 15 positive online reviews in the last month is more relevant than the practice with zero online reviews.

Of course, the practice with zero online reviews, may have a binder full of 100 patient reviews sitting on a coffee table at their office. The problem is that no one sees those until after they make an appointment so they aren't very useful in attracting new .n That same practice may then decide to post the 100 reviews on their website. This is great because it allows web visitors to see them, but again, they are visible only after someone decides to come to your website.

The challenge with paper-based reviews, is that while you can transfer them to your website, but you cannot feed them into Google, Yelp, Yahoo, etc… They need to be online in order to raise your online visibility and raise your relevance for more and more local search terms.

That is why I advise you to steer all your patients towards leaving reviews on third-party websites. After they submit their review, you can transfer the text to your website and print the page to add to your in-office binder.

I understand that not everyone reading this will have a tech-savvy client base. Use this to your advantage! Most of your local competitors won't want to bother with online reviews for the same reasons you dislike them. Use that as a reason for not against asking for online reviews in your own practice.

 

What Should I Be Doing?

#1 Familiarize Yourself with the Process – In order to help coach patients through the process of leaving an online review, you need to understand it yourself. The best way to do this is to watch exactly how it is done. Have you ever done an exam for a family member or friend? Great! Ask that person to leave you an online review and ask if you can watch the process. Each system (Google, Yahoo, Yelp, etc… ) is a little different. Watch at least one example on each of these systems so you know what to expect.

#2 Ask – You should make asking for patient reviews a part of your business process and assign a member of your team to be responsible for gathering a specific number of reviews each month.

#3 Make it Easy – You should make it easy and convenient for patients to leave a review. For example:

  • You can place a public laptop in your office with your review websites bookmarked.
  • You can email patients a personal request for a review along with the direct link they need to use.
  • You can provide a reviews QR code in your office. Anyone waiting in the lobby with a smartphone can scan it and leave a review.

#4 Take Photos – Ask patients if you can use their name and photo alongside their review or success story.

#5 Record Videos – Ask patients for a 90-second statement about their experience with you and your practice.

#6 Coach Patients to be Specific – Ask patients to be as specific as possible using a BEFORE and AFTER format. Ask them to address what they like most about your service or what most sets you apart from other service providers.

#7 Pay Attention – Be sure to read the new reviews you receive and respond appropriately.

#8 Respond Appropriately – Thank patients for leaving a review the next time you see them. Some practices offer a small gift such as a chocolate bar as a thank you. Others send a free Thank You eCard. If you receive any negative reviews, respond to them by posting a public “Response from the Owner”.

What Next?

The next article will provide some getting started tips for the do-it-yourselfer and some low cost / high quality options for doctors that want to outsource this task. Be sure to subscribe to the newsletter where I send out a recap of the newest blog posts about twice per month.

Categories Local Search, Reputation Management
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Make Sure Your Full Name and Address Appear on Every Page of Your Website

by Andrea Kropp
January 7th, 2013

It never ceases to amaze me how many local, bricks and mortar businesses do not have their physical address prominently displayed on the home page of their website. I see many home pages that don’t have it at all. Others where it is buried in tiny font in the footer. Others where you have to go to an interior page called ‘location’ or ‘map’ to find it.

All of this is bad for human visitors and bad for your search visibility. So assignment #1 is:

Assignment #1

Make Sure Your Full Name and Address Appear Prominently on Every Page of Your Website

Even if you have already done this, keep reading, because you need to understand that not all address text is created equal. When you add your business name and address to your website, you can do it as plain text, or you can do it in a special structured format that tells search engine robots ‘ hey, this is an address’.

To do that you’ll use an hCard format for your address data. You don’t need to understand exactly what an hCard is or how it works to be able to add it to your website. All you need to do is to replace the sample company text in the example below with your own data. If you’d like to get into the details, here are two suggested resources to start with.

Instructions

  1. Look up the exact latitude and longitude for your business. (There are several free websites that offer this such as geocoder.us
  2. Replace the business data in the example below with your own data.
  3. Ask your webmaster to add this to every page of your website. (They will be able to add formatting – size, font, color – to make it match the design of your website).

Why This is Important

Making sure that your full business name and address appears on every page of you website is sort of a no-brainer if you are a local business and want customers to come to your location. It also makes sense that search bots need to be told where you are located in order to get your location correct on a map. At a minimum, add your name, address and phone number data as plain text to every page of your website.

While you are at it, I strongly encourage you to go the extra mile and format the data in the hcard microformat. The code may look scary and it may take a little longer, but your website will benefit from the effort for years to come. The hCard microformat tells search bots EXACTLY where you are located – including your latitude and longitude – so there is no chance of sending customers to the wrong place.

Adding your address as an hCard will generally also earn you more trust in search engines and contribute to your website ranking higher for relevant geographic searches. Adding the hCard to your website gives search bots confidence that you are who you say you are and that if they send you a web visitor…it won’t turn out to be a vacant lot.

Did You Learn Something from This Post?

If you found this tip useful, please help support more great free content with a Like, Comment or +1.
All three are welcome too :-)

Categories Local Search
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Getting Serious about Reputation Management

by Andrea Kropp
January 6th, 2013

If you saw the blog post from a few days ago about using Pinterest in Reputation Management then you know that creating a Pinterest account is just one small step in a much larger effort to reclaim the search results page for my name – Andrea Kropp. The same is true about the post on creating a CNN iReport profile to get a link back to your website. Both of these are legitimate accounts on well established and respected websites. The reason I created them and spent so much time optimizing the text on them, is that they have excellent potential to rank for a name search.

Today I went around and hunted for all the other high quality profiles that I have online that link directly to this site at andreakropp.com and that are candidates for appearing in the search results. Here are the top ten that I decided to work with:

A word of caution if you decide to visit any of these accounts. Some of them I had completely forgotten about and have horrible images and text. I’ll be cleaning those up in the next week or so.

The point is that I now have 10 ‘parasite SEO’ links to work with that all link back to my main site here at andreakropp.com and give people choices about how they want to interact with me online.

The ‘getting serious’ part in the title of this post refers to starting a promotion campaign to increase the visibility of each of these individual pages. To do that, I need to create an online buzz around these sites – incoming links, social bookmarks, social shares, like, comments etc…

Creating buzz around a single site is hard enough…so how do you do it simultaneously for 10 sites when you are only 1 person?

Find Out How Right Here

Warning: This is an affiliate link, but it is a link to the main tool I am actually using right now for myself and clients. You can check it out now, or follow the step few blog posts to see how well it works its magic on the 10 links I listed above.

 

Categories Reputation Management
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Getting a Link from CNN.com

by Andrea Kropp
January 3rd, 2013

Whether you’ve dreamed on being a citizen-journalist or are mostly in it for the SEO value, very few people know that anyone in the world can sign up to be a CNN iReporter. You’ll get your own profile page on cnn.com with any bio text and home page link that you would like to list. Once registered you can email your iReports to a secret email address associated with your account or upload mobile videos and pictures from the CNN smartphone app.

andrea kropp cnn ireport

I finally created my profile page today after knowing about this tactic for some time. Here is a link to the profile page. No stories yet. That is on the list of things to do tomorrow – http://ireport.cnn.com/people/andreakropp

Categories Link Building, Reputation Management
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Using Pinterest for Reputation Management and SEO

by Andrea Kropp
January 2nd, 2013

I never had any difficulty ranking well in search engines for an exact match of my name – Andrea Kropp – until the 2012 Olympics. Up to that point, I barely even paid attention to ranking for my name, because I had most of the first page of results without even trying. That was before another Andrea Kropp posted some impressive results in the breaststroke events at the US Olympic Trials. Suddenly, anyone searching for Andrea Kropp got images and videos and articles about swimming not search optimization. The truth is, I was very,very excited for her. After all, I was a college swimmer at UC Irvine, but never made it as far as she did.

andrea kropp google search jan 2 2013

But, now it is the start of 2013 and a search for Andrea Kropp still brings up primarily swimming-related content. After mulling it over for some time I decided it was time to actively reclaim my name. You’ll get to come along for the journey and follow the progress.

So, after deciding it was time to get started, I started with Pinterest!

This may seem like an unlikely place to start, so I need to credit Ezra Firestone for the excellent Pinterest training he shared at the SEO Rockstars Summit in September. I filed that information in the back of my brain and finally put it into action today.

Step 1 – Pinterest Profile

First, I created a Pinterest Profile (account) based on my name. Luckily it was still available – http://pinterest.com/andreakropp/

Fill in as much text as possible on your profile and be sure to use words related to your segment. Do not copy and paste. Write something new. You’ll need to talked about yourself in the third person to work your name into the text. Don’t use “I”.

Step 2 – Pinterest Board

Next I created a Pinterest Board based on my name. The Board URL is https://pinterest.com/andreakropp/andrea-kropp/ and contains 7 images. These 7 images are the ‘pins’ described in step 3.

andrea kropp pinterest board

Step 3 – Pinning Images

I pinned a total of 7 images to the Board named Andrea Kropp.

The file name of each image contains ‘andrea kropp’ and the text associated with each image uses the term at least once. Note that I fill in the maximum amount of text for each image and that all the text is original. The text talks about each photograph and why it is on the board. These seven images depict my own personal branding evolution by showing my earliest avatars and website banners compare to today.
andrea kropp pinterest pin

Step 4 – Promote and Wait

Once I completed my profile, board and pins I wanted to make search engines aware of this new content quickly. So I shared a link on my Google+ profile and my business Facebook page. Both of these sites are heavily crawled by bots.

To top it off, I created this blog posts sharing the process and embedding several links to the new Pinterest pages to make sure they are crawled quickly.

Now I wait…

Here is a screenshot of a search for Andrea Kropp (regular and in images as of right now). I’ll post an update in a few days to see what happens ‘naturally’. I think I’m going to need A LOT more images to compete with the massive number of media photos from the Trials. Should be interesting…

andrea kropp google search jan 2 2013

andrea kropp google image search jan 2 2013

Categories Reputation Management
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Should I Redirect or Park a Domain I’m Not Using?

by Andrea Kropp
October 2nd, 2012

Generally you should do a permanent redirect (also called a 301 redirect) for any domains you are not using. Redirect them to a site that you are actively promoting. There are two reasons for this.

  1. The domain may still have small amounts of traffic and you want those real live visitors to arrive at one of your other websites rather than losing them.
  2. The 301 redirect passes “domain authority”. If olddomain.com is an establish website with inbound links and page rank, you pass along all of the domain’s authority to newdomain.com when you 301 redirect it.

I can’t really think of any good reasons that you would choose to park the domain, so don’t do it.

If olddomain.com is highly trusted in search engines you may choose to continue to pay for the registration and keep the 301 redirect on there forever. If it doesn’t have much trust and you don’t mind if someone else buys it, then let it lapse.

Don’t be surprised if someone does buy it and put a blog network site on your old domain. Aged domains are highly valuable to people that do professional search optimization. Many people buy old domains for the exclusive purpose of redirecting the trust somewhere else. If you’d rather not see if fall into someone else’s hands to protect your brand, keep paying the $7-10 bucks a year for it.

In case you were wondering you create the permanent 301 redirect for the full domain with your registrar not with your host.

PS. Redirecting internal pages on your website to a different page because the content has moved is a different topic.

Categories Domains
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Should I Pay for a Featured Directory Listing?

by Andrea Kropp
October 2nd, 2012

You will probably be approached by the sales staff of directory- or review-type websites on a regular basis asking you to create a featured listing. New sites spring up all the time and will try to convince you that you are missing out on searchers for your specialty. While we cannot speak for all such directories in all local markets, our testing has shown that paid featured listing typically don’t have a positive ROI. Here is what you should do:

  1. If they have a basic, free listing option of any kind, ask for that and fill it out as completely as possible.
  2. Push for a free trial of any paid listings for at least 90 days. Check your Google Analytics to see if that website sends you any actual visitors during the trial.
  3. Consider an upgraded listing if there is lifetime option. The enhanced listing billed monthly is hardly ever the best use of your paid search budget. We would generally advise you to put paid search marketing funds towards pay-per-click where your money will buy a specific number of actual visitors instead of just the possibility of visitors.

NOTE: Two exceptions to this general rule.

1. The Yahoo Directory at http://dir.yahoo.com/ will help your search engine ranking tremendously in competitive markets. $300 per year, but generally if you pay once and then don’t renew they will not remove it.

2. Many people have reported that is you refuse to pay for a Yelp featured listing, they are more likely to filter your reviews or show your unfavorable reviews at the top of the list. If you have a large number of Yelp reviews and are experiencing this issue, try upgrading to featured listing and see if it helps.

Categories Local Search
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Are You a Warrior?

by Andrea Kropp
March 12th, 2011

I admit that I’ve always been a “hermit SEO”. I do most of my work alone and figure out what works and what doesn’t through trial and error rather than taking other people’s word for it. As of late, I’ve been hanging out on the Warrior Forum more often to offer advice to beginners and read the heated debate among the SEO experts.

I’ve picked up several unique ideas and had a chance to mentor some up-and-comers. All in all being an active member of the discussion forum has been quite positive. If you are following this blog to improve your own SEO skills, I’d highly encourage you to join the conversation.

One word of warning…be careful to set a timer for yourself when you first enter the forum. The conversations and debate is so engaging you can easily lose an entire day and not have made any progress.

My username on Warrior Forum is NumbersJunkie. Hope to see some of you there!

Categories Online Marketing Advice
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