Make Sure Your TAS Website Is Ready for Search Engines
Having Great Content on Your Website Means Nothing If No One Can Find It
By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD
A few months ago we looked at SEO (search engine optimization) for telephone answering service websites. In that short column, we touched on the essential SEO elements: page or post title, description, and keyword or keyword phrase.
These are the three critical SEO elements. Start with those as the most important, but don’t stop there. Here are some key supporting SEO considerations:
Headings: For SEO purposes, a well-written page or post will use subheadings every couple hundred words. This helps people who scan. This is important since most visitors will scan your content and not read it word for word. Make your headings bold and add heading tags, such as H2 or H3. (Use an H1 tag only once, and that’s for the title of your page or post.)
Images: Every page or post should have an engaging graphic or photo that relates to the content. Give the image a name that reflects it, such as, professional phone answering. Don’t use image1 or Dx23ga234k. Then add relevant SEO alt text to the image.
Link Strategy: For SEO purposes, it’s a good practice to link every post to another post. And have an existing post link to the new content. Also, many SEO gurus now recommend one outbound link per post to a high-authority site, that is, one that gets a lot of traffic.
Content Length: Every page or post should be at least three hundred words long, but aim for five hundred. Anything shorter than three hundred doesn’t give search engines enough content to analyze, so they’ll skip that page.
Keyword Density: We mentioned that having a keyword or keyword phrase is a critical SEO element for each page or post. Make sure the content includes your keyword phrase without overusing it. According to Yoast SEO, aim to use your keyword phrase in 0.5 to 3 percent of the text. (In a 500-word post this is 3 to 15 times.)
Web address: A final consideration that’s easy to cover is the words in the web address for that page or post. Make sure they reflect the theme of the content and include the keyword phrase. Conclusion: Addressing these SEO elements will help search engines find, appreciate, and promote your site and its content. But remember that the title, description, and keyword phrase are the essential SEO elements. Handle these three items first. Then add the rest.
Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of TAS Trader. Check out his latest book, Sticky Customer Service.
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Build Robust Customer Relationships by Taking a Proactive Approach
By Jill J. Johnson
Today’s sales process appears streamlined and online, but this creates complexities and confusion for consumers who have options. Anticipating potential customer service challenges will help develop a framework for resolving issues in a manner that protects your customer relationship. CRM (customer relationship management) tools also create opportunities for enhanced customer insight and relationship development.
Team Efforts Build Strong Customer Relationships: The most successful salespeople develop strong and lasting relationships with their customers. They focus on solving problems, not just making a transaction. They become an advisor their clients rely on for accurate information and solutions to address their needs. They are responsive and do not leave their clients waiting for answers. With this approach, you can anticipate opportunities and present new ideas to your customers. Strategizing sales relationships throughout the organization provides the best opportunities to gain accurate customer intelligence when selling services.
Maintaining Customer Relationships Require Trust: When working with clients who have a long-standing relationship with your organization, it can become easy to take them for granted. Personal relationships often develop among the various parties on both sides. Frequently this evolves into a high-trust relationship. A glitch in service delivery jeopardizes this relationship. Clients make buying decisions based on trust. No matter what, you must resolve a client problem before it becomes a social media nightmare or results in the loss of a major revenue stream to your company.
Effective Client Relationship Management: Building and managing relationships with prospects and key referral sources require effort. It is more than simply having them on your mailing list or emailing them newsletters or updates. Tap your CRM tools to stay on top of customer follow-up. This requires an investment of time in capturing information. Then you can use its robust capability for data capture and market segmentation.
Final Thoughts: These efforts will help you more effectively manage your client relationships and provide options for efficient and appropriate outreach. Take time to review the effectiveness of your approach to customer relationship management. Don’t take your client relationships for granted. Just like any relationship, they must be nurtured to be preserved and grown. Improving your customer’s experience will build word of mouth about your effectiveness as a true sales professional—rather than just someone who manages transactions.
Jill J. Johnson is the president and founder of Johnson Consulting Services, an accomplished speaker, an award-winning management consultant, and author of the bestselling book Compounding Your Confidence.
Industry News
Intelligent Series Call Log Agent Assessment: Amtelco’s Call Log Agent Assessment can assess answering service operator productivity to improve their performance, improve customer retention rates, eliminate unproductive processes, and address sources of agent frustration. Supervisors can use the assessment to open a pre-built web script provided by Amtelco to assess an agent based on a series of customizable questions. The customizable “Done” button can perform any actions available in IS scripting, such as emailing or faxing to a specified destination, once the assessment is complete. The call log agent assessment can be accessed in the soft agent application along with the Intelligent Series supervisor application.
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Quotes for the Month
“The perfection of a clock is not to go fast, but to be accurate.” -Luc de Clapiers
“Judge each day not by the harvest you reap but by the seeds you plant.” -Robert Louis Stevenson
“Santa’s helpers are subordinate clauses.” -unknown