Google Local pinpoints locations of business and offers people the chance to add details. As a business you will want to include the services offered, any specialty goods, payment methods accepted, and your store hours. As a consumer, you can recommend the business and give them a review. Business reviews on these local sites such as Google, Yelp, and Yahoo Local come highly trusted from other internet users. In fact, according to the below source 7 out of 10 online users trust opinions of unknown users on these review sites. It is the latest way for WOM (Word of Mouth) marketing.
Found on: infographicjournal.com/the-importance-of-local-listings/
How Does Google Search Work?
Google + Were you Invited?
A creative way to stimulate demand for your business is key.
When a company rolls out a new product they need a way to gauge demand. This way they can plan for appropriate budgeting and production reports. If a restuarant plans to start opening earlier for a breakfast menu then they need to plan to increase their staff and then decide who to market to. Is this going to be marketed to the same customers that they currently serve or new customers.
So what’s with the invite on Google +? We believe it is a way to gauge and stimulate to demand.
Exclusivity, discounts, promotions, giveaways. There are many ways to stimulate demand. Think about the right scenario for your business.
Social Media and Social Mention
Do you use social media in your business? It can be a great first step to communicating and building a relationship with your customers.
The # symbol, called a hashtag, can be used by someone on Twitter with your business name (#NextWaveServices) to mark keywords or topics (#webdesign) in a Tweet. This way you can do a search for Your Business name and see tweets posted. A person can choose to follow your tweets to find the latest upcoming news that you want to share.
On Facebook, the @ symbol is a great tool on facebook to “tag” someone or a business. A person can “like” your business and then can comment on your page. They can also tag your business by saying @YourBusiness has the best desserts in town!
However, if they don’t include a hash tag# with the name of your company on Twitter or tag you with a @Businessname on Facebook then your customers could be saying either good or bad things about your business and you not even realize it. Social Mention is a great tool to keep informed about different tweets/blogs/facebook posts about your business. Try it out, it’s free: http://www.socialmention.com/ Just plug in your business name or check in on your competitors by seeing what people are saying about them.
Take it another step: If you see a tweet ”I just had the best lunch ever at Yourbusiness” then Thank them and offer them a free beverage if they come in again within the week. Get them back in the door and talking about Your Business. There can be no better marketing, than Word of Mouth, or Word of Mouse!
Next Wave Backup Security & Encryption
Many have asked about the security and encryption of our online backup service, Next Wave Backup. We have answered many of our clients questions in this post.
The online backup is 100% safe & secure and we trust it with all of our personal and sensitive information. We have many clients using our backup service for both personal and professional locations. All our my closest family and friends use the service as well. We are partners with the company who store the backup data. There are strict internal procedures and systems in place to ensure that staff and others cannot access or view this digital content and the network is protected by enterprise-grade firewalls ensuring that once your data is on our servers only the people you want to access your data can.
Once you download the software there is an option to encrypt the data transfer between your computer and the backup servers. Whether you use encryption or not will depend on the kind of files that you store on the backup. It is very unlikely that anyone will intercept your data even if it is not encrypted, but when it comes to security it is always best to assume the worst – if someone else saw your files, would it cause problems? If (for example) you are storing public domain photos, an archive of freeware software or shopping lists on your backup then you probably don’t need to encrypt your data. If you are storing sensitive documents, company information or similar then you probably should. Encryption will make transfers between your PC and the backup servers a bit slower, so it’s best to use it only if you do need it.
In our opinion online backup is a must and keeps peace of mind. You never know what will happen to your laptop. Local backup on an external drive is good too but that can be stolen or lost in a fire or other natural disaster or if it simply falls off your desk.
Next Wave Services is proud to offer one on one crash courses in Search Engine Optimization. Watch the video above, and if your ready for a more detailed look into what we can do to help your site get higher up in the rankings, contact us today.
Privacy Policy
One technical aspect to websites that is rarely talked about is the Privacy Policy. Any company that is going to sell products, or gather information from the end user needs to have a page on their website that states what it does with this information.
This helps customers feel more secure with ordering, or giving out their e-mail address, and is in general good website design practice.
A few tips to keep in mind when creating yours:
Make the policy easy to read, easy to understand and easy to find on your Web site.
Promote your policy internally in employee communications. Consumers are concerned about this issue, and your employees should know how your company responds to those concerns.
Promote your policy with key stakeholders, including customers, investors, contributors, and policymakers. Privacy policies put consumers in charge of their information.
Update your policy as needed to stay current with changes in your business.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the new game in town. You probably in fact stopped by this website because of just that. You typed in “Rochester Website Design” or perhaps “Wooster Website Design”
SEO is simply optimizing your website to draw in the clients that you want based on keywords they use to search on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and others.
Both of our search terms mentioned above will bring up this very website, in the first, second, or third positions on Google. Why? Because that is our target market. We want to show you that our SEO techniques work, and we can prove it. That and also we want to solicit new clients.
I’ve personally been to several conventions where website design companies are giving presentations and touting their SEO techniques. I take their brochure to review the competition, when I apply the same search words, or various others, our company website, www.nextwaveservices.com, always comes up before theirs.
Be a smart consumer, a little research on the internet will help you shed some light on how good a potential web design company is.
Create competition
In the fourth installment in our series on how to increase website traffic, and in turn sales. We turn to a core value of democracy. Competition.
Of course there are other people out there selling the same products or services that you are. That is not the kind of competition that we’re talking about. We’re talking about your customers. Or people in general. They like to find a good deal. People like to find something that is special or one of a kind that they found.
A website that gets people coming back more often, makes more sales. Again I defer to on of our favorite websites,www.woot.com. They have perfected this model. Each day they have a new product, that is usually priced much lower than the competition. They only have so many of this product, whether it be 10, or 1000. In any case though, once they are sold out, that’s it. No more.
So some ideas for you and creating a competition on your website. Give something away for free. Pick a product or service everyone would love, and give one away, say once a week, or once a month, or how ever often we want people to come back. Let them enter their email address, and get a chance at winning. It helps to build your newsletter base up, and gets them to come back once per day. Or offer them a chance to email this offer to their friends, to help spread the word.
If giving something away for free is too much for your business model, then give something at a good discount. Why does the grocery store sell that gallon of milk at such a low price? Because they know everyone needs milk. They are hoping that you also grab those oreo cookies on the walk back to the dairy section in the back. Most people will add those complementary products to help make their purchase complete.
So pick the services, or products you can give away for free, or at a deep discount, and start watching people stop by more often.
What do you think about Next Wave offering a free website to a client? Would you stop back to enter your name into a hat? Let us know, we’re trying to figure out what our contest and competition can be.
Update your site regularly
In our continuing series on how to increase traffic and drive more business to your website, we are looking at keeping it fresh and updated.
Your website is not a business card, brochure, or yellow page ad. You decide what it looks like once a year, if that, and it manages itself. A website is a constantly evolving project that takes constant attention and updating to make the most of it.
One of the most important aspects of your website is keeping it up to date, and relative to what is going on in the world. For example a car dealership is constantly changing its signs, balloons out front, commercials, and many other aspects. Just to help catch your eye and get you to stop back into their dealership and check on that new model.
Your website should be doing the same. If I stop by your site today, what is going to get me to come back tomorrow, other than I lost your phone number, or need directions again? Nothing. Keeping it updated, and adding in dynamic features will not only get your customers visiting more often, but it will help Google, Yahoo, and the many other search engines realize that something is new and different. They will come back more, and it will lead to increased rankings in the search results.
If I stop back to your site, and see a new special deal, I may read it. If I see a new blog entry, I’ll read that too. If I see a different catchy graphic that is explaining a new procedure or how to, I may read that too. I mean I did come to your website at some point in time because I wanted to know something about it.
So keep in mind each time you change your store window layout, or update your answering machine message, or send out a new flyer in the mail, that you should also be doing the same thing to your website, if not sooner. It will really help in the end.
It doesn’t have to be anything fancy either, spend 30 minutes once a week on it. Slowly over time you’ll see it turn into the website you want and need it to be. Best of luck!
