Handle Negative Comments; Design Mistakes; SEO

by Jason Unger, Founder

Insights / Social Media / Handle Negative Comments; Design Mistakes; SEO

It’s Friday, so let’s do a little link roundup with stories and advice that can help your business succeed better online.

Social Media: 7 Ways to Handle a Negative Comment
If your business has a social media presence, at some point you’ll have to deal with negative feedback. How you and your business handle it will go a long way toward either creating a new customer or driving a potential sale away. The following seven tips can help you handle a negative comment swiftly and appropriately, keeping your customers happy and coming back for more.

Quick take: Look at some of the biggest brands who are using social media effectively and do what they do. You can’t ignore legitimate negative feedback; most of the time, the customer is simply venting and you can help them through the issue. Make it obvious and clear that you’re handling it and ensuring they’re being taken care of – this also shows other customers how you deal with a problem – and this is important for retaining customers and generating referrals.

7 Web Design Mistakes Businesses Make
A website that is “done right” is one that reaches your target audience, meets your business goals, and answers your users’ questions, not one that you think ‘looks good’. Poorly designed sites translate into instantaneous loss in revenue from potential clients turning away.

Quick take: This tips range from the actual design of the site to the process of building it to achieving your site’s goals. The biggest takeaway is the importance of focus – you can’t be everything to everyone, and if you tried to be, you’d mean nothing. Spend your time and energy working to deliver value to your target audience and you’ll succeed.

Stop Clicking Here! 7 Superior SEO Alternatives to Generic Links
Over the past year, we’ve seen a strange trend develop in the world of SEO: the rise of the “generic link.” Generic links are bland phrases that avoid using keywords that search engines use to determine the context of what you are linking to. Instead, we should seek out links that enhance context and usability for not only our readers, but search engines as well.

Quick take: This is actually a bigger source of controversy than you’d think. “Click here” is one of the most popular phrases for links online – it’s been used since the early days of the web to instruct someone what to do. That’s not a bad idea, but it doesn’t provide any context outside of the particular sentence/link.

My fundamental rule when it comes to writing for the web is to not overthink it; write naturally and you’ll not only provide excellent content for your audience, you’ll give search engines more information to better understand what your site and links are about.