Don’t confront disgruntled customers on Google Places

Negative reviews on Google Places can be a real pain for businesses. Sadly with this review process and other reviews, the squeaky wheels tend to get most grease. That is, dissatisfied customers get more attention simply because satisfied customers don’t tend to leave reviews as frequently as dissatisfied customers.

Obviously, the first point is to try ensure you don’t have unhappy customers but no business is perfect in this regard, so dealing with unhappy customers is inevitable. Having a clear customer service policy and natural course of communication will help ensure customers issues are at least addressed, rather than them leaving annoyed, getting home and then leaving a nasty 1-star review on your Google Places account.

Bad reviews are quickly noticed – unless they are swamped in a myriad of positive reviews. You may serve 2000+ customers per month, 10 may leave a positive review, one may leave a negative review. To new customers this may appear to be a 10% dissatisfaction rate, which is quite high, whereas you know from your entire client base, that dissatisfaction rate is actually .05%, which is a very acceptable number for most businesses.

Don’t over react to negative Places reviews

Don’t blow a gasket upon seeing a negative review – you may decide in the heat of the moment to fire abuse back, which doesn’t auger well for your online reputation. Read it, consider it, walk away and consider it some more, leave it a day and then respond:

1. If it’s an issue you are familiar with personally (rather than another member of staff), talk through the problem and what you did to try to resolve it or if you haven’t tried to resolve it, perhaps propose a phone call or meeting to address the issue.

2. If it was a member of staff that dealt with the issue, check that they handled it appropriately and if so, state that in your response. If they did not handle it appropriately, try to make amends with the customer.

3. If you know the review is fake (sometimes competitors have nothing better to do!), then call them on it. ” It appears, you are not a known customer, please call us to discuss this issue or provide us with details of a time and date of your transaction so that we can follow it up”.  This usually ends the conversation if it’s not a genuine complaint.

It’s also worth noting, never apologise unless you were genuinely in the wrong – like misleading a customer on expectations. Apologising and pandering to the customer is likely to frustrate them more and cause further angst. If you feel you are correct (without being arrogant), stand your ground.

Writing for Google Adwords is a real challenge

Writing compelling ad copy for your Google Adwords ads, or other PPC ads is a real challenge. You have a small window of opportunity to make an impression on your target market and the rate at which you make an impression has an effect on your quality score, which has a knock-on effect for your ad position.

Your ad copy needs to be concise and direct – it can have a huge effect on your conversion rate if you get it right so it’s worth spending a little time trying to improve. You also have to be prepared to test variations, that’s definitely the case with PPC – testing is king.

An understanding of customer or prospective customer impression of your business can influence your ad copy. You want to focus on what they perceive to be the competitive advantage of your product or service. Are you cheapest? Offer fastest shipping? Free delivery? Or simply just the best product? Whatever it is that makes you better needs to be conveyed in the 95 characters on offer in your ad – that’s why professional copywriting can be a wise investment for internet advertisers.

Don’t over-optimise titles for SEO

The title tag is one of the most valuable pieces of real estate when it comes to the world of SEO – if you can get your keywords into your title tag, you are more likely to rank well, providing everything else in your SEO campaign is on track.

But is it the best approach? If you look ad Adwords ad copy, it’s written as a sales pitch. Just 95 characters to make an impression on a target audience. Title tags have 70 characters alone and meta descriptions have a further 160 characters, yet they are often overlooked from a SEO and promotion perspective.

Get your title tags and meta descriptions to read better, throughout your site and the likelihood is you will increase on click through rates to your website. If you can manage to secure more visits, then you can secure more customers.

SEO experts might suggest that the copywriting guys are wrong for saying this – at least with title tags. They want to maximise that space for keywords, which is a fair argument. Meta descriptions have no impact on SEO however, so writing these as a sales pitch is a wise move if you want to increase the traffic to your website from Google search results.

Content ideas can be found in Google Analytics

What many online marketers don’t realise is that content ideas can be found in their Google Analytics data. If you would like to know more, why not look at getting a Google Analytics account if you don’t already have one. It’s free to sign up and relatively easy to install and it will present some very valuable data on your website traffic.

When you have added Google Analytics to your website, content ideas can come through the keywords people input into Google to find your website. Similarly, if your Analytics account is synced to a Google Adwords account, your matched search query data can have a similar effect from a content perspective.

Periodically, take a look at your Analytics keyword data and try to identify trends that may be relevant – such as longer time on site, which is a key metric for seeing satisfaction with your product or service. If the average time on site is particularly higher than the site average, it means those readers are happy with what they see – so give them more of the same.

When copywriting, thread those longtail keywords into your content or  look at the questions being asked of Google, where Google returns your website as the most relevant source of information and perhaps answer the question in greater detail.

If you want to know more about Savant Copywriting and the SEO content writing services we offer, view our About Us page.