My Blog: The Web, IT and OU life

My SEO Tookit

January 26, 2012

There are lots of tools out there to help you optimise your web site for search engines and attract more visitors. I've narrowed my SEO toolkit down to a handful of apps, web sites and browser plug-ins that let me get the information I need about the sites I manage.

So in no particular order...

Google Adwords

The Keywords Tool in Adwords is good for assessing the popularity of search terms. No point optimising your site for phrases no-one uses!
www.google.co.uk/adwords

Alexa.com

This site provides web site analytics and it is free to create an account. You can measure your sites (and competitors) popularity, the keywords they use and the number of incoming links. This allows you to see the effect your changes have made and measure the success of your SEO work over time.

It is also useful to see how other sites measure up when you are evaluated their worth as part of a link building exercise or to see what links competitor sites have to them.
www.alexa.com

Google Web Master Tools is another (and probably more accurate) way of seeing how many back links your site has.

Browser Plug-ins

You can get all kinds of metrics at your finger tips with browser plug-ins. There are plenty to choose from but I have kept these two in my Chrome browser.
SEO Site Tools
SEO for Chrome

Rank Checker

This is a desktop application for Windows that reports the position of your site in search engine results for your keywords and phrases. This saves you having to manually run lots of searches for different keywords, which can be time consuming if you manage more than one site. Rank Checker runs searches against all the major search engines and some smaller ones, not just Google.

It is available for free from www.link-assistant.com/rank-tracker/download.html.

Twitter

I use Twitter to keep up with SEO news and announcements. Keeping up with developments in IT and the web in general is difficult because you can overload on information.But I find it useful to follow other SEO experts and take a look at what they are tweeting.

I follow SEOmoz, seotasticcouk, smashingmag, Link_building, seoinc and seobook to name a few.

Google Analytics

Is your optimisation working? Are visitor numbers up? Are you tracking conversions, whether that be sales or contact form submissions, and have they increased as a result of your hard work? How many visitors are coming from different sources? Is Google Places for Business working for you? Google Analytics can help you analyse so much that to start with, the biggest problem is focusing on the relevant stats.
www.google.com/analytics

Google Web Master Tools

It is essential to know if your sitemap.xml has a problem or if Google is getting errors when crawling your site. Google might be #1 search engine but I still use Bing's Web Master Tools to keep a track of any Bing issues. You can submit new pages to Bing via BWMT too.
www.google.com/webmasters
www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster

More Google

To find reputable sites to publish articles linking back to my web sites and to see what the competition are up to.
www.google.co.uk

Social Networking Sites and Ping.fm

I use Ping.fm to post updates to numerous social networking sites at the same time. Ping lets me manage all of these sites from a central place. Using Ping, I can fairly easily post links back to my articles on popular sites. I can then use a combination of publishing articles and the power of social media to improve my SE rankings.
www.ping.fm

Open Office Calc & Writer

You need a way of keeping track of your rankings, what articles you have submitted and so on. I keep things simple and use a couple of spreadsheets for this.

On a monthly basis, I write a report using a template of mine to highlight the SEO work that has been done, rankings compared with previous months and a summary of GA stats.
www.openoffice.org.

You're More Likely To Spread a Bad Customer Experience Than a Good One

December 12, 2011

It's well known that people are much more likely to tell their friends about a bad customer experience than a good one and two contrasting experiences highlighted this to me recently.

According to this report, British customers are three times more likely to tell friends about bad service than they are about good service. 97.7% would simply take their business elsewhere.

The good

A BenQ monitor stopped working within a year of purchase so I raised a returns query online with the manufacturer. A prompt email response provided me with instructions on how to return the monitor and when it would be picked up. There would be no charge to me (unless it was found to be fault-free), a replacement would be shipped once tests were complete and I was told pick-up would be the next day. I didn't have to provide any proof of purchase or go through any mind numbing troubleshooting steps. The process so far was smooth, automated and hassle free.

The next day a courier arrived with a padded box for the faulty monitor to go in. Great – I didn't have to worry about packing it properly. But then the surprise...the padded box contained my replacement monitor! The courier dropped off my replacement and packed up the faulty monitor without BenQ running tests to prove the fault. A quick turnaround in 24 hours.

You could argue the monitor shouldn't have needed replacing within a year, or that the email reply didn't make it clear a replacement would be delivered or packaging would be provided but these were minor points that didn't matter to me. My expectations were exceeded and I couldn't have asked for more.

Before my monitor experience, I would have described BenQ as a low cost, budget IT manufacturer. But as a result of great service, my opinion of them changed favourably.

But interestingly I hardly told anyone about the experience.

The bad

The same week I spent half a day waiting at home for a visit from Virgin Media, a company I had previously thought good of, to install a TiVo box. No-one turned up and there was no phone call, text or email. So I called Virgin to find out what was going on, only to be told their records showed the appointment was for two weeks time.

I cancelled the upgrade, unhappy at having wasted half a day and unwilling to spend another half day waiting in, particularly as I had to pay for the engineer visit. As a result they lost an upgrade customer and I lost out on something I wanted.

The mistake was entirely mine. I booked the upgrade online with a provisional date and somehow failed to notice that the date in the confirmation email was different. But by the time I realised this it was too late. I had already re-told the story to family and friends and felt hard done by that Virgin hadn't done more to appease me.

Responding to complaints

I sent a message via Twitter to Virgin Media, not expecting a reply. Promptly they responded, asking if a reason was given for the mix-up. This small response made me feel that perhaps they did care, maybe just a tiny bit. Then I realised the error was mine. But how many people did I tell? One, maybe two. And I didn't post a follow up on Twitter. By that time my focus was elsewhere and it just didn't seem important.

Using social media to improve customer relations

This highlighted something else to me. Yes, people are far more likely to tell friends about a bad experience but it can be possible to turn this experience around if the response exceeds the customer's expectations.

By responding to my tweet, Virgin made me feel more valued than I had done previously. They could have followed this up further, perhaps by investigating (which of course would have shown me to be at fault!) or by offering me a discount. They would then have provided me with more than I expected. I would have been far more likely to tweet about that, post on Facebook or tell my friends. This would have largely undone the negativity spread by me re-telling the original experience.

The final lesson here is check your emails. It might just be your fault. Sorry Virgin...