Internet Marketing and SEO is great for bringing customers to your site, but how do you keep them loyal once they’ve found you?

Customer service is just as important for online businesses as it is for traditional ‘bricks and mortar’ establishments. In some respects it’s even more essential, because you lose that ‘face-to’face’ contact that is so important in human interaction. Trust is incredibly important, if you can’t retain trust then you are doing something wrong.

For eCommerce sites, it is essential that you remain transparent, and, if for any reason you can’t fulfil an order the you must tell your customer. For example, I bought a teapot for my sister and her husband for their wedding present. I purchased said teapot from Royal Doulton, a well established and timeless brand. I arranged for the teapot to be delivered at my sister’s address as I must admit to running out of time in the lead up to the wedding, so I thought, that’s fine, I’ll get it delivered to their address, to arrive after their honeymoon. The delivery dates were stated in the purchase confirmation email, and it all seemed to fit in perfectly with the happy couple’s return. ‘Great’ I thought, ‘this all fits in perfectly’. Unfortunately, 6 weeks on, my sister and her husband are still waiting for their teapot. I would not mind if I’d heard from Royal Doulton explaining that the teapot was out of stock, or that there had been a mess up in the order or delivery, but despite repeated email correspondence from myself they have remained dumb. I will never buy from them again.

When you invest a lot of money and time into drawing visitors to your site it is imperative that you do your level best to keep them loyal to you. After-all, from a customers’ perspective it’s far easier to open a previously bookmarked website and buy directly from somewhere known and will honour your purchase, deliver on time, or if necessary, keep you informed if things go wrong.

Royal Doulton have sent me repeated emails marketing their summer sale – and whilst I can appreciate that my email address has just been added to a list, this has still proved incredibly annoying (and serves as a reminder about how they’ve messed me about and treated me, their customer, very poorly). Email marketing is very, very effective when the sender delivers something of use or value to the recipient. If you’ve screwed up the order (as I suspect to have been the case with Royal Doulton), then it just makes your unhappy customer even more disgruntled.

The Golden Rules of Customer Service

The best way to remain in business online for the longterm is to always remember the ‘Golden Rules of Customer Service’

1. The customer is Always Right
   I worked in retail and catering as a summer job when I was a teenager and if a customer made a complaint, even when they were being totally out of order, my boss always said to me ‘the customer is always right’. Listen to them, find out what their problem is. Let them know you are taking them seriously, it’s important to regain their trust. They are far more likely to forgive human error if they know it’s just a mistake, afterall nobody is perfect and the majority of people are reasonable.
2. Solve their Problems
   If a customer has a problem, whatever it is, do your level best to solve it. Don’t make them do all the work, if it’s out of your remit to solve the problem yourself, pass it on to the relevant person in your establishment and make sure you get an answer to take back to the customer.
3. Terms and Conditions
   Keep these short and sweet. It’s true that very few people read them, but for the few that do, make sure it’s legible and to the point. The very last thing you want to do is put your potential  customers off from making their purchase.
4. Know your products
   If you don’t know your products or services very well, then the chances are your customer will go elsewhere. It’s really important that your staff are trained well in order to answer any questions that a potential customer may throw your way.
5. Customer Satisfaction
   This is really important. Your customer will appreciate you taking the time to ask if they are happy. Also, without asking your customers if they are happy with their purchase then you will never know if you need to make any improvements. This is also a great way of making more sales. Customer surveys are really powerful selling tools, you can use them to show your ‘trustworthyness’.

So keep in mind that if the goal of your internet marketing or SEO campaign is to improve sales and gain new customers, then you must look very closely at your customer service, and make sure it it top notch.

So Britain finally looks to take action after Australia and Europe began their investigations into Google.

The Met are investigating the Google street-cars after they captured private data from unsecured Wi-Fi networks. Google still maintain that the collection of said data was a mistake, caused by a piece of code for a different project.

It’s been reported that 30 countries have experienced this issue, with many deciding to investigate Google.
Google probably won’t feel too much of effect after this tumultuous event is resigned to the history books, though their money vault may not contain as many gold coins.

With a firm grip on SEO, and now with a view at taking on Facebook,  Google is a behemoth that will probably consider any punitive action as insignificant. I doubt if the general public even know that this is going on, or that it will make them consider not using Google as a search engine.

I find it hard to feel angry/annoyed/(relevant emotion) at Google, seeing as how Britain seems to has sleepwalked into a Big Brother state. CCTV, the nanny state, cameras in bins, Nectar cards, what Google did was pretty standard…wasn’t it?

I expect worse mistakes from the government and when was the last time they received any punishment for their ineptitude?

We have written about the benefits of quality over quantity links ad nauseom over here at Creare, but I do still think it is a subject worthy of discussion.

As Kaspar Szymanski, Search Quality Strategist at Google says in his recent blog post: Quality links to your site, published on Monday – a quality link is always going to be worth much more than a hundred ’spammy’ links. So, how does a person determine which links are ‘quality’ and which are not?

Well, I think a lot of this comes down to experience, when I first started dabbling in SEO a few years ago, (and, my, how the discipline has changed since then!) I know I fell into some pretty easy traps and pitfalls when it came to link building. One thing that I do know about link building is that it isn’t easy. Whichever way you come to look at it, ‘easy’ is not a word I would use to describe it, not that it’s technically very difficult, of course, just that it’s time consuming and requires patience, dedication, and to some extent a certain amount of luck.

So, what pitfalls and traps could a green SEO newbie easily find themselves slipping down?

Lets start with Rubbish Directories – when I started my first SEO Campaign (many moons ago now) I seem to remember spending hours (literally hours) submitting my site to a gazillion directories. Some were ok, and I would even go so far as to say I would use them again today, some, however were absolutely diabolical.

What do you look for in a good directory then? I hear you ask – and because I am feeling generous I’ll let you in to a few little secrets I’ve picked up the hard way…

1. Is the directory relevant? At the very least it should have a relevant category
2. Does the directory provide SEO friendly links (by this I mean, make sure the links aren’t PHP forwarders or other such uselessness)
3. Is the directory active?
4. Look at the page you want to link from, does it have a lot of other links? - The fewer the links the better
5. What is the PageRank of the directory?
6. Are the Links Follow or Nofollow (not that Nofollow links should always be discounted, just if the site asks for an administration fee then bear this in mind)

This seems a good place to add in a comment on Kaspar Szymanski’s blog that caught my eye:

Zack Pike said…
Kaspar - Very relevant artice. I lead the SEO strategy for a Fortune 200 company and I get cold calls on quick turn linkbuilding all of the time, it gets especially frustrating when someone above my pay level catches wind of “linkbuilding” and how this “great” new strategy can get you to the top of Google. It takes a lot of time educating my internal stakeholders that the key to generating quality links, that are going to have any effect, is great content and interaction with our consumers and KOLs online. I’m glad you wrote this post so I can reference it in my presentations… Straight from the source. Thanks!

Kaspar Szymanski goes on to say in  his blog post that your site’s content is extremely important to gain quality backlinks through natural processes. Well, I tend to agree with him, and this is why I say that link building isn’t easy.

To continually come up with unique and interesting content for your site is an ongoing and arduous task. It’s important to weigh up the value a page one listing will have over the time you spend on this task. If you know that the time spent on such things is worthwhile then invest your efforts there.  If it’s not going to make commercial sense then look to other online marketing activities such as email marketing or PPC Advertising and invest your time and money there instead. But, this isn’t the place for such discussions, we’re and SEO blog, and SEO is what we’re all about, so… If you have decided that it’s worth your while developing you content, then look outside the box. There are many forms of content besides plain old text, though text is still extremely important (and will remain so for as long as Google uses text as fodder).

Think about including a web video  to your pages. This will add value to you users, can increase the time spent onsite (I think this is a Ranking Factor), and generally gets you noticed. If you employ Video Optimisation techniques then your videos will even start to appear in the SERPs and it doesn’t take a genius to work out that videos are much more likely to get clicked than text. You’ll also find that your videos will get distributed and linked to by others within your community.

I would say, if it’s lasting effect you are after then humour will have it’s down side – the benefits are often short-lived. You will get a spike in traffic, but it will always remain just this – a spike. For lasting effects add something your users will want to return to regularly and will find useful in the future.

Kaspar also talks about Social Media. I have to confess, this is an area that I feel a little out of my depth in, however, with a strategy behind it I think it can be very powerful. It’s just about leveraging what you want from it (like pretty much everything else in life, eh?). His tip of making sure you provide a link to Twitter or Facebook is a great and simple one to implement. It’s just about making it easy for non-techy folk to share online content.

Finally – Look at your competitors – where have they got links from? Could you get links from similar industries? If it works for them, it could well work for you too. Don’t copy, obviously, but use your competitors for ideas. You never know where it may lead.

Chris Crum over at Web Pro News has been keeping an eye on the increasing likelihood of Bing becoming more competitive in the SEO game.

With Yahoo and Bing coming together later this year Bing is becoming the main rival to Google.  Bing is the default search engine for the Opera browser and also Verizion’s Blackberry (in the good ol’ US of A). Hewlett–Packard computers will have Bing as the default search engine over the next 3 years.

And, as Nick and James pointed out a couple of weeks ago, Bing is in the start menu of Windows 7 and Vista and IE is the default browser of Windows, which, of course, has Bing as it’s search engine. So with 70% of computers being PCs, and therefore likely to be running Windows, they have potential to wrestle some market share from Google.

Bing is on the right track but it’s going up against Google which has become a brand and is even used in daily speech (‘Oh, yeah, I Googled it’). Google isn’t just a search engine anymore.

Moving onto the technical side of Bing, it’s webmaster tools allows you to see the types of links that are coming into the site and their value. Useful for SEO, if you can identify a particular sector/area where links are coming from.

But Bing has recently made some changes to their tool. They listened to users and implemented the non-crazy ideas.

I’ll give you a brief overview of the changes.

-    Bing wants to now focus on three key areas with their webmaster tools: Crawl, Index, and Traffic.

-    It will allow you to submit individual URLs to Bing that should be prioritized by their robots.

-    You will be able to block cache links, block individual URLs, block whole folders of pages, or even block your entire website from appearing in SERPs.

Bing’s webmaster tools are now more comprehensive than Google’s and that will be attractive to SEO companies. Though will the general public care? They don’t hear about this kind of news; they just want to find the most relevant result from their search.

So, Bing has the potential but will it knock Google off the top-spot?

When you’re the biggest people tend to go after you.

Man U were the best team throughout the 90’s but everyone loved to have a dig at them, Schumacher for Ferrari, Woods, Leicester Tigers…I’m sure I could think of more sporting references but I’ll stop there.

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about the Australian government complaining about Google’s Street-View cars obtaining data about people’s wireless connections.

Now a Spanish organization, the Association for the Prevention and Investigation of Crime, Abuse and Malpractice in Information Technology and Advanced Communications (Apedanica), is taking Google to court over the same issue.

Intercepting telecommunications carries between one and four years prison time in Spain and Miguel Angel Gallardo, the Apedanica president, obviously believes this wasn’t a simple mistake, he said “something which was carefully programmed and has been done in 30 countries can’t be an error”.

Over the last month, the street cars have been banned in Austria and Greece, while the Italians are investigating the cars.

If Google was a smaller company would the countries be as angry?

Does Google’s size stop it from making “genuine” mistakes?

If Google’s power is curtailed will this have any effect on SEO?  Well, people seem to be talking up Bing at the moment but market share wise it’s so far off Google.

Google would probably need to be the cause of a massive oil spill, tsunami and small pox outbreak before Bing overtook its share of the market.

Google is trying to make itself a company that the World needs, that every business needs to be listed and every search needs to go through, but when does anyone ever want the successful, powerful and massive team to win? (I’ve asked too many rhetorical questions, haven’t I? Sorry).

I doubt if anyone from Google Spain will go to prison, maybe they’ll have to pay a fine, it’s just your typical little guy trying to ruin the Man.