small business

4reviews
  • Shout Out Studio

Local Search & the Link to Online Reviews
Local Search & the Link to Online Reviews 1920 703 Shout Out Studio

For most companies, it’s not so much a question of if managing your brand’s online reputation is important; it’s more a question of “where does online reputation management fall on my list of priorities?” It’s a fair question. To which the answer is, while there are many facets to reputation management, the best place to start is the area with the greatest opportunity.

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More than 10 billion searches are conducted on Google every month. That’s a monster number, and many of those searches involve someone looking for a particular type of business or service. In fact, 92% of consumers regularly read online reviews to learn about a business,1 but here’s the catch; 94% of people only look at the first page of Google search results. 1 It’s easy to see just how crucial that first-page ranking can be, and therein lies the opportunity–on the first page of all those local searches.

Consider this scenario. It’s a Friday evening, and you’re craving sushi but want to change it up from your local go-to spot. You search online, “sushi restaurants near me.” Essentially your goal is two things: determine what’s near you and what’s good.

An ad appears and a few initial listings. Instinctively you start scanning the listings to help make your selection. You start at the top browsing ratings and reviews, likely the pictures too. You notice Akai Hana with 1,102 reviews and a 4.7 rating. Good, right? You scan a few reviews and see someone recommends Sukiyaki, and you’re sold at that point. Problem solved, dinner ordered. What you didn’t notice, had you kept scrolling, was restaurant X with only two reviews and a 3.0-star rating. And that’s not uncommon.

There are several reasons for the search results you receive, but research suggests online reviews are now the second most important factor for local rankings.2  Much like fresh content is vital for SEO, so are reviews. Search engines factor in your review profile (including quality and quantity) when calculating where your business will show in the search results. Obviously, the higher the rating out of 5 stars, the better. What most folks don’t expect is that your reviews need to be recent and high volume as well, especially in comparison to your competitors. “When you acquire [reviews] regularly, they provide a constant influx of fresh content for the search engine spiders to digest.”2

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More than ever, consumers are looking for signals of trust, and what people say about your brand builds credibility. Often, companies fail to cultivate their good reviews and what remains online as a representation of the business are those few negative experiences. Train staff and team members to ask customers in-person. Provide links on your website, email signature, newsletters, thank pages, or on receipts. You can even ask for feedback on social media.

Want to continue the conversation on customer feedback? Reach out to learn more about our review generation process.

  1. https://www.vendasta.com/blog/online-reputation-management-stats/
  2. https://www.brightlocal.com/learn/key-ranking-factors-for-local-seo/

Photo Credits: Samson Katt; Andrea Piacquadio; Henry Perks.

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  • Shout Out Studio

The Incredible Power of Online Reviews
The Incredible Power of Online Reviews 1920 950 Shout Out Studio

Everyone has a story about online reviews; some are good and well, some aren’t.

So before we take a deeper dive, let’s go to the board for a few stats.

  • 97% of consumers use the internet to find local businesses – Source
  • 94% of consumers read online reviews; they trust reviews as much as recommendations from friends and family
  • 89% purchase within a week of visiting review sites and 29 percent will do so within a day
  • 82% of consumers go to review sites because they want to buy a service or product
  • 80% of consumers will reverse a purchase decision based on negative reviews

Reviews matter…

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Negative Reviews

Once a negative review is in place, no matter what anyone tells you it is virtually impossible to get it removed unless you can demonstrably prove it is fraudulent. We actually had this happen and someone we had never done business with, or even heard of, left a negative review on Google. No matter how much we went through Google customer service, they deemed it a legitimate review and would not provide any relief. We wound up having to write a response to the reviewer saying “…we don’t recognize your name and have no record of doing business with you. Please contact us so we can address this for you.” They took it down without discussion.

Negative reviews have a direct impact on the bottom line. Here are some specifics.

Effectively the only way to manage bad reviews is to get in front of them. By this, I mean to identify potentially negative reviews and respond to the customer/reviewer before it is published. It can be done, and we can discuss that later.

In a study conducted by BrightLocal they found that a single negative review can cost a company up to thirty customers, and in a similar study Moz found that three negative reviews can drive away up to fifty-nine percent of customers. Eighty-Six percent of people will hesitate before purchasing form a business that has any bad online reviews.

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Positive Reviews

Online reviews drive local traffic. Ninety-Seven percent of consumers use the internet to find local businesses, and three in four people who use their smartphones to search for something nearby end up visiting a local business within a day. While traffic to retail businesses is down fifty-seven percent in the past five years, the value of every visit has tripled.

Grade.US found that happy customers tend to share their experience with up to fifteen individuals, and when you get those good reviews, they actually add to your revenue stream. Companies experience a revenue increase of between nine and twelve percent with a one-star rating increase on Yelp. Sixty-eight percent of customers will leave a review when asked.

And finally, negative reviews are not all bad, seventy-two percent of B2B buyers say negative reviews give depth and insight into a product or service offering, and if handled correctly they provide a great opportunity for a response that demonstrates your company’s values. Over seventy percent of consumers who have a problem resolved satisfactorily will buy from that business again.

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The Formula

So there are a few basics you need to achieve.

  • At least a 4.0 rating on the respective platform with a minimum of 40 reviews per platform
  • Current/fresh reviews that have been created in the last thirty days
  • Respond to every single review your organization receives, good or bad.
  • Embrace customer feedback as a core value for your company, listen, learn, improve, and prevail.

The Way to Get There

There are a lot of ways to engage customers and manage reviews. We prefer a system to do such and bowline that this approach provides a simple and effective manner to engage customers for feedback. The platform we use allows businesses to leverage positive reviews and mitigate potentially negative ones across up to severely review platforms.When integrated into ongoing communications efforts, it can drive significant change to an organization’s online ratings.

…and finally

One final comment to consider, reviews count for 15.44% percent of your Google SEO…and it’s growing. – Source

Marketing Extensiuons
  • Shout Out Studio

Keep Organized With These Small Business Marketing Extensions
Keep Organized With These Small Business Marketing Extensions 1920 700 Shout Out Studio

Marketing for a small business can get hectic, time-consuming, and unorganized. Between the hundreds of accounts, sites, and content resources used everyday, it is easy to get overwhelmed. Luckily there are plenty of browser extensions that can be added to your web browser to help keep your efforts clutter-free. Here are some great extensions that the Shout Out team uses to stay sane:

Awesome ScreenshotAwesome Screenshot:

Screen capturing is nothing new, but Awesome Screenshot is the most versatile and capable screenshot tool I have come across. It allows you to capture either a selected area, the directly visible area, or the entire web page. After you have selected your screenshot, you can annotate it in a variety of ways, and even censor sensitive information. The final benefit of Awesome Screenshot is it gives you the option to email, share the url, or save the image. Showing edits needed on site pages, individual posts or photos has never been easier.

 

HootletHootlet:

If you’re in charge of social media for your small business, there is a good chance you are no stranger to HootSuite. Hootlet is their browser extension which helps you save time and effort. You can post to multiple social media profiles at once, schedule your posts, and find targeted content all without leaving your browser window.

bitly fish logobitly:

bitly is a link shortening/ branding extension that does so much more. After you create custom bitlinks, you can then manage and review their performance from the analytics and reporting from bitly. It keeps your social sharing looking clean, and helps you track click-throughs.

 

crowdriff 2561riffle:

Riffle is the Twitter dashboard you’ve been looking for, assuming you were looking for a Twitter dashboard. Get a Twitter profile’s vitals, influence assessments, top shares, usage and it’s activity rate all in a single dashboard. It’s a great way to learn about your followers or potential influencers.

PocketPocket:

Save the content you find for later with Pocket. This nifty extension will save, categorize and sync content so you can access it later, from any device. Pocket is a great way to curate articles, videos, or photos to share from your brand’s social media accounts.

MozBar1MozBar:

The MozBar browser extension provides free SEO metrics and data. You can search keywords, locations and individual search engines. MozBar also lets you analyze on-page elements with their Analyze Page overlay. It provides you with a break down of social shares and metrics. Save time on SEO research by adding MozBar to your extension arsenal.

Other useful extensions that will save you time and effort:

Check My Links:

As the name suggests, this extension is a link checker that scours through your page or post and will make sure all your links are working. Once it’s done it will highlight working links in green, and it highlights the broken links with red. This is a great time-saver, especially when you’ve been editing content for an entire day.

RiteTag:

It can be hard to know which hashtags to use on your social media posts. RiteTag takes the guessing out of it by grading your hashtags on a three point scale. Updates shared through RiteTag are also monitored for click-throughs, replies, retweets, favorites, and follows.

Check out the extensions above and let us know what you think! We’d love to hear of any extensions you use that have simplified your daily workload.

BeBetterBusinessBlogger
  • Shout Out Studio

How To Be A Better Business Blogger
How To Be A Better Business Blogger 880 461 Shout Out Studio

In previous posts, we’ve broken down the anatomy of an effective blog post and established why blogging matters for business, but how can YOU be a better business blogger? Here are a few best practices you might try:

Collaborate With The Team

There’s no “I” in team right? Well, there’s no “I” in blog either. The most refreshing blogs online these days are the ones that have different viewpoints – why? Because it’s different! Working together as a team allows different to be created with little to no effort. How does that happen? In 3 ways:

  • When you collaborate with a team you feed off of each other’s ideas. If I’m stuck and my creative juices aren’t flowing I can look to my team to support me through that. They offer ideas or things they would want to hear about.
  • Your team isn’t afraid to say no. Or yes really. Often as individuals, we sit around and question our ideas, yet when we present them to the team we more often than not get a positive response or ways to make our posts even better.
  • Think in broader terms of a team. Everyone has a perspective and sometimes it’s those with the softest voice that end up having a ton to contribute, it just takes asking and they’re excited to be involved.

Understand Your Audience:

You know how everyone and their brother tells you that in order to be a successful company you have to understand your audience? Well, they’re right. It’s Business 101. You have to be able to understand your audience’s wants and needs – and more importantly, provide for those wants and needs. The same goes for your blog. We could sit around all day blogging about why cupcakes are so delicious, but that’s not what our audience wants to hear because that’s not the information or the business we provide to benefit them.

Sometimes it’s as simple as just going straight to the source and asking what they want to hear more (and less) about. Survey your readers directly on the blog or poll your audience via social media. You don’t know if you don’t ask.

Network With Your Peers:

Don’t blog with blinders. Get out of your office and go talk to the world. It’s easy to get into a rhythm of developing content, but an outsider who’s not on the front lines with you all day long can help provide a fresh perspective. Sometimes ideas are spurred by just having conversations with your peers. Ask them about issues they’re challenged with, and turn it into an opportunity to use your expertise to help educate others who might be dealing with a similar issue. Don’t just focus on challenges though, we all love to hear a good success story and share ways we can be more efficient and effective in business. Consider even doing a monthly roundtable with other business leaders to discuss hot topics for blog fodder.

Another way to utilize both your expertise and your peers is to swap your knowledge. Be a guest blogger and pay it forward. Provide insight on a subject matter that might be relevant to their audience, and in return give them a platform to share their knowledge with your audience. Sometimes it a nice little break on both ends.

Photo credit: Thomas Hawk

Picture of tools on table
  • Marsh Williams

Excellent New Marketing Tool for WordPress
Excellent New Marketing Tool for WordPress 776 415 Marsh Williams

Everyone has heard about marketing automation; the holy grail of business software solutions; at least this week. The solutions abound, HubSpot, ActOn, Infusionsoft, Marketo, and so on. They promise the moon, and for those with the human and financial capital to use them effectively, they actually deliver outstanding results. But what about the little guy, what about the small business that wants some of the same capabilities but has a staff of five and no money to spend. What do they do?

Well, using our superpower of prognostication we think we may have found one; LeadIn. We’ve been trying it out for the last few weeks and really like what we’ve seen so far. Clearly, it’s a work in progress, but it already is adding value to our organization.

In short, the current software provides capabilities to track individuals who visit a website and fill out any associated form, be it a request for information, a download of some sort, or joining a newsletter. LeadIn adds a tracking cookie to the visitors’ browser and automatically ads them to the LeadIn contacts section it will create in your WordPress site. In that sense, it is as powerful as the other options that cost thousands of dollars per month.

The folks at LeadIn are very much on the right track and have designs for bringing significant capabilities to the WordPress world.

Now the reason for this blatant plug…something we don’t do often…they need testers. Right now they are seeking to get as many people as they can accommodate to install the beta PlugIn and try it out. If this holds any interest for you, we hope you will check them out and we can all watch together as they move forward.

Photo Credit: tashland

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