Local Business Review Sites and Reputation Management

Small Business Owners Who Ignore Business Review Sites Risk Loss of Sales and Profits 

Any small business owner who learned the trade from a great mentor or who has read a dozen decent books on the how to run and manage a business knows the old rule:  If you make one customer unhappy they will tell 10 friends, but you need to make 10 customers happy to get one of them to tell one friend.  

And so it goes today with online reputation.  If anything the results are even more disproportionate.  I have clients with pretty decent customer service and lots of daily traffic with almost no reviews on Yelp, Google+, or any of the other online reviewing search engines.  Then again, I have clients with so-so customer service who attract negative reviews and can't understand why. 

If you are a small business owner, put yourself in the shoes of a potential client.  They search the internet and find a list of potential businesses that say they can fill the need of the moment.  As they quickly scan the list of options, the review scores are significantly different.  One company has 50 good to excellent reviews, another has 8 good reviews, and another has 5, but their score is 2 stars.  What would you do? 

It is a critical aspect of any business marketing strategy today to solicit reviews and testimonials.  You must find clients willing to take a few minutes to write up nice things about you on Google+ local so that the reviews show up on Google Places.  You also need to keep track of the comments being made on Google Places and Yelp.  If you see negative comments, you need to respond.  And that response needs to be courteous, engaging, and written with an eye to the idea that it isn't written to the unhappy customer, but to the others who have just read the negative review.

For more on reviews see http://googleplaceshelp.blogspot.com/2012/07/google-local-basics-410-reviews-will.html

What have you done about reviews?  What has worked for you to get more reviews? What are you doing about Reputation Management?

Your Small Business Needs A Mobile Website in 2012

As Millions of your potential customers purchase iPhones, iPads, and Android-based devices in 2011, you will be hind the curve if you have not created a mobile version of your small business website in 2012. 

Go ahead.  Check yourself out.  Use your Iphone or Android phone and see what your website looks like on the phone.  Probably not that great or usable, and the navigation is probably impossible to use.  Google is now providing device information in the analytics.  We checked on one of our restaurant clients and 25% of all traffic to their website was coming from mobile devices.  We checked a bike shop and 15% was mobile.  Mostly iPad and iPhone, but plenty of Android, too.

So, you and I need to make our websites look pretty and useful on this fast growing way to communicate and advertise.  And there are things about the reasons for using a phone that need to be updated as well.  For instance, having an autodial feature on page one. 

The cost will vary depending on who does the work and how complex the work turns out to be, but we should be able to deliver a conversion for under $1000 in most cases.