blog.wsiwebbasedmarketing.co.uk

I know this isn’t strictly internet marketing but it’s very relevant to customer service and I need to get this off my chest. I’m talking to anyone who charges me for the privilege of calling you.

I spend my live advising clients on the best ways to reduce friction within their sales and service channels, both online and offline. So it upsets me greatly to see friction being needlessly added in the form of charging people to talk to you. It’s just NUTS!

My credit card companies, Barclaycard and Capital One, both use a 0844 number for their customer services.  I have suppliers of other services to me using 0871 numbers as well as 0844.  Nowadays most of us have inclusive call deals on our land lines and mobiles. HOWEVER these inclusive deals on landlines don’t include 0844, or 0871, as well as all the other premium phone numbers.

On a mobile 0845, 0870 and 0800 (and derivatives) all cost money to call, even though they are free on most landlines, and 0844 and 0871 calls cost a lot depending on your network and package.  Even from a landline 0844 and 0871 calls cost at least 5p per minute and up to 10p.  The company you are calling receives a rebate of up to 7p per minute of this charge.

Here’s my gripe.

I SHOULDN’T HAVE to PAY to TALK to CUSTOMER SERVICES, SALES or ANYONE ELSE in YOUR COMPANY!

Do you think we don’t know this is making YOU money?  It’s bad enough having to speak to someone who has English as their second language, but having to pay for it is just rude.

Thanks for listening, I feel better now I’ve got this out.

If you have to put these numbers on your web sites and advertising at least offer an alternative so we can use a number that’s included in our telephony package.  On my site I have an 0800 number but I realise that from a mobile it’s expensive so I include a mobile number, that way everyone can call me for free.  It’s not that hard!

If your business is using telephone numbers that charge people for talking to you I urge you to stop this practice.  The revenue these numbers are delivering through rebates is peanuts compared to a negative impression and a phone bill for your callers to pay.

Here are some resources to bookmark, especially on your mobile phone, to find cheaper or free numbers to call the people you do business with, not that you should have to…

If they have a web site try and find a number for “Calling from abroad” as they can’t use premium numbers outside the UK.

Find an alternative landline number to the paid number advertised – http://www.dontpaytocall.com/

Here’s a useful guide to telephone number costs – http://www.uk2numbers.co.uk/?go=support&page=non-geographic-number-guide

If I had a pound…  How can I measure my social engagement without spending a fortune on a dedicated package. Well Google now has an answer.

I won’t repeat the post here but if this is of interest to your business you can get much more on the Google blog by reading the post here http://analytics.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/capturing-value-of-social-media-using.html 

Like all measurement tools on the internet this isn’t 100% accurate but it will give you some very useful information and you can measure the trends for your social engagement based on the efforts you, or your marketing team, are putting in.

If you’d like some assistance with setting this up please get in touch.

Enjoy!

Optimising your site to rank for the keyword phrases you’ve decided will achieve the goals you’ve set for your site is critical for your success. OK that’s an obvious statement but…

In a recent interview Matt Cutts at Google pre announced Google’s intention to penalise sites that are “Over Optimised” to “level the playing field”. Listen to the audio interview here.

For several years I’ve been told by clients that they get a call every week from someone promising to get their site to the top of Google for a monthly fee, sometimes a huge monthly fee.  Some of the methods to achieve this will leave your site more attractive to machines (search engine spiders) than it is to humans. BAD NEWS.

I have always advised that the most important attributes for your site content is that it’s relevant and engaging.

Here’s my top tip for not getting caught in the “Over Optimisation” trap.

CREATE CONTENT FOR HUMANS NOT SEARCH ENGINES AND MAKE SURE IT’S GREAT CONTENT, RELEVANT, INTERESTING, USEFUL, AND GRAMMATICALLY CORRECT.

OK so now we have that out of the way here are my 7 top tips for getting your site found by optimising your “On Page” SEO.

1)      Carry out your keyword research diligently and for every page, product and service on your site.  Yes it’s time consuming but not doing it is like building a house without foundations.  You can use Google’s free keyword tool, it really isn’t that difficult.

2)      Ideally your page URLs should contain the keywords. For example if you had a page about generating more sales then this is an ideal URL: http://www.wsiwebbasedmarketing.co.uk/generating-more-sales-for-your-business  If you are creating new pages always take this approach.

3)      Make sure on every page you have a relevant, unique and grammatically correct page title with the most important keywords at the beginning. Remember 65 characters is a good limit guideline.

4)      Make sure every page has a Heading1 title on the page, just one as we don’t want to confuse Google.  This should include your keywords, see a pattern forming here?

5)      Your content should have your keywords in the first paragraph and perhaps twice more if it fits into the word flow on the page.  Remember most people will only read the first paragraph or the “highlights” but Google will read everything.

6)      Use Heading2s, Heading3s, bullet points, bold and italics on the page to highlight important words, especially keywords.

7)      Use keywords as links to other relevant content. So a link to a “How to create a LinkedIn company page” should look like this:-  How to create a LinkedIn company page.

If you just follow these simple guidelines you’ll have 80% of your on page optimisation done and you can fine tune as you go along.

Good luck and get in touch if you need advice, it’s always free.

Alan Tomkins alan.tomkins@wsiwbm.co.uk