Year: 2008

Linking Up to Boost Popularity

You’ve no doubt read that in order for your website to rank well in the search engines, such as Google, your site needs to attract links. However there is so much information online on how to get those links that it can become overwhelming – and if you follow the wrong advice your site can be penalised by the very search engines you want to rank in. This guide is aimed at providing you with simple, step by step information on how to attract the right links to your website – links that not only help you rank highly in the search engines but will also help you attract targeted visitors to your website.

What is Link Building?

Link building is an exercise in getting another website to link to your website. Google were the first search engine that deemed that the popularity of a website would be partially determined by the number of links that website had from other sites. The more links to a site, the more popular it was thought to be, and the more highly ranked it would be in Google. It didn’t take long for people to realise that in order to rank well for their chosen keywords they needed to get links to their site and hence the beginning of the link building revolution.

Link building has evolved over the years. In the beginning a link from almost any site would help you, especially if the link contained the keywords you were targeting. So if you ran a car hire website in Brisbane a link with the words “car hire Brisbane” in it would go a long way in helping your search engine rankings, especially for the term “car hire brisbane”.

All good things must come to an end and it did with link building. As more and more people started manipulating links the search engines fought back and upped the ante on what constituted a valuable link. These days not all links are created equal. Links from more popular, reputable websites carry far more value than those from smaller unknown sites. In addition links from websites within your theme carry far more weight than links from a site with no relevance to yours. So again if you ran a car hire business in Brisbane links from a Queensland Tourism website and local B & B accommodation operators would be far more valuable to you than a links from a crocheting hobbyist websites in Arizona.

Benefits of Link Building

There are two main benefits of getting other websites to link to you:

  1. Links help you rank highly in the search engines; and
  2. Links from relevant websites can send targeted visitors to your site.

1. Boost Your Search Engine Rankings

As I stated above the more links you have to your website the higher your search engine rankings will be. This in turn means that you should attract more visitors to your website – more visitors that you can convert into sales, leads, customers or subscribers.

2. Attract Targeted Visitors To Your Website

A great additional benefit of getting links from high quality, on topic websites is that they should send targeted visitors to your site. Visitors who are already interested in what you have to offer and are ready for conversion into customers.

So How Do I Get Links To My Website?

There are hundreds of ways to attract links to your website. I’ll detail some of the more popular methods below and also provide links to some great resources which will help you further. One thing to keep in mind. If you have a fantastic website full of valuable content in your chosen field you’ll find your website attracts links without you even trying. This is a strategy I recommend to all our clients.

Website Directories

Website directories have been around for as long as the internet. In fact Yahoo! started as a directory long before search engines became the place to find what you are looking for.

Directories aren’t the most popular way of getting links but I always recommend you focus on getting links from at least the most important. There are both paid and free directories that you can list your site in – try for a mixture of both.

Local directories, focusing on your immediate are is one area to explore. It’s also a good idea to try and list your website in niche directories focused on your business’s theme. Searching Google for your theme plus “directory” is a good place to start.

Reciprocal Links

Reciprocal links are links that you generally swap with other websites – you add their link to your website and they do likewise. Getting reciprocal links can be a time consuming process but one that I definitely recommend.

To get started I recommend finding websites within, or that compliment, your niche. Spend some time on the sites and make an effort to see how our sites can compliment each other.

When you are fully informed it’s time to craft an email to the site suggesting that you swap links. Try and get a contact name so you can make your approach more personal. If at first you don’t succeed don’t give up. As I said above reciprocal linking takes time and patience but the results are well worth it.

Links From Clients and Suppliers

A great place to get links is from your clients and suppliers. You already have a relationship with them which should help the process go smoother. The links cold be in the form of testimonials, client list or recommended suppliers.

Local Business Links

Are you part of a local business organisation that you cold ask for a link from? Are you or could you sponsor a local sports team, radio station or the like and request a link as part of the deal. What other local relationships do you have that you could use to get links to your website?

Create Link Worthy Content

Finally as I said above if your website has interesting, unique content you should naturally find other websites linking to you. Another benefit of this content is it should also help your prospects learn more about your business and skills, can show that you are an expert in your field and can help them choose you in their decision making process.

Here are a few suggestions to get you started:

  1. Create a newsletter.
  2. Write a blog.
  3. Run a promotion or competition.
  4. Create an industry glossary.
  5. Write articles and create other information of use for your prospects.

A Note of Caution

Finally you need to keep in mind that not all links are desired. When researching potential sites to get a link ask yourself whether you would feel proud or embarrassed about having a link on their site. Are they a website you would do business with? If the answer is no they do not, I repeat do not put your link on their website. As much as links from good, reputable websites can help you links from “bad” websites can hurt you.

Summing It Up

Building the links to your website are a great way to help boost your search engine rankings. However getting those links is a time consuming task. Don’t let that daunt you. Treat it as a long term strategy and spend a few hours a week working at it. Over time you will see, and reap, the rewards of your labour.

Planning Your Website Re-design

By now many businesses have a first website and are looking at re-designing it. There can be many reasons for this re-design: to make it more up to date, to add more content, to rank better in the search engines, to fix errors discovered in the first site and to increases it’s overall success.

A website re-design is also a perfect opportunity for you to analyse what works and what doesn’t on your current website and to make changes that will boost your site’s overall performance.

If you are considering re-designing your site the following article can help you plan the project to ensure the re-design is a success. I recommend that the re-design be done in two parts:

  1. Review the performance of your current website.
  2. Use this information to help you and your web designer plan your new website.

Review the Performance of Your Current Website

To start it’s a good idea to review the performance of your current website. Discovering what is working and what is letting you down will help you determine what you need to keep from your existing website and what areas will need improving.

Review the Look and Feel of Existing Website

Depending how long ago your current website was created it may be looking tired and outdated. There are two issues to consider:

  1. Has your businesses identity changed and if so does this need to be reflected in your new website?
  2. Has the website used online design trends that are now outdated? A note here: design trends move fast on the internet. As nice as it is to have a website with the latest online design trends it’s more important to ensure the website’s look can be usable for more than just the next trend.

In most cases an updated, fresh look and feel is a good place to start in a website re-design.

Review Your Current Site’s Usability

The usability of your website is vital to it’s success. If you prospective customers can’t use it they’re hardly going to buy from you. Take a look at your current website and ask yourself how easy is to use. Questions to ask yourselves:

  • Can I quickly see who this company is and what they offer?
  • Is it easy to find what I am looking for?
  • Does the website structure and navigation make sense?
  • Is the website easy to read?
  • Does it compel me to take the next step (place an order, make an enquiry, subscribe etc)?
  • Are order forms easy to use?

It might also be worthwhile to spend some time watching other people (friends, family, clients) use the site and ask for their feedback.

All this information will help you and your web designer plan the website structure and content of your new website.

Review Traffic and Conversions

What is your current website’s traffic like? How many visitors do you get a day? How many pages do they look at? How many visitors convert into customers or subscribers? What are your most popular pages and your least popular pages? Where do your visitors come from?

All of this information will help you decide what pages are vital in your new website, what can be left off and what pages need improving. It can also help you determine if you are maximising the amount of visitors and sales you are getting. If your traffic figures are low it is good to discuss tactics to increase these visitors with your web designer. If you are getting a decent amount of traffic and no sales this also needs to be addressed.

Review Search Engine Rankings

If your website is currently ranking in the search engines it is vital that you make a note of what pages are ranking and for what keyword phrases. You need to share this information with your web designer and make sure that these rankings are not lost in your re-design. Any good web designer will be happy to discuss this with you and take it as seriously as you do.

If you are not ranking in the search engines this needs to be addressed in your re-design.

Review Current Website Hosting

Ask yourself how happy you are with your current website hosting provider. Things to consider include: the service you receive, how often the website goes down, the response times when there’s a problem and the speed of your website, ie how long does it take for your website to come up in a web browser.

If you’ve found your hosting provider to be good it might be best to stay where you are. However if you have had problems discuss this with your web designer who can help you find a better alternative.

Planning Your Re-Design

All of the above will provide you and your web designer with a lot of valuable information that can be taken into account when re-designing your website. I recommend breaking your website re-design down into 6 stages:

  1. Redefine Your Online Goals
  2. Finalise The Website Structure
  3. Develop Your SEO Strategy
  4. Define Your New Look & Feel
  5. Prepare New Website Content
  6. Develop Your Website

Redefine Your Online Goals

This is a good opportunity to redefine your online goals. Are they the same as before or are there some changes? These goals can include:

  • Selling online
  • Promoting your brand
  • Generating leads
  • Earning advertising revenue
  • Cutting costs

The goals you set will help you and your web designer decide how to best approach your website design.

Finalise The Website Structure

The website structure is the blueprint of your new website. It defines each section and page of your website.

This structure should take into account your website goals and the performance of the pages on your current website. I strongly recommend you work with your web designer to finalise this structure. Their expertise can help ensure your website is laid out in a logical, usable way to maximise the return on your investment (ROI).

These days many people want to be able to update the content of their website themselves using a Content Management System (CMS). If this is something you are interested in now is a good time to discuss this with your web designer.

Develop Your SEO Strategy

You’ll want to make sure your re-design does not loose all your current search engine rankings and also look at how you can improve your search engine strategy. For example is there a new product or service you’d like to promote that is not on your current website?

It is important to remember that not all web designers are skilled at optimising websites for the search engines. It’s really important you find a company that can do this, or find a search engine optimisation company who will work with your web designer to ensure your new website is search engine friendly.

Define Your New Look & Feel

The first step in defining the look and feel of your website is to ensure that your new website has the same look and feel (or branding) as your existing marketing materials. It’s always a good idea to provide these to your web designer so they can get a feel for your businesses identity. You may also want to give your web designer a list of websites you like and dislike to help give them an idea of your tastes.

This is also a good time to talk about the longevity of your website and how often you feel you will want to make it over. If you want to ensure the website has a long life it would be best to avoid design the website using the latest online design trends and go for a look that is more timeless.

Prepare New Website Content

Once you’ve defined your website strategy and structure you’ll need to create the content for your site. This content can be created by you by a website copywriter or your web designer (if they offer this service). Again, use the feedback from your current website to ensure that this content is suited to your customers, is compelling and engaging and supports your online goals.

Developing Your Website

Once you have completed the first five steps it’s time to build your website. By this time you and your web designer should have a clear idea of what your site’s goals are, how they can be achieved and the steps required to fulfil them.

Putting It All Together

A website re-design is an excellent opportunity to capitalise on the success of your current website and to rectify any mistakes that were made. It’s also a great time to listen to your customers and build a website with features that will encourage them , and new customers, to come back time and time again.

Counting “Hits” is a Miss

In the early days on the Internet website traffic was measured in “hits”. It was never an accurate guide to the number of visitors to your website but it took off anyway.

Over time many of us in the biz have tried to educate people about the correct terms to use (page views, visitors, unique visitors and so forth) with varying success. And it’s always frustrating when you hear someone refer to “hits” as you know just how much education is going to be required. So it was with great joy that I read the following quote in Lance Loveday and Sandra Niehaus’s fantastic book Web Design For ROI:

If your standard answer includes the words “hits” please take a moment to close this book and whack yourself in the head with it. There. Now remember that every time you’re tempted to use that term again. It’s an open secret in the web design community that anyone who uses the word “hits” in reference to their website most likely has no idea what they are talking about. Just don’t tell anyone we told you.”

Hehe. Seriously though analysing your website traffic is a vital part of running your online business. It can take a bit to get a handle on but is well worth doing. Here are some resources to get you started:

Web Analytics Demystified – by Eric Peterson
Google Analytics – probably the best free web analytics program around.
Measuring Your Web Site – great forum threads from Cre8asite.
Hurol Inan – web analytics guru.
Web Design For ROI – get the book.

The State of Online Retailing in Australia

ZDNet Australia’s Jude Willis has written a great post Why eBay tried to screw Aussie users. Apart from it’s discussion on the failed eBay PayPal debacle it has some great insight into the lack of an online shopping industry in Australia.

Some interesting points:

“According to Jenny Wilson, lead technology partner for Deloitte Australia, consumer confidence with online transactions has been scaring even the major, trusted brands away moving beyond bricks & mortar.”

“Predominantly, Australian retail chains use their websites to spellcheck their catalogues and offer cryptic advice as to how to locate your nearest store. Any online shopping is restricted to baffling lines of merchandise that barely represents their total product range.”

It goes on to quote Jenny Wilson who states that online retail in Australia is two or three years behind other countries.

Apart from the lack of consumer confidence I’d suggest that the inherently small size of the Australian market has a lot to do with the lack of online retailers in Australia. And with the Aussie dollar almost on a par with the US that leaves us doing our online shopping overseas. Which is a shame, cause I know I’d do a lot more locally if I was able to.

How about you?

To Captcha Or Not To Captcha

Like many businesses we have online forms on our website to make it easy for prospects to get in touch with us. Unfortunately like many businesses this means we also get a lot of spam. Did I say a lot? I mean a ton. It’s frustrating and takes time to be cleared out of the in-box each day. So much so that my husband and I have discussed adding a captcha option to our forms.

If you’ve not heard of captcha before I’m sure you’ll remember a time you’ve filled out a form online and had to enter some funny looking characters before you could submit it. I also suspect you had to fill it out a few times because they never seem to be accepted first go. Now I don’t know about you but this frustrates the heck out of me – I just want to submit a form – why are you making it so difficult?

So I suspect you know what we decided. Not to captcha. Its a fantastic idea, and definitely has some uses, but why should we make our prospective clients lives that much harder to make our lives easier? It just doesn’t make (business) sense.

Cut Costs with Your Website

A website doesn’t just have to earn you money it can help you save money too. It seems most people focus on getting a website to help them increase sales and money however with a little thought and planning websites can also help you make significant savings.

Reduce Phone and Reception Costs

Reducing the time your staff spend on the phone helping customers is a sure fire way to reduce expenses. Here are some of the ways you can help reduce this telephone time.

List Basic Information on Your Website

You can vastly reduce the time your employees are on the phone answering common questions by including that information on your website. Basic information such as store locations – including maps, opening hours, addresses and telephone numbers are a must.

Answer Common Questions with a FAQ

Another great tip is to create what is known online as a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page where you can provide answers to common questions your customers ask you. You can then encourage customers to visit your website for answers to these common questions. Promote this in your marketing literature, advertising material, recorded messages and by reception staff. Of course you need to emphasis that if they can’t find what they are looking for they are welcome to call you – we’re not trying to discourage contact just reduce it where we can. I’ve found that customers love this sort of information – don’t forget it saves them time and hassle as much as it saves you!

List Stock Availability Online

Don’t just display descriptive information about your stock on your website – list it’s availability as well. Even down to what location has what quantities. As well as reducing the time your staff spend on the phone looking this up you are making your customer’s lives much easier. There’s nothing worse than a customer travelling all the way to a store only to find out that the item they want is out of stock.

Include Your Prices On Your Website

This one is a pet hate of mine. If you are going to the trouble of listing all your products on your website why not include the prices? One large store chain once told me it was so their competitors couldn’t see their prices. Great – so they’re prepared to inconvenience a customer so their competitors can’t see their prices. Although those competitors could always call or visit a shop, 😉 I really don’t get this one – the beauty of the internet is you are not limited by space – show as much information as possible. It will make your prospective customer’s life much easier and help you get the sale.

Include Detailed Product Information

My husband and I are currently shopping for baby furniture and it really frustrates me if I cannot get all the product specifications from a company’s website. It would make my life so much easier and save the company from having to look up the information each time I call. I suspect I am not the only one calling so multiply my questions by hundreds if not thousands and that’s a lot of time you could save.

The sort of detailed product information I would like to see includes:

  • Detailed photographs – including front, side and rear views. It’s also vital that your photos are of high quality and can be zoomed in for a closer view.
  • List colour options and include photographs of the product in the different colours it comes in.
  • Item dimensions – height, width, length, weight and whatever else is relevant to the product.
  • Instruction manual.
  • Product reviews.

This is basic information that prospective customers need to make up their minds, so have it all there for them.

Reduce Printing and Mail Costs

Every business knows that printing and mail form a large part of your expenses. However if you use your website smartly you can reduce these costs significantly.

Online Forms and Documents

Where at all possible encourage your customers to use your website to download the information and/or forms they are after. This is often extremely convenient for them and as a bonus they are using their own printer, paper and ink not yours and you save on postage. You can do this for a range of printed materials including forms, manuals, product brochure, sales catalogs and so on.

Use Online and Email Newsletters

If you have been mailing out newsletters to keep in touch with your customers it’s time to stop. The same newsletter can be included on your website or sent out via email, or both, for a fraction of the cost. You can also set up your website to enable prospective customers to sign up online.

Use Your Website to Promote Sales and Specials

Rather than post out brochures and catalogs promoting sales encourage your customers to visit your website on a regular basis to check for any promotions or sales you have. Of course you can include an online, electronic brochure for them to download. You’ll also find that customers often forward the catalog onto their friends who they think would be interested in your products and services – giving you more ways to reach new prospective customers – for no additional expense to you.

Reduce Support Costs

Another great way to cut your expenses is by using your website and email to provide support services.

Provide Support Information on Your Website

I remember I lost the manual to our clothes dryer a few years ago and instead of having to call the company, get put on hold, request one be sent out, wait for it to arrive, yada, yada, yada I simply went to their website and downloaded a copy. So easy. Easy for me and easy for the company – they didn’t have to take my call, source the manual and then post it out to me.

There is a wide range of support documentation you could include on your website:

  • Instruction Manuals
  • Troubleshooting Guides
  • Software Drivers
  • Returns & Claims Forms

Provide Support Via Email

Email is a convenient, easy and efficient way of providing support to your customers. It can also help you cut expenses by:

  • Reducing staff costs – one staff member can easily handle a number of enquiries at the same time.
  • It reduces your phone bill, especially if you offer 1800 numbers.
  • It increases customer satisfaction and loyalty – they get fast responses and resolution of their problems.
  • Answers can be stored in a database so common questions don’t have to be re-answered from scratch each time you receive them.

These are just some of the ways your business can reduce it’s expenses by utilising your website and email. And I’ve not even touched on online marketing and promotion.

Some of these systems will take some time and effort to set-up but once they’re in place they can be used over and over and over again saving you money and providing satisfaction to your clients. That sounds like win, win to me.

The Employable Web Designer by Andy Rutledge

I hear many hopeful web designers explain that if they had better tools they’d be able to create better work. Andy Rutledge’s great article The Employable Web Designer debunks this and provides a great list of skills one really requires if they want to succeed in website design.

Note also that nowhere in this list do the words Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, or Fireworks appear. As I and others have observed plenty of times before, tools do not make a designer. Anyone can learn to use Fireworks or Dreamweaver in an hour or less, but nobody can be a competent Web designer unless they possess a foundation in the things listed above. Choose your own tools and learn to use them, but don’t let the tools define your abilities; tools won’t create a place for you in the profession.

If you’re wanting to become a web designer it’s a must read. In fact if you’re wanting to hire a web designer it’s also a good read. Web design requires a broad range of skills, that if the designer doesn’t possess reduces your chances of a successful website.

Measuring the Success of Your Website

I was talking to a potential client the other day. Her website was ranking well in the search engines and she could not work out why she was not getting the number of enquiries she expected with the rankings she had. My first question to her was how was she analysing the success of her website. Her answer, was she wasn’t apart from checking her search rankings.

Without delving into her site and reviewing what is going on sadly she will never know what is working and what is not. And more importantly what steps she could take to improve the overall performance of her website.

Defining Website Success

The first step in measuring your website success is to determine how you define that success. Generally this should be based on the goals you set when you first started planning the site. This is one of the first and most important steps when building your website. What do you want your website to do for your business? Is your goal to sell online, collect leads, inform people or to promote your brand? You may have more than one goal for your site. These goals could include:

  • Selling online?
  • Collecting targeted leads?
  • Providing information about your products and services?
  • Branding yourself?
  • Providing customer support?
  • Building a community?
  • Receiving advertising revenue?
  • Reducing printing and mail out costs?

Once you have defined these goals you can then put measures in place to evaluate how successfully they are being achieved. For example if a goal of your website is to reduce print and mail out costs in your business you can review how many people are downloading material from your website and compare it to how many mail outs you were sending out before you had it on your site. You can also compare your printing and mail costs from before and after the material was offered on your site. These results will help you to measure the success of your goal to reduce printing and mail out costs.

Tools to Measure Your Success

The goals you set for your site will help determine the best methods of measuring your success. As a starting point the following tools can help you analyse your website traffic and make adjustments to improve on your success.

Checking Your Search Engine Rankings

Many people will deem their website a success if they have high search engine rankings, as did my prospective client above. Unfortunately this alone is not a good measurement – all the number one rankings in the world mean nothing if they don’t convert into sales, leads or other website activity. Having said that a good presence in the search engines is a vital piece of the website success puzzle and a good start to your online success.

You can monitor your search engine rankings manually by typing your main keyword phrases directly into the search engines. Alternatively there are a number of automated rankings checkers. Here’s a list of some of the more popular:

Free Solutions

Paid Solutions

Please note that automated rankings checkers are against the terms of some search engines – so be sure to check that what you are doing is ok before going ahead.

As I said above having high search engine rankings is no guarantee of success however it’s a start. When you combine this with analysing your website traffic (see Web Analytics below) you will have a good idea which keywords are performing and which need to be re-evaluated.

Web Analytics

One of the great bonuses of having a website is there are many ways for you to measure and track the visitors to your site. You are able to find out many things including:

  • How many people visit your website.
  • How many pages of your site they look at.
  • How long they are on your website.
  • The most popular/least popular page of your website.
  • Where your visitors come from eg search engine, another website, etc.
  • What your most popular keyword phrases are and which need improving.
  • What country/state/location your visitors come from.
  • What web browser they use.
  • What operating system they are on.
  • And so on.

This data can then be used to help you gauge the success of your website and pinpoint what areas of your site need improving.

Free Solutions

Paid Solutions

Link Analysis

Links to your website can provide you a number of benefits:

  • If you have links on topical, relevant websites they can sent highly targeted traffic to your website.
  • They can help boost your search engine rankings. Many search engines use the number of relevant links to your website as a measure of the importance of your website. The more relevant links your website has the higher your site will rank in the search engines.

Building links to your website can be a time consuming task but one that is definitely worth doing. The following tools can help you monitor the links to your website:

The Search Engine’s Webmaster Tools

Both Google and Yahoo! offer a set of webmaster tools that can help you evaluate the performance of your website.

Google Webmaster Tools

Google’s Webmaster Tools can help you monitor and track a variety of performance indicators in the one spot. They include:

  • How often your website is crawled by their spider and what, if any, errors are found.
  • How many, and what pages, are in their search index.
  • How many links there are to your website.
  • The top 20 search queries in which your site appeared.
  • The top clicked queries.

Google Webmaster Tools is quite advanced but it’s a great way to see how their search engine views your website. And let’s face it, success in Google is pretty vital to most websites.

Yahoo! Site Explorer

Like Google’s Webmaster Tools, Yahoo!’s Site Explorer helps you monitor and track the performance of your site in Yahoo! Features include:

  • All the pages that are indexed by Yahoo!
  • How many links they see to your site.
  • The last time the Yahoo! spider crawled your website.

Yahoo! is not as popular as Google however using both sets of tools to monitor your site will give you a clearer picture of how the search engines view your website.

Putting It All Together

All these tools on their own don’t mean a lot, it’s when you put them together and analyse the results that you start to reap the real rewards. Here are just some of the ways you can measure the success of your website using the tools above:

  • You can see where your visitors are coming from and use that data to make sure the content they see is targeted towards them.
  • You can see how many people are visiting your website and the number of visitors that convert into customers – giving you a conversion rate.
  • You can work out which keywords best convert visitors into customers and work on improving your rankings for those words to increase traffic and hence conversions.
  • You can see which pages are your least successful – for example those that have a high rate of people leaving – and then make changes to improve that figure. You can then track and measure each change to work out what works and what doesn’t.
  • You can measure response rates to online campaigns, such as placing an offer on another site or in a newsletter.
  • You can record how many people are downloading documents and compare it to the number you are posting out to see how much you are saving in postage over time.
  • You can create 2 different ads and monitor the response rates to both – this type of A/B Testing is easy to set-up and monitor online.

These are just a few of the ways you can measure the success of your website. Without this data you are running your website in the dark and most likely leaving dollars on the table in the process. Start implementing the above and make adjustments to your website according to what you see and watch your online success increase dramatically.

Managing Your Online Reputation

At some stage it is likely you will come across a bad review of your website somewhere online. I say likely as the proliferation of review websites has become big business.

So what do you do if a bad review happens to you? Firstly, don’t panic. For all the positive ways the internet allows you to promote your business it also allows people to tell others about their experiences with your business – both good and bad. This doesn’t have to be bad. Remember you can’t please 100% of the people 100% of the time and a business that just has glowing reviews might make a prospective customer wary. However the way you handle those bad reviews will say a lot about you and your business.

So what to do?

To start most sites have a feature that allows management to respond to a review. Take advantage of this by responding to all the relevant reviews. Address the issues raised and make sure your replies are courteous and well thought out. Believe it or not I’ve seen responses where the management bags the customer which only makes them look worse.

You may also want to encourage happy customers to leave positive reviews for you. Make it easy for them by having a computer set-up where they can review you quickly and easily. It might also be worth offering them something in return – obviously letting them know that what they write is up to them.

A bad review won’t be the end of you as long as you take the initiative to attract positive reviews as well. I don’t believe this type of services is going away so it’s better you address it head on rather than just hope they disappear over time.