“Customer: A person who purchases a commodity or service
Client: A person who is under the protection of another”
Like many small businesses, we are looking at the bottom line and it finding it isn’t where it should be. And, like many small businesses, we are looking to see how we can improve our situation.
For many service businesses, the temptation is to lower prices by offering less service. Moving from having clients to having customers.
I wrote about this earlier in the current economic situation. While the downturn has dragged on longer than many people expected, my ideas on how to handle it haven’t changed. Service related businesses need clients – not customers
Having customers is not a bad thing. Many bushiness, such as MacDonald’s, have made vast profits by having customers. However, moving from clients to customers in a service industry is a one way street. Once you get a reputation for lower prices but poorer service, it is hard to go back.
Then you are in a race for the bottom. There will always be new businesses trying to provide the same service cheaper or faster.
A better strategy is to keep your prices the same, but increase services. Give your clients a reason not to switch to a lower cost service. Implement strategies to keep your existing customers. They may be as simple as a ‘Buy 10 get one free’ coffee card or as complicated as making one of your services free for existing or long term clients.
Don’t get into the ‘race for the bottom’.
]]>For a variety of reasons I am creating the map manually. Which means I need to get the address for each business being listed. To my amazement, many businesses, particularly restaurants and pubs, don’t have there address on the Home page. Or, if they do it is below the fold, so I have to search for it.
I don’t particularly care if the address is there or not. If it is a business I REALLY want to list, I will find the address. If not, I just skip it. But, why are these businesses hiding their address from potential customers?
How to purchase your product or service is what your website is all about. Its NOT the copy, NOT the great images, and definitely NOT the great web design. Your website is there to make it easier for your customers to find you and BUY YOUR PRODUCT.
Don’t make it hard on potential customers. If you want them to visit your place of business, make your address prominent and above the fold, on every page. If you want them to contact you, place all your contact information at the bottom of every page. When in doubt, the closer to the top of the page the better. And, having the information in more than one location doesn’t hurt.
There are a number of map services. We like Google, but there are others that are just as good. Place a map on your contact page, or on its own page, and link to it from every other page on your website. Add a input box so your potential client can get the driving directions to your business.
Making your business easy to find is the quickest way to increase sales.
]]>Google Analytics Site Speed metric has changed that.
If you have not upgraded to the Google Analytics Async code you may want to do so now. As the name suggests the code is asynchronous, which means your page will still load even if the Google code is now available. Plus the code is easier to use and offers many features now available in the older code.
Again, if you haven’t already done so, update your Google Analytics setting to us the new reporting system. It is much easier to use and has many new features.
Adding the code for tracking the page speed is as simple as adding one line of JavaScript to the async code.
_gaq.push(['_trackPageLoadTime']);
See Google Answers for more information.
Results are available after one day. It is important to be aware, as Google points out, the page speed is not run on every page load. It is also important to remember that the dashboard, shown below, shows the average speed. You need to drill down to see how each page loads.
Pagespeed Test
Information from other sources indicated the present sample rate is too low to be useful on sites for site with low traffic volumes.
I have only tested one site with a traffic volume of about 100 page views a day, so far, . There was an initial test on the top landing pages and a few interior pages, then nothing for the last two days.
Current ‘guesstimates’ of the sample rate is 2% of page views are sampled. If that is true, sites with a large number of pages, but low volume, may take some time to get completely crawled. And, as pointed out before, the ‘Avg Page Load Time’ is a fairly useless measurement. Drill down to get load times for specific pages
]]>I planned on doing a few client accounts on Monday, once I had finished testing everything with my own account – but the tool has been removed.
Who Would Need This
Up to now – businesses that wanted a Facebook presence were forced to have someone create a Facebook profile, then create a ‘business’ or ‘fan’ page for there business. Facebook’s terms of service did not allow the creation of a Profile for a business. This was a problem for many businesses, my own included, that didn’t want that link between their personal information and the business account.
The work around was obvious – but if Facebook picked up on it you could loose all your accounts.
WARNING
This process was irreversible – there was a warning that ALL your ‘friends’ data would be lost. Which makes sense ‘fan’ pages can’t be friended – only ‘liked’.
Of course you know what is going to happen don’t you. Some, OK a LOT, of people didn’t take the warning seriously or, perhaps, weren’t sure what irreversible meant. The result – LOTS of complaints and Facebook dropped the procedure.
Fortunately, I got my site done in time. Hopefully, Facebook won’t force it back to my profile.
BTW – like everything in Facebook – the procedure was a real bear. If they do reinstate it, I hope they make it simpilar
]]>Adding this information requires getting the latitude and longitude of each location. An application at itouchmap.com makes this a simple operation. One option is to put in the address and it will spit out the latitude and longitude.
Problem #1 – the two most popular local pubs didn’t have their address prominently displayed on their websites. In one case the address was there, but way down on the page. In the second case the address was not on the Home page – but on a inner page.
Problem #2 – In both cases the addresses was not found in Google maps. They were using a local variant of the street address ‘Island Hyway S.’. Google shows the same road as ‘Island Hyway W.’ (Which is strange since it is to the East of the ‘Inland Island Hyway’. )
To be fair to Google Maps – it will actually find the right address if you enter the closest town. However, it displays the address as ‘Island Hyway W.’.
Should you be a slave to Google Maps? (MapQuest couldn’t find the address at all.) I guess it depends on whether you want you want only local people to find you?
]]>Like the old map search results, the Places results are placed near the top of the page. The map overlay has been enlarged and placed in the right column, previously reserved for Adwords (PPC). Surprisingly, the map overlays the PPC, so as you scroll down the page – the top PPC listings are hidden ‘behind’ the map.
The Places listings are much ‘richer’ than the normal results. If an image was included in the Places listing, it will be displayed along with the number of reviews, and address.
The Places position is to a large extent based on geographic location and your distance from that location. Which, if you are in the right location, can lead to some interesting results. For example a search a search for ‘accommodation Vancouver Island’ produces a map center around the geographic center of the island. This completely eliminates Victoria, the largest city on Vancouver Island.
Other blogs are reporting significant changes in the SERP based on the Places results. For example, the Barry Hotel, a small Bed and Breakfast on Sussex Place in London has top ten SERP in a search for “accommodation london england”. Higher than many 5 star London hotels.
For many terms the standard methods of on page SEO are no longer enough to secure a top SERP. The Places listing can take up to seven of the top ten positions. The exact relationship between Places position and SERP isn’t immediately obvious. While businesses like the Barry Hotel that rank well in Places, and have a good Page Rank may be getting a boost in their SERP, none of the top ten SERP positions for “rental cabins vancouver island” appear in the Places listing.
Getting Optimum Results
Of course, the best results for your business would to be in the top results for both the Places and SERP. The first thing to do is make sure your Places listing is up to date. Once that is done, start optimizing the web pages for Places. This is a much slower process than you are used to with SEO.
Five things to check are:
For a more complete list of ideas on Google Places ranking see David Mihm’s article on Local Search Ranking Factors.
]]>It was time to buy a new computer. My old no-name white box wasn’t able to keep up with all the demands of web development. I like to keep a number of programs open three browsers, a virtual box loaded with XP, email, ftp, and eclipse are the minimum. Also, there are Apache, ssh and mySQL servers running in the background. Not a particularly heavy load but it was starting to bog down my old system.
The new system is an Acer Aspire – i5 650, 6G RAM, and 1.5T off disk space. Like most new systems it came with Windows 7 preloaded, as in no install disks. I wasn’t going to use Windows 7, but I didn’t want to ‘blow it away’, so I decided to repartition the disk.
Windows 7 comes with a nice utility to ‘shrink’ the partition. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t let me ‘shrink’ the partition below approximately 700G bytes. No problem. Linux can read the Window’s NFS partition, so I can still use it.
I like Kubuntu over Ubuntu. Just a matter of taste – I have been using the KDE interface for more years than I can remember. There are times when I need a Gnome application, but, for the most part, they will display nicely in KDE.
Installing Kubuntu just keeps getting easier. I chose to let it install everything in one partition rather than customize the partitions. The down side is the ‘home’ doesn’t have its own partition. This can be disaster if you have root access and clumsy fingers. And, I have both.
Maintaining the servers can be a pain using sudo, so I like to have a terminal with root access. Unfortunately, Kubuntu has ‘root’ blocked ‘out of the box’. The solution is simple. In a terminal enter ‘sudo passwd root’. You will be prompted for your password to run the application the asked to enter the new root password.
Root access lets you install packages using the ‘apt-get install’ command. This can be very useful for getting the occasional package, where opening the package manager would be to much of a pain. Unfortunately, before this you can get access to all the applications out there you need to update the package list. ‘Out of the box’ the system doesn’t access all third party application sources. Open the Adept package in the Systems menu and goto Source > Edit Software Sources > Other Software and select the archive location.
With that done, I installed Synaptic, my favorite package manager and vim, my favorite command line editor.
Synaptic runs from my desktop without root permission. This means you can’t install applications. ( Pretty much useless ). Just click the wrench icon that appears when you mouse-over the Synaptic icon. In the Application tab change the Command to ‘gksudo synaptic’. ‘gksudo’ is a wrapper that will let you run a graphic application with root permission.
I have a local network connecting the systems in the house and I wanted to use it to transfer the files to my new system. I installed gFTP, a graphical FTP client application. On my old system, I installed ProFTP as a stand alone system and got its IP address (ifconfig from the command line). Using gFTP I logged into the old system and started transferring the files.
If, like me, you are using ‘Kmail’ as your email client, copy the directory, .kde > share > kmail >mail to a temporary directory on the new system. Then use the Kmail import wizard to import all your email.
Kmail uses the Akonadi server for storing the Address Book information. ‘Out of the box’ it was returning errors making the Address Book unusable. The solution was found at https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=98707. “go to system settings -> advanced -> kde resources, add an akonadi resource for contacts and one for the calendar and make them standard.” posted by Wu
Although Amarok was saying it was setup to play, the play indicator wasn’t moving and the wasn’t any sound. Amarok requires two packages phonon-backend-xine and libxine1-ffmpeg. The phonon-backend-xine was installed but the libxine1-ffmpeg wasn’t. Once that was installed everything worked smoothly.
I am sure there are other problems – I just haven’t found them yet. But, for now everything is running smoothly
]]>I have been visiting the UK for the last few weeks. It was a bit of a “whirl wind” tour “5 cities in 14 days”. There was so much to see that 14 days per city wouldn’t have been enough.
Among the items waiting for me when I got back was a request to do a SEO audit on a website that had recently been updated. One of the problems was so common that I thought I would pass it on.
I first checked the robots.txt file. This is the file that tells the robots (search engines) which pages pages you want them to exclude from their index. Google, and the other major search engines, take the robots.txt as gospel and obeys all the entries. Getting the robots.txt wrong is the quickest way to get your site ignored by the search engines.
Unfortunately, it is a sad fact that many, dare I say most, people claiming to be web designers either don’t know about or forget to check the robots.txt. In this case the txt was blocking the search engines from a directory that no longer existed – not a problem. And, pointing to the sitemap.xml file.
The sitemap.xml, or sitemap, is a complete listing of all the pages that you want the search engines to index. And, while the search engines have a method of submitting sitemaps, they can also ‘discover’ the sitemap if it is listed in the robots.txt.
IMHO, all websites should have a sitemap, with ONE BIG PRIVISO – IT MUST BE KEPT UPTO DATE!.
One of the key pieces of information provided by the sitemap is the last time a page was modified. The search engines use this as a short cut. If the page hasn’t been modified since the last time they indexed the site – there is no reason to check that page for new content. It saves the search engines time, and reduces your bandwidth usage. But, this works only – ONLY if the sitemap is upto date.
Sadly, it hadn’t been updated since 2009.
Fortunately, the major search engines were ignoring the “last modified” tag and viewing the new pages. They new content apperared to be indexed as the new description meta tags were appearing in the SERP. However, this is sub-optimal.
A current sitemap is the best way to ensure all your pages are at least being indexed. Don’t forget to update it when you do your next site update or add new content.
]]>I am planning a vacation for later this year. And, for the first time I am booking the rooms online.
We are flying to London and there are a HUGE number of hotels to choose from. So, I started looking at the review on TripAdvisor. One hotel in particular had a four star rating, was reasonably price, for London, and was near where we wanted to stay. It had a great website looked like exactly what I wanted in a hotel. But was getting hammered in TripAdvisor.
There were a lot of possible reasons for the bad reviews. Most noted that the hotel was undergoing renovations. This was a legitimate reason for some bad reviews. I was looking for some comment by the management explaining the problems and what they were doing to improve the situation.
NADA!
I was tempted to email them and see what the problem was – but, in the end, decided if they were not interested in their reputation, why should I be. I booked in another hotel. Only a three star – but with good reviews.
Sites like TripAdvisor and Yelp can’t be ignored. If you are providing a service you need to be aware of your online reputation. There might be reasons for bad comments. You need to explain your position. If there was a problem – you need to tell people what you are doing to fix it.
Tracking your online reputation isn’t hard. Google “your business name” plus “reviews” will get you all theinformation you need.
Don’t ignore bad reviews. Someone was so disappointed with your service that they took the time to post their comments. Think of all the people who didn’t post a comment but will never deal with you again.
Even if you think the comment was unfounded – take the time to write a reply.
]]>I hadn’t heard of PinBud before – so I checked out the site. It is a search engine for finding trades people within your geographic area. And, it is REALLY good.
The site has a little ‘Beta’ logo – so I guess it is still in beta. But, it is a great idea and it gave some interesting results. The interface is fairly intuitive. Major categories are in tabs, each tab has a drop down menu that lets you select the most common sub-categories. Enter your location either zip code, postal code or city and get a listing of local trades people. You can increase the search radius for finding a company or display the list in a number of different formats.
Not all cities are listed. But, surprisingly there were some good results for my little town of Comox on Vancouver Island.
For me, however, the big surprise was it was using the Bing search engine. I haven’t checked Bing for local search for a while. But, after seeing it on the PinBud site – I went and tried a search for “plumber comox bc” on Bing. Surprisingly, I got a local listing. And, while it has a long way to go before it looks as clean as Google’s – it was there. ( The Pinbud listing looked better. )
However, the question remains, how does a local Canadian business get listed in the Bing local search? You can’t do it from the “Bing Local Listing Center”, it only accepts US businesses. It is possible that, like Yahoo, it is getting its listing from Yellow Pages. But wouldn’t it be nice if they let businesses everywhere list for free.
So, a big thumbs up for Pinbud and Bing – you have disappointed me yet again.
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