March 2019 – Creative Assets Inc Blog

Is Your Vacation Rental Blog Ignoring Half Your Customers?

A blog that only caters to part of the clientele for your vacation rental management company is not really doing its job.

If you are a vacation rental management company, you know your business has more than one type of customer. You perform transactions that are both business to customer, B2C, and business to business, B2B. You do one with your Vacation Rental Guests and the other with your Vacation Rental Owners. Just like you, your blog needs to cater to both types of clientele. You wouldn’t let an employee ignore valuable customers. Why let your blog get away with it?

Blogs Generate Sales Leads

A blog attracts valuable attention to your website and to your business. Few things receive organic responses as well as blogs do. When you write regularly and stay on the key topics of your vacation rental business, pretty soon you will have a lot of key words that lead right to you. Search engines will respond, and so will those who are browsing the Internet. The question is, who does your blog cater to, your vacation rental guests, or your vacation rental owners?

Your Vacation Rental Blog Should Target both B2C and B2B Clients

Your blog should cater to both guests and owners. The first thought that might spring into your mind is that attempting to appeal to both clienteles might get your blog ignored by one or the other. If a person is dreaming of a vacation, an explanation of what lock to put on a vacation rental might not have a good appeal. Therein rests the problem that you need to solve. How do you cater to both?

Blog visitors tend to behave in similar patterns. If they find a blog they enjoy, they are likely to read another topic on that same blog site. You want them to stay on your site.

Below is a pair of possible solutions.

Two Options for Building a Vacation Rental Blog Targeting Both Guests and Owners

Creating Two Stand Alone Blogs

While this option is possible, it is not the easy route. To create two separate blogs without downloading WordPress onto your hosting site twice, you will need one of two things, some programming knowledge, or a contractor with programming knowledge. You can see an explanation of how the process is done here. It’s called MultiSite and is available through WordPress plugins. That’s a more complex route and that option is not covered further here in this blog.

A simpler option does exist. It’s one you can do on your own.

Use Categories to Divide the Topics of Your Blog

You can use the category feature to separate the topics on your blog. Categories are a commonly-used and handy feature of WordPress blogs.

On WordPress, if you go to your blog Dashboard, you will see the the option labeled Posts and under it a few options that includes one labeled Categories. If you click on Categories, you will see a form to create new categories for your blog. Create one for Vacation Rental Guests and another for Vacation Rental Owners.

Be sure your Widgets are set up to display Categories. You will find Widgets in the drop down under Appearance in your dashboard.

When you post your blogs, select the appropriate category.

Go back through your previously posted blogs and add check marks for your Guest and Owner categories on each blog.

If a blog applies to both categories, go ahead and check both.

Categories Help Marketing Goals

Following those steps, all by themselves, you will divide all you posts into two main categories. Do so regardless of what other categories you created and regardless of how many additional categories each blog belongs. By putting each blog in either Vacation Rental Guests or Vacation Rental Owners, you’ve accomplished two important things:

Readers will see that you have organized your blog with a category aimed at their specific interest
Search engines will see the words Vacation Rental Guest or Vacation Rental Owner as keywords on every one of your blogs!

Create Links to Your Blog Categories

An added bonus comes with categorization. You can create links that go to your categories. That means you could put a link for your vacation rental guests onto social media, like Facebook. When Facebook fans follow the link, they will arrive at a page that displays only the blogs from your Vacation Rental Guest category. You can use a link to your Vacation Rental Owners category in the same fashion.

With the categories in place and checked off on every one of your blogs, you will have an interest-targeted links that you can use as often as you like. The uses and locations for those links are as broad as your imagination.

A Well-Organized Multi-Purpose Blog

Creating categories on your blog is the easiest way to divide your blog between Guests and Owners. Once you have divided up your posts in that way, you can then share them with your separate clienteles.

Cater to Both Vacation Rental Guests and Vacation Rental Owners

A blog that only caters to part of the clientele for your vacation rental management company is not really doing its job. A vacation rental management company needs to appeal to both owners and guests. By tweaking your blog using categories, you can serve up targeted blogs to both audiences. The change will also inform search engines more precisely what it is that you do and that will make you more discoverable. With your WordPress blog as part of your main website, it will lead the blog traffic right onto your site. Once you have them there and interested, converting them into a customer is only a step away.

How to Answer Vacation Rental Reviews

The power of reviews is monumental for any company that seeks its customers online.

Answering reviews written by vacation rental guests can be hard. Even warm reviews can create dilemmas when responding. The question arises if you even need to answer all those reviews. The answer is yes. Answered reviews demonstrate that a business is connected, listens, and cares. Whether the review is good or bad, you improve your reputation by answering. After writing replies to hundreds of reviews, here’s what I’ve learned.

Answering Angry Vacation Rental Reviews

When a guest has a valid complaint, responding can elicit multiple cringes. Whether it is a cleaning oversight, an unexpected living condition, or a mistake in the booking system, the error is yours. Those can be the hardest to answer. However, when done properly, they might also turn out to be the easiest. Here’s how.

1. Investigate the Problem

Find out who is responsible and why. Call your cleaning company and find out what happened or ask your sales team how the booking error occurred. You can’t fix a problem that has “no source.” Establish how the problem occurred in the first place.

2. Solve the Problem

Solve the problems the customer noted, even if they’ve already left. Have the cleaning manager train the person who made the mistake. If the guest complained about a living condition, such as too much noise, put a note about that condition in the rental description. While such a note won’t make the noise disappear, it will no longer come as a surprise to guests, which will help a great deal. If it is a booking error, perhaps you have another rental that guests can use. In some situations, a refund may be the only solution. Follow your company policy for such situations but do something to resolve the customer upset.

3. Report that the Problem Is Solved

Now that you solved the problem, it’s time to write the response to that bad review. Am I saying you should let that bad review sit while all of the above is going on? Yes. On some sites you only get one shot to answer. Make it count. Resolving problems like the ones above should not take too long. If you find time stretching on, you can do two things; change the way your company operates and take action regardless of the resolution.

Streamline your operations so that, in the future, problems resolve faster.
- It can be done. When a staff writer, I had the company owner’s support in getting the above system in place. It was the owner’s task to ask why the problem happened, but when I asked if it was resolved, the staff answered to the best of their abilities. As soon as I got my answer, I wrote the review response. After a short time, we all got quite good at working together.
When the time stretches too long, it’s time to take action despite not reaching a resolution. Write the response. Note that your business takes the problem seriously. Then state that you are currently looking into it or mention whatever steps you are taking. This is a temporary patch for the hard-to-solve issues. It should not become a habit. If people realize that you offer such as a standard response, it will damage your credibility.

No matter how bad the problem is, when you report that it is solved and how you did it, review readers will be satisfied. Instead of seeing you as a bad company, they will see you as a company that had a problem and then solved it. It will show that you care and that, if they have a problem, you will support them.

Never Respond in Anger

In all the time of answering reviews, through all those hundreds of responses, I only considered a remarkably small number of them be bad apples. Only two, in fact, turned out to be impossible to satisfy. One of those turned out to be a professional “troll.”

A vacation is supposed to be a dreamy time of relaxation and fun. Lots of expectations go with it. When that bubble is burst, upsets occur. If you paid thousands for your vacation rental, the tub should be clean, shouldn’t it? Well, of course it should. Those guests should never receive a response that makes them wrong for their dissatisfaction. It is up to the person answering your reviews to maintain a cool, kind, and understanding demeanor – at all times. That doesn’t mean that person can’t roll their eyes once in a while, but when it comes time to put fingers to keyboard, disparaging thoughts should be cast aside.

Please note: a passive-aggressive response isn’t going to fool anyone.

Fighting a Damaging Review

Once in a while, a guest will defame you in a way that is untruthful and damaging. You do have recourse when that happens. If you can show that the review is dishonest, many sites will take them down. That doesn’t mean they will make it easy for you. You will have to contact the company that published the review and ask for its removal. If you are certain it is false and adamant that it should be taken down, perseverance may bring success. Be prepared, however. Sometimes it is impossible to get them removed.

What to Do When Guests Threaten a Bad Review

When a guest threatens a bad review, it might seem like they have you over a barrel. That is usually not true. You see, if someone says, “Give me a discount or I’ll write a bad review,” that’s extortion. It is an illegal act. One company I worked with would politely point that fact out to the customers, reminding them that they were speaking over a recorded phone line. That dissolved 99% of those threats. Reviews have power and modern customers know it. How you solve that volatile situation is up to you, but you do have options.

Upset Customers Want Acknowledgement

Remember, a person who is upset usually hasn’t had anyone listen to them and tell them they’re right, or at the very least acknowledge them for what they said. A mere “That’s not good,” or “That shouldn’t have happened,” will diffuse a surprising number of those upsets. After you acknowledge them, you may find yourself teaming up with that customer to solve the problem. Defusing problems in that way, right when you receive a complaint, can intercept bad reviews before they happen.

Responding to Good Vacation Rental Reviews

Good reviews require responses just as much as bad ones. When the review is favorable, you have plenty of options. For one, you can just say “Thanks!” Don’t overdo that one, of course. Your responses should be varied and genuine. If the customers compliment the view, agree with them and say that the sunsets on your beach are beautiful. The variations are as plentiful as the types of reviews written. Just answer positively, agreeing with their viewpoint. After all, your vacation rental is probably in a good spot and it should be easy to pull forth positive points to back up their views.

Respond to Reviews Regularly

When I took over writing reviews for one company, they had a deep, unanswered backlog. Some could not be answered because they’d been archived by the host sites. I set a cutoff date and dug in. I answered the oldest ones first and moved forward. Simultaneously, I answered all the new reviews as they came in each day. It took some doing, but I closed the gap until the company had no unanswered reviews.

Zero unanswered reviews is the ideal situation. If you do not have the staff or the time and resources to clean up your backlog, at the very least you should answer all your new reviews. You can usually do so in just ten to twenty minutes each day. The value of well-answered reviews can’t be understated in our current online shopping economy.

Where Are My Vacation Rental Reviews?

The sites where you list your vacation rentals should have reviews for your rentals on them. That’s the case with HomeAway, VRBO, TripAdvisor, and most others. Learn how to login so that you always have access to your reviews. Set up email notifications if you don’t have them already. Each site will work differently but it is worth your time to figure them out.

Evaluate the Value of the Review Site

You will also notice a number of other review sites have collected reviews on you. Not all review sites are created equal. Some have algorithms that label your five star reviews as suspicious and deem your more tainted reviews as valuable. You will have to decide if those sites are worth your time. Not all of them will be.

Answering Vacation Rental Reviews

Answering your vacation rental reviews is vital. An article on learn.g2crowd.com related that reviews influenced 97% of shoppers’ buying decisions. The power of reviews is monumental for any company that seeks its customers online. No matter how good you are, you will receive both good and bad reviews. Responding to them gives you back a measure of control. It delivers a message that you care and allows customers to see that you will fix problems that occurs. How you answer your reviews will paint an image of you to the public. You have the power to make your image a positive one.

Use Your Blog to Stake a Claim on Your Business Territory

Don’t hope your brand will become synonymous with your area. Make it happen.

A blog can help you to stake a claim in the territory where you live or work. The process is easier than you might think.

How to Claim Your Territory Using a Blog

The answer to claiming your territory by using a blog is as simple as repetition of your territory name. You should be writing blogs about what you do, what you offer, and where you operate. Each and every one of them can and should mention your territory. Do you operate throughout your county? Do you define your geography via city limits? Do you consider your entire state your territory? It doesn’t matter how small or how large an area on which you lay claim. What matters is how much you talk about it and how often.

Divide and Conquer Your Work Territory

The size of your territory is irrelevant when it comes to branding yourself as the solution for the people who go there. Let’s use a vacation rental company on the beach as an example. If a company claimed a single beach, such as Clearwater Beach, FL, plenty of options exist for dividing and conquering. Locals at Clearwater Beach consider it to have to parts, North Clearwater Beach and South Clearwater Beach. For a piece of vacation real estate that is not much more than a mile long, that’s pretty specific. It doesn’t end there, however. Clearwater Beach also has a well-defined marina area and famous Pier 60. By writing about each one of those micro-areas, you would still be writing about Clearwater Beach. Take a moment to consider the area you claim as your territory. It surely has divisions and points of interest. Use them. Blog about them and do so often. Each time you do, you will use keywords that focus on your territory even if you’re not trying!

Expand Your Reach Using Your Blog

Including descriptions and features of your territory in your blog is a great idea, but don’t stop there. Plenty of points of interest surround your domain as well. Clearwater Beach is an easy target as an example. The beach region continues north and south with nearly another dozen other named beach cities and parks along the coastal strip. Your territory will undoubtedly have nearby attractions that you can use to your benefit. Write about them. Figure out a way that they have something to do with you. No matter your business, public interest in your area and the areas that surround it will target two groups; those who are there and those that want to be there.

Make Your Name Synonymous with Your Territory

Once your blog reaches a critical volume, it stands a chance of being the go-to blog for your niche in your territory. Don’t hope your brand will become synonymous with your area. Make it happen. It takes dedication and hefty amount of blogging. In my experience, the number to shoot for is about 100 blogs. On the way there, or somewhere just after, you will achieve a real impact. By covering your territory and the surrounding terrain, you will cast a wide net. By blogging about micro-areas, you will create a tighter weave in your net. When people search for your industry, with your territory attached, you will appear in the results. With a well-defined territory, blogs aimed at micro-areas inside your territory, and mentions of regional attractions, you stand a chance of appearing on the first page, organically. Your blog is a beautiful way to define your business. Use it to stake a claim on your business territory!

Cheating Time to Make Dated Blog Posts Evergreen

Modern technology has a very simple answer to the problem of stale blog posts.

Blogging about local events is a great idea to focus attention on your activities. Unfortunately, those blogs go stale shortly after the event ends. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a way to recycle those old posts to bring new value to them again?

Can Dated Blog Posts Ever Be of Value Again?

When you blog about something such as a 4^th of July show, a Mardi Gras parade, or a Christmas event, you have an opportunity to use those posts over and over again. It remains true that they will never really be evergreen, of course. Few people take interest in holiday promotion when holiday is six months away. However, the 4^th of July will be back and so will all the other yearly events. That provides you with an opportunity to breathe value back into those posts.

When to Promote Event-Based Blog Posts

The key to a successful re-sharing of those old blogs relies on timing. You will want to promote them anew about 30 days or so before the event occurs again. The nature of the activity will determine variations in the adjustment of that date. If a Christmas parade happens the first week of December, you might want to break the “Thanksgiving barrier” and promote a bit earlier.

Promote Blog Posts Per the Schedule of Your Industry

Special circumstances will change the dating of your blog revitalization. For example, in the vacation rental industry, a leading time of 3 to 6 months is not a bad idea. That would make a Christmas post in July make sense. Just make sure to headline your re-sharing of the post with an explanation of why they should take notice now. “It’s time to book for December vacations!” With many rentals scheduled a year ahead of time, you could even try it in January. Label that one very well. Folks are a bit tired of Christmas once January gets going. A text-heavy promo might do better than a holiday image. Regardless of the challenges or the industry you work in, the promotion is worth it and you should have a timed promotion plan.

Your calendar won’t mind when you mark events a year in advance.

Use Technology to Help Schedule Blog Post Promotion

Modern technology has a very simple answer to the problem of stale blog posts. Digital calendars and planners serve the purpose fantastically. They’re nothing new, but not everyone uses them. A generation gap certainly applies, with adoption of the tech slower among the “more established” age groups. The revitalization of old blog posts makes digital calendars worth trying, though. A simple entry into a planner, such as Google Calendar, can create alerts that appear in your Gmail or which pop up on your digital device. Plenty of other digital planners and calendars are available that offer similar features. For the die-hard paper calendar users, marking your promotion dates when you buy the year’s calendar works just fine too. You will just have to make that little chiming sound on your own.

Use Social Media to Revitalize Those Old Blog Posts

Share your old blogs on all the relevant platforms such Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, and so on. You should see a spike in views of that blog. Use the text space provided on the social media platform to explain why the blog is currently relevant. When you need to share them far ahead of the event date, explain to your followers why the should take heed. When the date is within 30 days, you won’t have to work so hard. Those old posts will get your followers reading your blog again. If the event has changed calendar dates, post the new dates.

Statistics demonstrate that once visitors arrive on a blog, they will often move on to read further posts inside the same blog.

Make Dated Blog Posts Serve You Again

If your blog is part of the main site for your business, and it should be, you will generate new interest not just in your blog but in your business. That’s the reason you have a blog on your site in the first place! Use those old, dated blog posts all over again when the time is right. You will take a previously wasted resource and breathe value into it all over again.

Blogging Creates a Bigger Footprint

A blog is a repeated message that leads to your website.

Website search engines are looking for you. Help them find you. One of the best ways to do that is a blog.

Websites Can Get Lost in the Woods

Imagine being lost in a forest while a search plane flies over. The most likely scenario is that the plane doesn’t see you. You decide to take action. You tear off a piece of your yellow blanket and tie it to a tree top. When the plane flies over again, your chances are improved, but not by very much. Left alone in the woods another night, you come up with a new, better plan. The next time the plane flies over, fifty trees have yellow strips of cloth flying in their upper branches. The search parties find you.

Communicate in Volume

When you publish your website, you’ve put out a single ribbon in a tree. Even with a five page website, you still only have five ribbons. Better, surely, but that’s just not enough. You want that rescue plane to see a swath of color. You want them to know, without a doubt, that you are there. A blog serves that purpose. It is a repeated message that leads to your website.

Blogs Present a Beautiful Opportunity to Reach New People

The more blogs you post, the more messages you put out there. Those blogs will each cover a different topic or, at the very least, a different nuance of a topic. With each post, you increase your chances of being found. With every blog, you create a new category of interest. Someone out there will be looking for just that thing. With lots of blogs, you will hit lots of interests for lots of people.

Central Theme Keywords

I once watched a gardening segment on the news where a woman described that you should plant flowers with the same colors in groups. That way, instead of one lone flower struggling to create an impression, you would have a whole set of them, creating a swath of color that you couldn’t miss. The same is true of using the same key words repeatedly in your blog. That will create a footprint for visitors and search engines. It will establish you as the expert on that subject. It will tell search engines how to categorize you.

Peripheral Topic Keywords

The guideline for repeating keywords has a flipside. Alongside your main keywords, use one or two others that are new and specific to each blog. That way you reach into one new niche after another to draw fresh visitors. With your central theme intact, you will consistently spread you influence.

Establish Yourself as the Authority

Another fantastic result of blogging is that you establish yourself as a subject-matter expert. Who knows more about your product or service than you do? Show off your knowledge. Introduce new technology. Provide solutions. Answer questions. Before long, people will see you as an expert in your industry. That is a position you want to be in. Authority translates into sales of your product or service.

Use Blogging to Reach Your Potential Clients

Blogging is a simple means of telling the world more about yourself or your business. It helps to brand you. It also creates repeated communications that will increase your chances of being seen. Use those posts to establish your brand with search engines and the general public. A volume of quality information on a subject will place you as an expert and inspire customer trust. Blogs do all of those things. They offer a solution that not everyone knows is there. Take advantage of what blogs can do and let searchers find you!

Branding Delivers Volumes in the Blink of an Eye

Take the golden opportunity to tell them what to think about you.

Branding means creating a concept, through images and words, that represents your company. The ideal effect of branding is to make people think about you and what you represent the moment they see your brand.

Branding Is an Old Idea That Still Holds True

Images work very well for branding. A name in front of a shape or photograph is popular. Another very successful method is to associate your company name with a particular font. The image then serves to represent your company. Much like a mark burned into the hide of an animal, a branding symbol represents who you are.

Encapsulate Your Image in the Customer Mind

The task of branding is to encapsulate all you do and all you represent into a single thought that your branding image stimulates in the mind. It’s a marvelous idea. After your brand is established, your promotional work becomes much easier.

Brand Images Contain Lots of Information

Creating a brand takes more than an image. The image does, indeed, speak for you, but first you must speak for yourself. You must tell people who you are. You must present your image to the world alongside of the essential data that tells people what to expect from you. You have to educate the public regarding what your brand means. Only then can that image remind them who you are.

In truth, a brand is more than just an image. It is who you are.

Tell the People Who You Are

Is your company dynamic? Is it helpful and caring? Does your product bring happiness? Does it solve a problem? Those thoughts will rise in the minds of your customer –or at least you hope they will. To achieve that end, you must first lay a foundation. That foundation is laid in words. You must first tell people who you are.

Get Your Brand Out There

When operating online, the creation of a brand may require a bit of work. Lots of media outlets flow onto our screens. Will your branding occur in banner ads or will you display it in social media posts? Lots of possibilities exist. That brings your primary tool to the fore. What about your website?

Your Website Is Your Brand Headquarters

No place is more important to establish your brand than your website. Once you become interesting enough for people to seek out who you are, you must answer the prime question. Who are you?! Visitors expect you to tell them.

Golden Opportunity of Branding

The writing on your website will answer the questions visitors have. In the simplest, most powerful words possible, you will tell them who you are, what you do, and what they should think about you. Yes, before they make up their mind, take the golden opportunity to tell them what to think about you. Now that’s branding.

The Art of Branding

A brand is a concept packed into a single location. That concept can be as large as you desire it to be. Concepts have the beautiful ability to convey volumes of information in the blink of an eye. Make use of that ability. Pack into your brand all you want your public to know about you and feel about you. With a successful branding campaign, what you communicate will stick in the minds of the people. Think of branding as an art. Create your masterpiece and then present it to the world. The more artful your endeavors, the more valuable your brand promotion will be.

What Is the Most Interesting Thing About You?

No law firm would ever use cat videos to attract customers (I think).

A website that is interesting gets a lot of hits. For the entrepreneur, that interest can translate into money.

A Hundred Million Views

If you remember back to grade school, you might recall that being too interesting resulted in a time out. In that situation, the culprit drew attention away from teaching, which wasn’t ideal. When it comes to the Internet, the picture is vastly different. Imagine your grade school classroom again but this time filled with a hundred million students. Your raised hand would mean nothing. However, if you stood on your desk and did a silly dance, well then, then you’d have something.

Attracting Attention on the Internet

With the classroom image above, you perhaps imagined a host of classmates turning your way as you danced. You could, if your dance was crazy enough, even attract the attention of your teacher, Mrs. Googlestein. The example demonstrates rather well the value of being interesting on the Internet. The more interesting you are, the more of your classmates you will attract.

What Is Interesting About Your Business?

If you are using the Internet to showcase your business, –and who isn’t –you will probably not be able to use too many antics to attract attention. No law firm would ever use cat videos to attract customers (I think). What remains to you are the features of your business type. What about your business is the most interesting? What do people need from you? A solution to a problem is very interesting. For the lawyer, getting out from under a lawsuit is pretty attractive bait. Anyone in that situation wants answers and solutions. A good start is to decide what people need from you and how you can solve their problems. That may very well be the most interesting thing about your business.

Dazzle Them with Your Wits

If you can’t be the class clown, then you will have to dazzle them with your wits. Lead with what you do best and how you are going to help them. Even if that help is providing the coolest blender they’ve ever seen, that’s still help.

Lead Visitors Smoothly to a Transaction

A seamless approach would lead visitors from a link that describes what you have to offer to the page that offers it. The introduction would welcome them and then the following text would walk them into your world. Needs and wants are interesting. They keep us hooked. Present the solution; offer something new or a twist that lets them know you’ve got the solution that will satisfy their desire. A smooth flow through your site will lead to a point of transaction, whether it be a sign up, a purchase, or a some other action.

Getting Noticed on the Internet

Being interesting is fun, but it’s also important for business. Shoot for the stars and try to make that viral video that will draw millions of hits. There’s no harm in trying. In the meantime, put what people need upfront, showcase your strengths, and solve visitor problems. Each time you help a visitor, you will gain goodwill and the potential for further visits and word of mouth. Once you turn enough heads, Mrs. Googlestein will notice you too.

The Difficult Simplicity of SEO

The more writing you have on your site, the better it will perform with search engines.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the craft of arranging the data on your webpage so that it appeals to search engines, thus raising your ranking with them. The goal is to appear as close to the top of the first page of search results as possible.

The Technical Side of SEO

SEO has a technical side. It requires using keywords in proper numbers, employing proper text such as headings, bold type, quotations, and italics, and includes behind the scenes data entry, known as meta-data. The depths that people will go to optimize their site varies. Some will go quite far. To complicate matters, the means to achieve good SEO frequently changes and is often debated by experts.

Major Search Engines Want to Deliver Quality

Browsers want their results to be valuable to the public. Companies such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, Silk, Safari, and numerous others constantly evaluate sites to determine their value. They rank websites’ importance and display them in accordance with that rank. That means bad SEO will put you at the back of the line and good SEO will put you at the front. The simple economics of the situation is that good SEO grants the potential to earn more money.

SEO and Metadata

A fair portion of SEO should fall in the hands of a website programmer. That person should craft all the metadata that goes behind the scenes on the site. Before all the user-visible information gets added, the programmer should have set up the site to win. Unfortunately, the metadata can’t carry the entire load. What goes on the visible end of the site matters a great deal.

Bounce Rates Determine Value

Search engines used to rely heavily on metadata, but that led to problems. Unscrupulous websites used metadata to trick browsers and gain visitors that had no need for their services. The major browser companies did not take kindly to the deception. That’s why, nowadays, you hear about the importance of bounce rates. A bounce is when a visitor comes to your site then leaves immediately. Giving poor ratings to sites with high bounce rates is intended to curb false or misleading links and metadata.

Metadata Is Only Part of the SEO Picture

Along with evaluating bounce rates, browsers also downgraded the importance of metadata. Browsers want the value of the site to be high to visitors, not bots or algorithms that read the site. While they still use metadata -or so we hope –they now rely more heavily on the visual side of the site to determine its value.

Browsers Read What You Write

Major browsers use the writing on your site to determine its intended goal and its value. The writing should describe your purpose. It should employ words that people use when searching for what you offer. When a person or a bot finishes reading one of your webpages, no doubt should remain as to its purpose. If not, you lose with both the bot and the person.

The More Writing, the Better the SEO

The more writing you have on your site, the better it will perform with search engines. First, the bots have more to read and so can better determine your true purpose. Second, the more writing you have, the more different ways people can find you. With more writing, you cover more subjects and more potential search words. Simply put, you have a chance to show up more. That’s why it’s a good idea to have plenty of writing one a page, have plenty of pages on your site, and to have a blog.

SEO Is Easier Than It Used To Be

SEO is easier than it used to be because it now relies on writing that’s appealing to the visitor. Instead of complex manipulation of metadata, website owners can extend their reach by presenting visitors with good website content and clear descriptions. Simply by sharing knowledge in a blog helps search engines to define the site and determine its value. The more a website shares, the more likely it is to be shared, and that includes the search engines. That means that nowadays, good writing, and lots of it, is good SEO.

Your Reputation Rests on Your Landing Page

When your target is that specific, what you put on that page becomes all the more important.

Landing pages serve the purpose of greeting visitors after they have clicked a link to a product or service. Plenty of times, a landing page is the home page. When that’s so, the tech of home pages applies. Just as often, however, landing pages often take visitors to the exact product or service of their interest. Those pages are deceptively simple. They present the product and little else. When your target is that specific, what you put on that page becomes all the more important.

Bounces from Landing Pages Ruin Your Reputation

Landing pages need to present exactly what the link to them suggests. A visitor who sees something other than what the link promised is going to leave very quickly. You will get a one or two second visit. That’s called a bounce. When Google, or any other browser, records a high percentage of bounces, they downgrade the value of that website. That page will receive fewer and fewer visits. No one wants that.

Lead Page Visitors toward Your Goal

While pictures serve as an ideal way to assure visitors they’ve arrived at the right place, your writing has to do so also. After the visitor realizes they’re on the page they want to be, they next look for information. That information should be well organized and suited to lead the person forward toward the goal you set up that page to accomplish. That goal might be to render information or to sell something. Either way, the page needs to clearly and easily provide the solution to the visitor. The better it does so, the longer they will stay or the quicker they will buy.

Successful Sales Improve Your Reputation

A swift visit to a page followed by a purchase is most certainly not a bounce. In contrast to bounces, purchases will gain you a reputation with browsers for being valuable to visitors. When you gain that kind of reputation, browsers become more willing to present your site as a valid option to individuals searching the Internet.

Everyone Wins with Good Landing Pages

The language on a landing page should first greet the visitor and then provide solutions. When you do that, your page visitor wins, and that means you win too. Make sure your landing pages are well-written to satisfy customers. You will gain more visits over time and improve your reputation with both visitors and web browser services.

Customer Education Leads to Services Sold

Clients who understand your services convert into sales.

Services need explanations, some more than others. When it is difficult to describe the service, an educational step is necessary. When the service is widely understood, then the details get a front row seat. At any end of that spectrum, and all the points in between, a good service description leads prospective clients through the introductory process toward a purchase.

Clients who understand your services convert into sales.

Describing Complex Services

Describing a complex service to prospective customers is a delicate process. You have to lead them toward understanding at a level that is easy to follow. For some industries, like IT solution providers, that’s not always easy. The running joke of “nobody understands the Cloud” is a perfect example. At the present day level of IT solutions, the cloud is old news. Innovations and new ways to use cloud functions now constitute their primary services. The IT Solutions Industry has a lot of untapped client potential, many of whom are unaware of what’s available.

To create a need for services that people don’t understand or don’t even know exist, companies have to overcome the barrier of understanding. Service descriptions will, of course, describe why the prospective client needs the service. Sometimes solving customer problems is enough. Other times, companies must deliver a measure of education to nudge customers across the line. Service descriptions can do both.

Describing Simple Services

Simple services can still bear some explanation. The problem with a service that “everyone understands” is that of customer assumptions. A service description puts your services into writing, describing exactly what you provide. An accountant who offers tax preparation services might have to have an uncomfortable conversation with a customer arriving with a stack of unsorted financial records. Some explanation of services is always necessary.

Streamline Services with Descriptions

You can streamline services with well-written descriptions. If you offer a variety of services, your descriptions should lay out each with precision. When the visitors to your site are finished reading, they should know exactly what your services are. With succinct service descriptions, your customers are left to simply say, “I want that one.”

Customer Understanding Leads to Sales

When a customer understands your services, they are capable of making decisions. Your service descriptions will put them in that position. While an IT solution provider might have to put forward a bit of writing to educate their clients, it is well worth it. That educated client is afterward ready to choose. The same is true for any other type of service offered. With you as the authority, potential clients are more inclined to choose your services than someone else’s. Well-written service descriptions lead customers a purchasing decision.