How can a website truly help your business grow?

How can a website truly help your business grow? Your business website is like your online business card, enabling potential customers to learn about you and get in touch with you. Here are five specific ways that you can use your website to grow your business and boost your revenue.

1 – Make Business Hours Easy to Find

If you have a brick-and-mortar store, or you’re in your office and open for appointments at certain times, make sure this information is easy to find for a first-time visitor to your site. If someone has to hunt around through multiple pages or links to find your business hours, they will likely get frustrated, and move on to the next business in their search list.

2 – Allow People to Book Appointments Online
Do you rely on appointments for your business? By giving your clients, patients, or potential customers the ability to make an appointment online – rather than calling your office or coming in – you give your business a wider reach. Many people used Cyberhooked Web Design Services.

3 – Display Reviews
A good word from a satisfied customer says a whole lot more than your best advertising campaign ever could. Having two or three positive reviews from happy customers displayed somewhere on your homepage can reassure potential customers that you’re a trusted name in business.

4 – A Modern Look Builds Trust with Potential Customers
While we all may try not to judge a book by its cover, as it were, we all do it anyway. You only have one chance to make a first impression, so make it a good one. A big part of your branding is your website and if it doesn't look up-to-date and professionally designed, people will be turned off and not be excited about doing business with you.

5 – Keep Your Site Updated
This is similar to the previous point. A savvy user can tell that a website was designed in 2002 and hasn’t been changed since. And in addition to the design elements of your site, you also need to keep your information current. If you get a new customer review, post it on the homepage and remove the one from last year. If your shop used to open at 10 and now opens at 9, make sure your website shows that. Potential customers come to your site wanting to find your most current and pertinent information.

Basically, online reputation management is the process of controlling what shows up when someone Googles your name. We'll show you how to promote positive content to the top of your search results and push unwanted content (negative, irrelevant or competition) farther down to ensure that when someone Googles you, their results are populated with positive, relevant content about you. Please Contact Robert Vaughan Director of Communications with your questions and for a Free website evaluation on your current website. 

Companies That Don't Embrace Social Media Might Be…

Drowning because they don’t have any real content or they are not engaging on social platforms. Does your client want to connect with you on LinkedIn? Probably not. 

That’s why you have Facebook and Twitter to engage and communicate with your clients get a better understanding of their needs and what products they are interested in. 

Trust ME!,  the water's fine in the social media pool, but many companies are still afraid to allow workers to dive in. Experts say employers should take the social media plunge to buoy their brand and improve productivity.A few of years ago, General Electric Co. wasn't satisfied with how it was bringing good ideas to life internally.

Like most global organizations, GE struggled to create connections and share corporate information among its 300,000 employees.

In just the past decade, social media has surged from a college student pastime to a full-fledged corporate phenomenon. Facebook was founded in 2004, but by December 2012, it had an average of 618 million daily active users. Similarly, LinkedIn and Twitter also have experienced skyrocketing growth.

On the other hand, companies should not adopt a complete hands-off approach, experts say. Improved productivity will only come when employees understand the right and wrong way to use social media on the job, and managers provide guidance on what's expected, Yates says. "Most people will respond appropriately if you communicate that social media at work is OK as long as it's used to get your job done and doesn't compromise your performance or that of others," she says.

Companies increasingly are getting that message. They are welcoming social media and weaving into the way they do work other companies waste their time with senseless reports that they try to measure with. When they take forever to upload content and when they do they still screw up and pass it along instead of taking responsibility for their own self absorbance or positon in the company.

In my personal experience loan companies haven’t decided whose responsibility it is to respond.
Is it marketing’s responsibility or perhaps the PR team’s job to reply? In other words your own boss may have no clue how to engage or turn on the social media button. If you have customers that are waiting for a response but these teams may be working hard to respond, but doesn’t know how to answer sales, support or service questions. If they see something that requires a response from another department, they may forward it on a “catch as catch can” basis, but have no automated way to identify and route things to the right person. And even if the post finds its way to the right department, which individual is responsible for replying? Fifty-three percent of respondents to the ICMI survey said that routing posts to the right person was a major challenge.

The best users and companies like Cyberhooked understand that social media is a conversation, not a monologue. More effective companies use social media to interact with customers by creating online customer groups and monitoring trends. They were twice as likely to use social media to research new products. And they met their customers where they already were, using four or more social media channels – including multi-media sharing, review sites, discussion forums, and blogs. How do you use social media to listen to – and engage with – your customers?

Mobilegeddon

   

On Tuesday, April 21, Google is making a major update to its mobile search algorithm that will change the order in which websites are ranked when users search for something from their phone.

The algorithm will start favoring mobile-friendly websites (ones with large text, easy-to-click links, and that re size to fit whatever screen they're viewed on) and ranking them higher in search. Websites that aren't mobile-friendly will get demoted.

About 60% of online traffic now comes from mobile and Google wants users to have a good experience whenever they click on a mobile link. 

The company announced its impending changes back in February, giving webmasters nearly two months and plenty of information to make the changes necessary to keep their sites from disappearing from mobile search results. But the update is still expected to cause a major ranking shake-up. It has even been nicknamed "Mobile-geddon" because of how "apocalyptic" it could be for millions of websites, Itai Sadan, CEO of website building company Duda, told Business Insider. 

"I think the people who are at risk are those who don’t know about it. Which to Cyberhooked that's mostly means small businesses.

"Come April 21, a lot of small businesses are going to be really surprised that the number of visitors to their websites has dropped significantly. This is going to affect millions of sites on the web," he says.

Businesses that depend on people finding them through localized search — like, if someone typed "Web Design in Sunnyside, Queens," into Google on their phone — could see a decrease in foot traffic as a result of this update, 

"Google has always been about relevancy, and content is king," he says. "But that's changing. Yes, they're saying content is still extremely important, but user experience is just as important. It's not sufficient to have all the right content — if people come to your site and the content is there but it's not readable, that's not good."

It's not only small businesses that are going to be affected by mobilegeddon though.

Marketing had been released and a study last week that found that a bunch of big brands, like American Apparel, The Daily Mail, and Ryanair, will all get punished when the change takes place, unless they update their sites before Tuesday. 

Mobile search update will not affect search on phones and tablets — it will not affect tablet search

~Rob Vaughan

Director and PR Manager of Celebrity Pub.

4 Level Headed Strategies for Responding to Negative Comments Online

www.Cyberhooked,com
By Robert Vaughan

Small-business owners spend good money on advertising, media relations and other promotional materials to increase brand awareness and control the conversation surrounding the business. Although these tactics can be effective, one of the biggest factors that sway consumers’ opinions is feedback from others.

Years ago, word of mouth was a very literal expression that meant one person shared their experience with their friends and colleagues and then those people shared with their network and so forth. These days, when a customer is upset with their experience, the first thing they do is announce their opinion on social media and web forums.

Related: Got a Bad Yelp Review? Here's How to Defend Your Business Online. (Cyberhooked)

So what do you do when you get a scathing Yelp! review about the terrible service and cold soup at your family restaurant or a horrible post on Ripoff Report about your gym’s cancellation policy? The tips below will help answer these questions and outline some of the best practices for handling bad reviews.

1. Know that time is of the essence.

To gain back trust after a scathing review, make sure you say something as soon as possible. A quick response shows that the business has nothing to hide. It’s important to note, however, that the messaging needs to be thoughtful and accurate, since the audience may already be aggressive and you don’t want to fuel an already existing fire.

Sometimes, the best response is something simple, such as “We are very sorry for the inconvenience and frustration that you've been experiencing. Please contact me directly and we’ll get this figured out.”

2. Admit wrong doing and just apologize.

If the complaint is legitimate and truthful, it’s important to step up and take the blame. People often respond negatively online to businesses that are trying to evade the blame or pass it off on someone else. Conversely, customers are more likely to forgive and forget if the owner apologizes sincerely and then tries to make amends.

Related: Don't Make These Customer Review Monitoring Mistakes

If the angry customer who received poor service and cold soup wrote on the local restaurant’s Facebook page, then the restaurant could respond back by saying that they truly apologize for the negative service, and would like to make it up to them by offering a meal for them on the house. A business owner should then go to their employees and pinpoint the problem, so the issue does not continue.

3. Don’t feel obligated to respond to everyone.

Often times, online comments can be crude or vulgar because people are more courageous when hiding behind a computer screen. If the comment is a personal attack or vague, don’t engage. Only respond to specific complaints about your service or the customer’s experience. Acting defensively or engaging in the foul play can make you and your business look petty and childish.

4. Ask yourself, do you want to be right or rich?

Even some of the most famous authors receive bad reviews on Amazon and elsewhere. It comes with the territory. And if you can’t bear the thought of someone criticizing you, justly or unjustly, then don’t publish.

Worrying about less-than-favorable reviews wastes energy that can be better spent writing another book or doing something fun.

Wait a day or two and see how you feel. If you’re still upset,resist the urge to keep going back to the bad review and reading it again, hunting for any inaccurate morsel.

Don’t send emails to your friends, relatives and fans telling them what happened and asking them to write good reviews to “push down” the bad one. Most of them probably won’t even know you got less than five stars.

Your objective is to have a successful business. Don’t sabotage yourself by turning current and prospective customers off with an emotional or defensive response to an online comment. Keep the big picture in mind and ask yourself if your response is going to help or hurt your business. Never respond out of emotion or argue over details, and always keep in mind that the best way to go about responding to negativity is to take the conversation offline.

4 Level Headed Strategies for Responding to Negative Comments Online.