• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content

Thats Journal

  • Home
  • About
  • Digital Marketing
    • Affiliate Marketing
    • Branding
    • Content Marketing
    • Email Marketing
    • Marketing
    • Sales and Marketing
    • SEO
  • Social Media
  • Influencers
  • Resources
  • WordPress
    • WordPress Plugins
    • WordPress Themes
  • Sitemap
  • Contact Us
  • Show Search
Hide Search

Evie Harrison

Why It’s Important for Businesses to Get More 5 Star Reviews

Evie Harrison · Nov 11, 2019 · Leave a Comment

Why It's Important for Businesses to Get More 5 Star Reviews

You want to go on a vacation to Kuala Lumpur. You have heard a lot about KL being a great tourist destination, but still know nothing of the best places to stay, eat, etc. A typical person today would rush to Google and look for places that have ‘the best reviews.’ 

If a place has terrible reviews, you will never go there because you want to have a good experience. This is the power of a review, and it matters the most to businesses. 

There is nothing new about reviews; they are a feedback strategy as old as time. Every business owner, shop owner, the restaurant owner has asked this question after a purchase: “how was your experience?”

Star ratings and reviews seem to be taking over the world of reputation management today. With digital media rising to the top, businesses need to get those 5-star reviews from their customers. 

Don’t be the grumpy old shopkeeper who ‘doesn’t care’ what people say. Skew through all ratings and improve. You can ask the client to leave you a review on your Facebook page; there is no harm in that. Let’s see why else it is essential to get 5-star reviews for your business:

Competitive edge

When you work hard and earn every little star rating from your customers, it gives you an edge over your competitors. The five-star rating can also convince new prospects to drop by and shop from your business. 

We are all connected consumers, and we do not want to take chances on inadequate services or products. The smartphones and tablets we own are better guiders of business than they were ever before. Social media apps are explicitly made to guide buyers about the best places to eat, shop, to for a date, etc.

If your competitors have a negative review, they can’t get those customers until they change that and get more 5 star reviews. 

Many businesses don’t know how to deal with negative reviews. There is always one way of open communication- talk to your customers about what went wrong. They will furiously tell you that the packaging was improper, the product was broken, or that you marketed it wrong. Take time and make up them for those mistakes. Maybe they will change their mind and give you more stars, or perhaps they will come back for more shopping. 

Be more customer-centric

An unhappy customer is not afraid to vent his or her opinion on the web. You don’t want to end up in this situation, so the first rule is to improve your customer service. From the salesperson to the payment counter and the doorman, every person of your team should make the purchase a memorable experience. In other words, it should be a 5-star experience. 

Customer-centric brands also come up with promotions, discounts, and special gifts for loyal ones. They also introduce plans to cater to loyal customers and retain the existing lot. This loyal community has more chances of leaving 5-star reviews and bringing in more business to you. 

In this case, reviews become a trust signal for someone new. It is a powerful thing in your favor because someone on the internet cares about your brand and wants new people to try your products or services out. Moreover, you should continually try to innovate and improve as per customer feedback that they leave on these reviews. 

A marketing call to action

If a user on Amazon sees a product with 5 stars, they are immediately impressed. That product has more chances to get sold than its counterpart with 2 stars. This is the power and influence of these star ratings. For businesses, these act like a free marketing stint. The better your rating, the more chances of you locking in more buyers.

People, in general, will click on that comprehensive review first, rather than going for a risk. Businesses can improve their conversion rate, increase spend and highlight bestsellers through reviews. Some businesses also ask the customer to leave a review while they are still inside the store. Some businesses offer a 15 or 10 percent discount if you check-in at their outlet and leave a Facebook review. 

Window of communication

Be it a bad star rating or a full 5-star rating; it puts you in the limelight. You can take the stage and address the customer personally. Some businesses respond through the CEO’s account to give it a more personal touch. But while you are talking to one customer, the world is watching. They are watching how you deal with that person, and they are taking hints.

If you nicely deal with a happy customer, the onlookers will be more impressed. If you deal with negative star reviews politely and professionally, onlookers will be thoroughly impressed. So, up your game and get in the good books of your customers through these star ratings. 

Last word

Retailers, service providers, and all kinds of business owners must be aware of the wide-ranging impact a negative review can have. Even if it is a delayed shipment, the customer can go and post about it on the web. You cannot have the benefit of the assumption that your customers will let these flaws go. 

The best approach is to learn from your negative, 2-star reviews and fix them within a day! Closing these gaps will elevate your service and make every customer happy.

Share this:

  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Telegram (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Skype (Opens in new window)

5 Google Local SEO Challenges and How to Overcome Them

Evie Harrison · Nov 5, 2019 · Leave a Comment

5 Google Local SEO Challenges and How to Overcome Them

Baby Boomers – and even some millennial – might remember the widespread advent of the Yellow Directory Pages. 

Whether you needed to book a reservation at a restaurant or get ahold of a local business dealer, the Yellow Pages would be right there to serve you. 

Fast forward to this day, Google took over their business and started serving as the only authentic and real-time online search engine that operates not only internationally excessively, but also locally with high-end results.

Google as a Local Search Engine 

Used by around 78% of digital and content marketers as a premium marketing tool, Google serves as a high-end public search engine that has facilitated people in their arbitrary queries and searches. 

The magnitude of people using Google for their common queries resulted in improved awareness, and consequently, an unremarkable and highly optimized conversion rate down the funnel. 

Since Google brings almost 94% of click-through rates, it is no doubt one of the most versatile and heavily used tools for bridging the gap in networking and connectivity. When considered locally, Google helps bring about 43% of its traffic to local businesses – and with good reason. Around 50% of people today look for local businesses online through highly optimized keywords on Google – because what good is a service that isn’t readily available, right? 

Given the vast demand of local businesses, local digital marketers still come across potential marketing prejudices because they consider Google as a highly operational international search engine. To facilitate local digital marketers in their quest, we have outlined 5 such local SEO challenges with ways to overcome them below. 

1) Trouble in Optimizing Google My Business Listing Page

If you’re an entrepreneur who either works from home or workplaces, it is entirely understandable why you’re facing problems in optimizing your Business page on Google. While some businessmen do have their locations listed on Google, some are either incorrect with false addresses or multiple without focusing on the primary one. 

See, SEO has equal – and perhaps more – importance for local businesses as compared to global listings, mainly because Google wants to focus on accessible and readily available local stores for helping its users out. If you display loose information on your Business page, you might get reported, which will eventually result in poor ranking on Google and perhaps, permanent removal due to inconsistency as well.

How to Overcome Them?

  • If you operate your business from more than one location, then you should consider forming separate landing pages for each business directory. 
  • Add multiple locations on Google Places, but make sure all of them point to the main URL of your brand website.
  • Once you’ve established a directory listing on Google Places for each of your business locations, try adding relevant details such as images and video content for your customers.
  • Add contact details that are relevant to each business location to facilitate your customers in reaching out to you. Along with your business address, add a functional contact number and an email address for prompt customer support.
  • If your business is backed up by social media, then mention all of your plug-ins so that your customers can reach you on platforms other than email as well.

2) Use Location-Centric Keywords

Most local businesses fail to attract local attention through search engines primarily because they don’t make use of location-centric keywords or optimize them throughout their content. Google showers light on content that’s not only of high-quality but also infused with keywords for helping out local natives in their searches. To challenge corporate industries, your content not only has to be concise and precise but also relevant to location-centric keywords. 

For instance, if you’re operating in New Jersey, people are more likely to make use of long-tail location-centric keywords when looking for a niche-relevant local business store. Suppose you deal in the automotive industry in New Jersey, and make use of ‘automotive dealers’ and ‘automotive industry’ as two of your most searched keywords. Do you think you’ll be able to attract local customers? 

Instead, if you use ‘automotive dealers in New Jersey’ or ‘automotive industry of New Jersey,’ then you’ll be able to overcome this challenge and attract highly targeted customers locally. 

Search long-tail location-specific keywords and use them in your Meta title and description, as well as throughout the content by maintaining a specific keyword density. If you’re adding images in your content, consider adding keywords to their Alt tags so that they pop up in location-centric keyword searches on Google. Well, this is something you can’t do all alone. You have to take help of local SEO experts if you wish to rank higher on SERPS. 

3) Optimize your Website with Location-centric Web Pages

If you’re marketing a multi-faceted business, then shift gears from designing generic pages towards location-centric landing pages as well. Suppose a lead searches your client’s local business on Google, and instead of getting redirected to a location-centric landing page, they get to face the monotonous content on the generic home and service pages. 

  • Optimize the landing web pages with location-centric keywords so that they pop up in relevant searches.
  • Try to lessen your customers’ efforts by introducing specific landing web pages as per the store locations within each vicinity. For instance, if you’re a multi-faceted brand, then dedicate an internal page to a specific location, such as New York or New Jersey, and add the stores with their pinned map locations for better navigation. 
  • Also, add their map locations and embed relevant details such as directions to get there, a contact number and an email address for engaging with you, and images for helping your clients out. 
  • Increase your search visibility by optimizing the title tags to each landing page. Try to be innovative and make use of both short-and-long tail keywords so that you can optimally fill your title tags. Don’t use duplicate keywords in your title tags or Meta description, as this will only cause you to exhaust your keyword directory.

Design a customized page with a ‘contact only’ form so that your customers can send in their queries from directly from your internal page.

4) Get Online Testimonials and Reviews 

As per instinct, we humans tend to believe word of mouth, so it’s pretty unbelievable to say that we won’t do the same while looking for local stores online. Referrals to a local store or sappy, positive feedback to a local business’s services tend to get our adrenaline flowing – and with good reason. We want to trust in brands that people trust blindly because let’s face it – we have been scammed before, and we’re scared of getting scammed again. 

We adore the happiness that we achieve with retail therapy, so why should we consider shopping from a brand that solicits more negative reviews than positive ones or those that are fake and bought?

  • Create a landing web page for soliciting reviews from your customers. Showcase all types of reviews and encourage a rating system for people who want to scan and compare the responses.
  • Hire a marketing agency for handling the email accounts of your loyal customers or subscribers to your newsletters and ad campaigns. Send them personalized ad campaigns via email and ask them to rate your services on your website. 
  • Be responsive to the reviews and learn to take criticism. By responding to queries and acquiring testimonials, you can guarantee a positive fan following in no time.

5) Check your Content through Google Webmaster Tools

Why don’t people make use of Google’s analytical tools when a majority of them are free? If you cannot afford an agency for handling your local rapport online, you can learn how to do it yourself for the time being. It’s better to stay in the fold rather than to ignore your website’s health. 

Google Webmaster Tools allow you to keep track of your website’s overall health so that you can not only update your content according to new algorithms but also take care of any issues debilitating its performance.

  • GWT helps to notify you regarding your website’s loading speed. If your website takes more than 3 seconds to load, you can lose leads to competitors. With the help of Google Spiders crawling through the content of your website, you can learn about any issues that hinder its speed.
  • GWT will also notify you of the errors or glitches in the makeup of your content. For instance, duplicate content or web pages with broken backlinks are penalized by Google as low quality. GWT can help you keep track of your pages so that you update or remove duplicate content before they get flagged for inconsistency or irrelevancy.
  • GWT helps you to identify the demographics of your users for creating location-centric and buyer-specific content.
  • GWT also helps you to improve your schema markup, including changes required for altering your title tags and Meta description as well. 

At times, handling local SEO is more frustrating as compared to SEO spread over on a global and vast timeline. However, if you can manage to bake content with quality, you can surely monitor its SEO with regular backlink upgrades and use of long-tail keywords as well. 

Share this:

  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Telegram (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Skype (Opens in new window)

12 Tips and Benefits to Create a Minimalist Web Design

Evie Harrison · Aug 27, 2019 · Leave a Comment

12 Tips and Benefits to Create a Minimalist Web Design

We are living in an era of minimalism. The concept is infiltrating all aspects of life, from architecture to home decor. Not surprisingly, it’s taking a considerable amount of weight in digital products too.

Current trends 

Research from SimilarWeb states that 58% of site visits in 2018 were from mobile devices. Therefore, the importance of responsive, mobile-first design is naturally increasing. With Google prioritizing mobile-first indexing since July 1, 2019, designers will now need to focus more on creating products with excellent user experience on mobile devices.

The following trends will remain relevant in 2019:

1. Responsive design

2. Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning

3. Minimalism

4. Chatbots

5. Design systems

Well-designed minimalist digital products are on the rise. Developers are aiming at merging aesthetics with usability to create impressive yet proficient websites.

As mobile browsing is firmly overtaking desktop, web designs must become thumb-friendly. Scrolling should be effortless and finding information just as easy. The future is in UI/UX designs that satisfy the customers.

What is minimalism?

Just as the word implies, minimalism means keeping things to a minimal. A minimalist web design strategy simplifies interfaces by reducing elements and content to a bare minimum.

The reason behind this is not only to give a clean visual presentation, but also to enhance communication. Striping away adornment and decoration allows consumers to focus on the key essentials. As KoMarketing pointed out, 86% of visitors who land on the homepage say they want to see information about the brand’s products and services. 

Current approaches are revolving around the ‘less is more’ ideology. However, it’s not new to web design. Google has been implementing it since 1999. Very little has changed on its homepage over the years. With as little distraction as possible from the core content, Google presents only a couple of navigation options. Users can access the rest of Google’s offerings through the grid icon.

Google homepage 1999
Screenshot taken from WayBack Machine Internet Archive
Google homepage 2016
Screenshot taken from WayBack Machine Internet Archive

Trendsetters like Google paved the way for others to follow. Within a decade, minimalism began to dominate the web. And now it’s everywhere, from online publications to e-commerce sites. In fact, one-stop design and hosting services like Weebly and Squarespace propose numerous templates that are all nearly based on a minimalist approach.

What are the benefits of going minimal?

Here are some reasons why minimalism has been gaining a considerable amount of traction over the years.

1. Improves performance

Minimalism is about breaking things down to only the elements that are vital for function. With fewer aspects to upload, performance is better, and loading times are quicker. As of July 9, 2018, Google announced that page speed is a major ranking factor for mobile searches. So yes, speed matters.

According to CrazyEgg, 47% of users expect websites to load in two seconds or less. 40% will abandon if it takes more than 3 seconds, with  79% never return to a site with poor performance.

2. Promotes responsive design

With a simplified user interface, minimalism helps create a design that adapts to screens of all sizes. Many people own multiple mobile devices and prefer consistency. A responsive design helps maintain familiarity with your site on all platforms.

3. Highlights content

According to a survey by HubSpot, 76% of consumers say the most crucial factor in a website’s design is the ease with which they can find what they are looking for. Minimalism brings the user’s attention straight to the content. Information is easier to find and consume. And with everyone absorbed in their busy lifestyles, this is a godsend.

4. Adds more clarity

By eliminating visual clutter, designers can achieve clean-cut aesthetics. It improves usability and navigation. By removing distractions, the viewer’s eye can instantly identify essential elements. Consider how a minimalist design amplifies the CTA by contrasting it with white space.

How a minimalist design amplifies CTA

A sleek website with eye-catching content will make people want to stay and check your website. Psychologist Jerome Bruner pointed out that 80% of people remember what they see. 

5. Creates a memorable experience

According to a thesis at the Missouri University of Science and Technology, it takes 2.6 seconds for the user’s eyes to land on an area of a website that influences their first impression. Researchers noted that the better the first impression, the longer people stayed on the page.

Website sections that drew the most interest along with the amount of time spent on it were as follows:

Ranking of areas of interest according to fixation duration
Source

Key takeaway: All impressions were made within 7 seconds. So make sure all elements listed are spot-on, especially the logo- one of the first things that viewers note about a brand. Therefore it’s crucial to hire experienced logo creation services and web designers for the job. 

6. Raises UX

A functional design helps customers locate what they are searching for. This can be especially beneficial for ecommerce by improving customer experience and boosting loyalty.

7. Tweak your marketing strategy

A better UX and CX will get rave reviews. So make a good impression on your users. 

An organized layout with just enough imagery, contrast, and text will do wonders for your brand image. It’ll carry a level of professionalism that will help establish your brand with authority in your niche.

The defining characteristics for a minimalist website

This topic is expansive enough for an entire blog on its own. However, it’s vital to pinpoint the fundamental elements that go into a minimalist website.

1. Content and features

  • Limit the number of options. 
  • Remove unnecessary items, excess details, and any other distractions.
  • Divide content into small blocks so that information is easier to consume and understand.
  • Prioritize the content.
  • Create a hierarchy by placing important content at the top.
  • Balance all elements to create visual harmony and cohesive design.

2. Typography 

  • Use one or two fonts. 
  • Big, bold fonts are effective for displaying short, dramatic, resounding brand messages.
  • Use typography to communicate hierarchy and create interest.
  • Always make sure that the content is legible.
Typography in web design
Image Source

3. Images

  • Utilize flat rather than skeuomorphic patterns and textures.
  • Carefully choose images that communicate your brand’s voice.
  • Is the logo in the right location?

4. Color and contrast

  • Keep it simple.
  • Use a limited or monochromatic color palette.
  • Implement a unified color palette. According to econsultancy.com, companies can increase brand recognition by 80% using the same color throughout marketing, packaging, and logo design.
  • Colors can add accent to direct a user’s eye to a specific part of the screen.
  • Apply contrasting colors in a monochromatic color scheme to highlight various aspects of the web design.
  • High contrast is a great tool for visual performance. 

5. Negative space

  • Maximize negative space to give the content room to breathe.
  • Elements are more noticeable when there is more negative space surrounding it.
  • Avoid placing multiple focal points on the screen- let consumers focus on one aspect at a time.

It’s a wrap

Along with improving performance, minimalistic websites are highly flexible. The layout is streamlined, making it optimal for speed and usability, both of which are essential for website SEO and earning higher rankings on SERPs.  

A minimalist approach is intended to reduce complexity and enhance user experience. But every website is unique depending upon the demands of the audience. So just because a design technique is popular, it doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily the right one for you. Websites like eBay or Amazon need a detailed interface to support content categories. Understand what web design is suitable for your business.

Share this:

  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Telegram (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Skype (Opens in new window)

Copyright © 2022 Thats Journal