Google Scores Lowest Ever In Customer Satisfaction Survey

There’s a mystery surrounding the latest customer satisfaction numbers released by ForeSee Results (for the American Customer Satisfaction Index [ACSI]). Published late last night, they indicate the lowest levels of consumer satisfaction with search engines (and portals) since 2003.

The satisfaction scores for social sites are worse.

According to the survey, which ranks sites on a 100 point scale, Google received its worst score (77) since the inception of the survey more than a decade ago. Google’s score last year was 82. This year Bing and Yahoo both received scores of 76, which are lower than in 2012 as well. The category average was 76. AOL fared worst with a 71 score.

Source: ForSee Results/ACSI (2013)   

The explanation offered for the low scores is that “advertising is diminishing the customer experience, especially among search engines.” ForeSee juxtaposes advertising and the customer experience. But this doesn’t entirely make sense in the context of search advertising, unless there’s been a marked decline in the relevance of search ads (or a marked increase in the number of ads on the page).

According to the survey, “22 percent of search engine visitors cited advertisements as what they liked least about the site.”

ForSee results and the ACSI assert that these satisfaction scores are predictive of future consumer behavior and market share. While that may be true for traditional industries and brands, that logic has not played out in the e-business category. Past gains by search engines other than Google have not translated into market share gains. And since there was a decline in the 2013 scores across the board we can similarly expect little or no change in market share resulting from these scores.

Source: ForSee Results/ACSI (2013)   

One of the more interesting findings of the survey concerns search loyalty. Those using sites other than Google as primary search engines saw a decline in 2013. This may well be the most significant search-related finding of the survey:

The number of people who use Google exclusively for search has stayed consistent, while the proportion of exclusive users of other search engines has declined since last year. Search engines not named Google experienced an average drop of 30% in primary users (those who identify the site as their primary search engine). Google dropped only 6%. Still, it seems that consumers are shopping around for search more than they have in the past.

ForeSee found that satisfaction scores for social media sites were even lower than search engines. Indeed the company said, “The category scores dropped a point to 68, putting social media on par with airlines, and rating better than only subscription TV service and ISPs.”

Source: ForSee Results/ACSI (2013)

Google+ had higher satisfaction scores than Twitter and Facebook, which both saw slight gains vs. last year. However Google+ experienced a massive satisfaction decline compared with its 2012 scores. In this category, two satisfaction scores have not translated into usage gains or losses historically. Pinterest saw the biggest gains of the category, improving from a 69 to a 72 in 2013.

Perhaps the source of the thesis that ads are driving down satisfaction scores, ForeSee found that large numbers of users on social media sites simply ignore ads or find them annoying. In the chart below, majorities of survey respondents said they “don’t pay attention” to ads on these sites — the average was 60 percent across the category.

Source: ForSee Results/ACSI (2013)

Among all the social sites in the survey users seemed to notice or pay attention to ads on Google+ most and least on LinkedIn. In addition, 27 percent of Facebook user-respondents said that ads “interfere with my experience” on the site. But because there’s no historical data we can’t evaluate whether the numbers are improving or getting worse.

The big and rather bland takeaway from these e-business satisfactions scores is that site owners and publishers must pay constant attention to user satisfaction and should make ads as relevant and engaging as possible.

The ACSI was created by the University of Michigan but ForSee Results administers the “e-business” component of the index.

Postscript: Below are the ACSI search satisfaction scores essentially since measurement began and for the past five years. There were no scores for Bing until 2010.

Tips To Attract More Readers To Your Blog

Just Before You Get Started

Before you start a blog, you should honestly examine your motives. If you’re going to blog for self-gratification or other self-serving reasons then you will simply inhibit the growth of your blog readership. Also, if your primary motive is making money online, then you need to re-think your purpose. The truth is that people visit blogs because they want to find valuable information that serves their needs. So, if you write self-serving blog posts then you will lose big time. Having said that, let’s now look at powerful ways of growing blog readership.

Promote Your Blog through Social Media  

Social sharing is an easy way to increase the exposure of your blog for online lead generation. Every time you write a post, you should make sure that you embed the link to the latest post in your social media accounts. You can use Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn Groups, and even Twitter to promote links to your latest posts. While social media marketing channels are primarily used for network marketing, they also play a vital role in attracting readers to your blog. Sharing links to your latest posts gives readers an opportunity to read and also share the links with their friends. Eventually, your readership and subscription will grow to match your popularity in social media.

Encourage Readers to Share Blog Posts

It’s not enough for you to create and publish your blog posts regularly. You have to encourage readers and prospects to share your posts and content with others. You should add a call-to-action that prompts your current readers to share links to your blog or blog posts. To facilitate sharing, you should add social sharing buttons that allow readers to sign into their social accounts and share or comment on your article.

Provide Valuable Resources in Your Blog

If you want to attract visitors and convert them into exuberant readers then you should provide FREE useful resources in your blog. There are quite a number of things that you can provide free. You can write and share a free downloadable eBook, a whitepaper, a market report, or a podcast. You can also share links to valuable resources located in partner sites or 3rd party sites. When you share valuable resources, you will give readers a reason to want to join your mailing list and to share the link to your blog with others.

Be Charismatic and Approachable

Since blogging is about attracting people and engaging them, you should learn to be charismatic and approachable. You can easily connect with readers and establish life-long relationships if you are witty, compassionate, and remarkable. When you develop these traits, you will find it easier to leverage your blog as a tool for attraction marketing. Besides that, people will want to associate with you and even recommend your blog to their friends and colleagues.

Use Audio Visuals and Captivating Graphics

You can also increase blog readership by creating and posting content that features rich graphics. As part of online video marketing, you should also post audio visuals that capture the attention of visitors. Naturally, readers are attracted by captivating content. Images are more attractive than plain content. So, instead of writing a plain and boring blog post, create cool info graphics and include them in your posts. This will attract the attention of readers and give them an easy time to digest the information and details of your blog post. 

Create a Series of Great Tutorials

There is no better way of increasing blog readership than creating and publishing a series of blog tutorials. Though you can attract some readers, through your weekly blog posts, you stand a greater chance of doubling blog readership by creating unique and relevant blog tutorials. When you create tutorials, you’ll give readers the impetus to share links to your posts. Unfortunately, many people waste time sharing their lop-sided opinions or writing boring subjects. It’s very important for you to understand that some readers don’t just want a weekly dose of your musings or ratings; they want good solid information that will add value to their lives.

Optimize Your Blog Posts

The majority of customers and prospects use Search Engines to find links to websites and blogs that are relevant to their needs. This underscores the importance of search engine optimization in increasing the visibility and traffic to your blog. If you optimize your blog posts for targeted keywords, then you will rank higher for those keywords than most of your competitors. Besides optimizing your blog for the search engines, you should also optimize them for readers. You can do this by posting unique and relevant information that provides timely solutions that addresses their specific needs.

Write Killer Guest Posts

You have probably heard people say “Content is King”. That’s true. Successful blogs thrive because of good content. Writing killer guest posts for another blog is a sure-fire way of increasing your exposure and maximizing traffic back to your blog. You can write about a real life story of someone who conquered a weakness, or someone who excelled in his or her business, or someone who came up with a great innovation. The other thing that you should know is that a guest post introduces you to a new community of readers. By being a guest blogger in someone’s blog, you will not only add value to the host’s blog, but also build a relationship with existing readers. As you write more posts, your will influence will grow, and ultimately, you will find it easier to attract readers to join your email marketing mailing list. To sum it up, there is no one magic formula to get readers to your blog; it takes time, dedication, and effort to increase blog readership and popularity. You have to be cognizant of the content marketing needs of your readers. It also pays off to optimize your blog posts and to encourage readers to share your content. When you back all these with an inviting personality, you’ll attract more readers and build lifelong relationships with them.

Important Link Removal Fact for Post Penguin 2.0

Penguin 2.0 launched May 22nd, causing many sites to lose vital rankings, visibility, and traffic. This will without a doubt lead to yet another wave of link removal projects, which have been prevalent since Penguin 1.0.

Before diving into your backlink portfolio and attempting a Penguin recovery, here are 5 important link removal facts of which you should be aware.

1)    Matt Cutts recently stated that link removal/disavow needs to be done with a “machete”, not a “scalpel” or “fine toothed comb”.

Cutts is fairly direct and straightforward. When a site is hit by Penguin there’s no sugar-coating it. Anything under suspicion needs to be removed if there’s to be hope of forward progress. His actual statement:

“Hmm. One common issue we see with disavow requests is people going through with a fine-toothed comb when they really need to do something more like a machete on the bad backlinks. For example, often it would help to use the “domain:” operator to disavow all bad backlinks from an entire domain rather than trying to use a scalpel to pick out the individual bad links. That’s one reason why we sometimes see it take a while to clean up those old, not-very-good links.”

Personally I can attest to this. Anyone who has spent time working on link removal, disavow, and reconsideration requests knows that Google’s not going to reward half efforts. There needs to be considerable work done, and a true mending of ways. Even a hint of spam will receive nothing more than a vague “At this time…”

2)    There are no guarantees with Google

The first mantra of every SEO’s life should be ‘There are no guarantees with Google’. Before you launch a project, especially link removal, it’s important to stare this statement in the face. Think about it, understand it, and truly accept it.

We’ve had successful link removal campaigns, and we’ve seen recovery from both manual actions and algorithmic penalties. Given enough time, energy, and resources I have no doubt that virtually all recovery campaigns are possible. But, at the end of the day, there are no guarantees with Google.

3)    Link Removal isn’t a small undertaking

Link removal is an exhausting task. To meet Google’s standards there are basically four steps to any link removal campaign:

A)     Backlink portfolio analysis

Here you’ll be taking a complete analysis of your backlink portfolio using Open Site Explorer, Majestic, or Ahrefs. These can be quite large, potentially with tens of thousands of links or more, and need to be properly categorized.

Again, it’s important to ensure you’re not skimming the worst off the top. You’ll have to dive deep and ensure you’re getting as close to every offender as possible. Specifically:

• Paid links
• Link directories
• Irrelevant links
• Bad link neighborhoods
• Site-wide links on low quality sites
• Spammy blog comments
• Article directories
• Link exchanges
• Etc. etc.

Basically, any link you wouldn’t want Google to take a look at, or you’d have to explain with a conditional statement (that link is actually good because…) get rid of it.

B)      Find contact information

You’ll need a way to contact all these sites in order to request to have the link removed – a very important part of the link removal process. Google will potentially ignore any disavowed links if there’s been no effort to have the link removed.

C)      Outreach

Such a simple word for an exhausting process. Here, you’ll be contacting every site which you wish to have your link removed from. Which typically involves thousands of sites, depending upon the project.

It’s important to note that contacting them all once isn’t enough. You should contact all the sites at least three times, over the course of a month, in order to prove you’ve made every possible effort.

D)     Disavow

You’ll never be able to have every spammy, low quality, irrelevant link removed. There will be sites that are abandoned, sites with no contact information, webmasters that refuse or ask for money, etc. etc.

Once again, make every effort to have the link removed. Once you’ve had as many links as possible removed, go ahead and disavow the rest, including notes as necessary.

E)      Rinse and repeat

The hidden step, you’ll often have to rinse and repeat the whole process depending upon Google’s response. Once again, think machete, not scalpel.

4)    New links are vital

Link building is generally overlooked, or put on pause, during a link removal campaign. And, while it logically it makes sense to focus all of your energy into link removal, it’s actually better and more effective to build quality links in conjunction to link removal.

This is true for a variety of reasons.

First of all, building quality links signals Google that you’ve changed your ways, mended your tune, and changed your song. These newly built, high authority links will be a point of proof that you’re moving in a new, better direction, which is very important when wrangling with Google.

Secondly, these new links will help lessen the blow of your current link removal. You should be removing a large amount of links from your backlink portfolio. And, no matter how careful you are (you shouldn’t be overly cautious) you’ll be removing links that were passing value. Having new links, of higher quality, should ensure a quick recovery from any dip you see as you remove these links.

5)    Link removal is extremely difficult without tools

Tools are absolutely vital to a successful, effective & efficient link removal campaign. Often these projects have hundreds of hours invested into them, and any tool that can help provide an edge is important.

At the bare minimum, you’ll need help from a tool that can run a backlink analysis on your site. Some of the top rated:

• http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ – from Moz (formerly SEOmoz).
• http://www.majesticseo.com/ – Majestic SEO
• https://ahrefs.com/index.php – Ahrefs, a clever play on the html tag
• http://raventools.com/tools/ – Raven tools
• http://www.link-assistant.com/seo-spyglass/ – SEO Spyglass

Going beyond that, there’s tools specifically developed to help ease the pain of link removal. Some of the top rated:

• Remove’em – A very comprehensive tool, also the most expensive. Helps keep track of the project and emails, as well as suspicious link discovery.
• rmoov – Helps identify contact information, create and manage outreach, complete with reminders.
• SEO Gadget – Automatically rates whether the link is ‘safe or not’. Can do 200 at a time, and will help find contact information as well.

No matter which tools you use, make sure you’re documenting your work. Documentation, documentation, documentation! Not only will it keep the project flowing smoothly and efficiently, but Google’s unlikely to revoke manual actions without proof of effort and change.

Here’s a video from Cutts himself which discusses the unnatural link detection warning as well as a few changes Google’s currently working on:

These 5 link building removal facts will hopefully prove useful as webmasters gear up for lengthy link removal projects, especially since the release of Penguin 2.0. I wish everyone the best moving forward and a speedy recovery.

SEO: What Is Local SEO & the Major Facts We Should Know

Google Local Listings can be defined as the business listings in the map that you usually see at the top or at the middle of Google’s first page results. These listings tend to show up when you search for a keyword accompanied by a specific city, e.g. “Shopping Stores California” or “used cars for sale UK”. As a result, these local search results are different from the organic results and sponsored pay per click listings. So if your business has a physical location, you’ve undoubtedly been told that you need local SEO. But for many business owners, local SEO remains covered in mystery, they don’t even know what is meant by “Local SEO”.

So here we will get a detailed idea on Local SEO, for whom it is most necessary and how we should implement that in order to get best result. Let’s have look over that.

#1.What Kind of Business Need Local SEO:

Any Business owners who get some or all of its customers or clients locally should go for local SEO. That could be a local restaurant, retail outlet, doctor, dentist or lawyer, but it could just as easily be a local ad agency. If you have a physical address in a city and expect people to go there, you should be doing local Search Engine Optimization for that location.

#2. How Local SEO is Different from Normal SEO:

Though all of the elements that apply to Normal SEO also impact Local SEO (i.e. on-page factors, links, social, indexing, etc.), local comes with a few unique elements.

The first and probably most important is that for local SEO you need to create and claim a local profile on major Search Engines like Google Places, Bing Local and Yahoo Local especially where major peoples go for search in order to fulfil their needs.

Second most important thing is called a citation. A citation is any place online that uses your company NAP (name, address, phone number) all on the same page, in the same format as your local listing. 

Third one is reviews, Lots and lots of reviews (preferably really good ones. Quantity and quality of reviews left for your business on your Google Places page is one of the most important local ranking factors.

#3. Most Important Facts That Boost Local SEO Ranking:

The three most considerable factors in local listings that influence your Local Listing are the number of citations, the number of reviews (primarily on your Google Places listing, though other places do count), and how positive the reviews are overall. From what I’ve seen, positive reviews will trump citations, so persuading your customers and clients to leave great reviews on your Google local page is the single most important thing you can do.

#4. How Onsite Optimization is Different for Local SEO vs. Nation SEO:

All of the same elements apply, but there are four things you should strongly consider mixing in. One, make sure your name, address and phone number are used on every page of your site, in the same format as your Google local listing (in the footer is an ideal location). Two, use your City and State names in your Title tags, Meta descriptions, and the content on your site (as it fits, don’t just force it in there). Three, include a KML file on your site. Four, make use of Schema local markup to better help search engines identify and show your location.

#5. How to make Local Listing Better:

Here let’s know how to do Local listing.

Ø  Claim Your Profile: Follow as mentioned in #2.

Ø  Upload Pictures: The local sites listing services like to provide their users with pictures of your business. To help ensure that they see some good pictures, upload your own. They don’t have to be professional photos, but they will represent your business so make sure they are decent.

Ø  Control Information across the Internet: A big part of local search optimization and marketing involves obtaining information from other sites. Local listing aggregation services search the internet far and wide to find pictures, reviews and any information they can on your company.

Ø  Ask For Reviews: Let your customers or clients know that they can rate their experience with you on your Google Places profile. Have logos up in your windows or in your office showing the places where people can leave reviews. Include your profile links in your email communications (particularly in follow-up emails after a purchase or visit), direct mail, and anywhere else you can think of to get it in front of customers. Of course, if you want positive reviews, you need to provide a product and/or service that warrant them.

Ø  Multiple Locations Need Multiple Landing Pages: Local sites don’t like a business having more than one local listing, but if the business has two locations, than that’s OK. However, you should ensure that each location links back to a page on your website that is all about that location and what it has to offer. Sending both local listings back to the same page, or homepage, isn’t ideal.