Tips to Improve Online Customer Service

Customers like simplicity in the buying process. So that it’s easy for them to do it, but they also want a robust system of personalized attention to answer their questions. Generate a sense of belonging and security within it by entering your personal and bank details. In short, good customer service.

At the beginning of 2020, when we were all in quarantine due to Covid, the stores had to adapt and offer free shipping options. Just as pick up in store option emerged. Nowaday, “49% of eCommerce leaders in Mexico will continue to offer these contactless payment and delivery methods, as they have improved the face-to-face experience of users.” According to a study conducted by Signifyd and Adobe.

Sometimes customer service is seen as a requirement only when a problem must be solved, but it should be seen as a comprehensive service from the beginning of the first interaction to the end and post-sale service.

According to 37% of buyers, their orders have been affected by errors on a weekly basis. For this reason, the most important challenge of B2B eCommerce is investing in reliable web structures and platforms that offer guarantees with special emphasis on user experience.For this reason, the most important challenge of B2B eCommerce is investing in reliable web structures and platforms that offer guarantees with special emphasis on user experience.

That is where you should start, fixing these errors so that people have a better experience and that these errors do not prevent them from returning to buy.

Suggestions that can be implemented to reduce errors:

  • Having multichannel strategies with the generation of paid and organic contact points, generation of specialized content for each channel and well-designed conversion opportunities for each one.
  • Provide security perception, such as: return of the purchase, payment against delivery and checkout process, which does not require many personal data.
  • Creation of experiences similar to B2C for buyers.
  • Implementation marketplaces.
  • Prevail experience on mobile devices.
  • Reduce the number of external partners, providers can become the cause of significant information leaks, so it is important to review in detail the background of these partners.

Now being aware that it is worth investing in seeking to provide the best customer experience. For online, offer an omnichannel, secure experience that can make communication as clear and similar as possible to a face-to-face one; We can consider WebToq as a platform that is a support to boost your business.

Are You WebToq’ing Yet?

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Key Tips on Website Indexing to Improve Site Performance

Indexing a website is crucial to make a business’ web presence visible to search engines online, as well as becoming visible to its target audience to boost website traffic.conversion tools in digital marketing Indexing will increase website visibility online very quickly.

In this article I will share some useful tips which I have compiled over the years through my experience in research and application development. But before I move on, you need to understand a few terms and how sites index in Google.

Important terms related to indexing

Googlebot:

This is software that Google uses to search the web for new content and pass the results to Google. Once the content is found by Googlebot, it is visible on Google pages. Also known as web spider.

Crawling:

Googlebot moves from site to site searching for new content that is generating the most traffic. This activity is known as crawling.

Indexing:

In SEO (Search Engine Optimization), indexing is the process of including new content or web pages in Google search detected by Googlebot crawling and after testing it for quality.

Tips for indexing

Generation of a Site Map

It is the first and most important step towards successful indexation. A sitemap lists all the pages on a website in XML format.

A crawler derives various about the website from the sitemap such as the size, the important pages, and the location of the new content.

A sitemap helps the crawler to index a new site, a new page or blog within an hour. Whenever a new page is added to your site, it is the sitemap that informs the search engine.

The sitemap also signals Google when to check for new product pages, articles, blog posts, and contents on the website, for instance, every few hours, daily or weekly.

You can get your site indexed fast with an crawl rate. You can use a WordPress plugin called Google XML Sitemaps and other tools like Yoast SEO plugin and Screaming Frog.

Commenting on popular blogs

As per my own experience, posting comments on high traffic blogs from other well-known WordPress websites can index your site quickly on Google search and can boost website conversions.

This should be done to make sure that search engine bots follow the link with the comment and redirect to your blog.

Submission to stat sites

There are websites that maintain data related to domains or the value of the domain. It is a good method of website indexation, but it is cumbersome to submit to multiple stat sites since you need to do it manually.

Google analytics tools provide statistics regarding visitors like the time being spent on your website, the pages viewed, and visitors’ location.

So the best way is to insert the link and anchor text following which the IMT submitter submits the website to “website stats”, for instance, who.is.

Sharing the link in social media and bookmarking

One of the best ways to speed up the indexing process is by adding the link to your social media profile and creating a profile to boost website conversions. For this, you must choose popular social media platforms.

After your website link is included in your social media profiles, the link must be shared with as many people as possible.

When creating social bookmarks, you should choose high traffic sites like LinkedIn, Quora, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, Pocket, and Flipboard.

Acquire external links

Since Google crawls through various pages via HTML links, linking your site with others is essential.

The most common way to do this is to write guest posts or create content frequently for other websites that are relevant to your niche.

For this, you need to seek permission from bloggers where you want to publish your content as a guest author.

Quality articles must be submitted to various article directories. The quality of the contents must meet the highest standards. This will help you to get backlinks and hence boost website conversions.

You should also write search engine optimization articles for the purpose of distribution to other sites.

Use ping services

Ping services inform search engines whenever your website or blog is updated. For this reason, you should take advantage of this service to keep your search criteria current. You can use free websites like Ping-O-Matic because it is easy to use and gives quick results. This particular tool can send alerts to multiple search engines at the same time. You can also use Pingler which has both a free version and a premium version.

WordPress uses a list ping service by default that can be updated easily from your dashboard itself. Just be careful which ones you use since Google frowns on the use of some of them

Do not forget to add Meta descriptions and other vital conversion tools in digital marketing for SEO elements. Otherwise search engines will end up indexing the not so important web pages.

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An interview with WebToq’s CEO

An Interview With Orlando Zayas

As part of my series about the “How To Create A Fantastic Retail Experience That Keeps Bringing Customers Back For More”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Jason Junge, an MIT/Kellogg-educated Business Strategy expert in high-tech that has worked with companies ranging from new startups to Microsoft, to craft and execute successful growth strategies. He is currently CEO of PointerTop, an innovative Remote Sales and Service Software company based in Scottsdale, AZ.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

I’ve always been a tech geek, graduating from MIT with degrees in engineering and MIS, and fell in love with entrepreneurship from my father who was always inventing new technological solutions to business problems. I worked for a consulting company straight out of college and did so to gain the knowledge and experience to eventually launch a business of my own, while I also waited to come up with an idea worthy of its own customers.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘takeaways’ you learned from that?

My biggest mistake with one of my first businesses was reducing our brand name from a two-word descriptive name to a one-word, abstract name since that was the fad, made for easier publishing and signage, and seemed “stickier”. I quickly learned that when it comes to retail, clear and simple messaging always wins the day. Branding is a long-term and expensive exercise, and it helps when your brand name is obvious.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?

My best friend from college has always been there to support me in every project I’ve undertaken in my adult life, no matter how crazy or difficult. Being Greek, he lives and breathes the Socratic method, and keeps me honest along the way. The last time he helped me was when I was having a difficult time coming up with a name and slogan for our flagship product since the concept was so new and broad in its capabilities; we had to educate and market at the same time. So, on his advice I travelled away from the office to get a fresh perspective, isolated ourselves in a hotel conference room, and went through a few hours of brainstorming, refining, and testing until we landed on something we felt thread the needle: CrozTop, Cross-Interactive Websites!

Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?

My favorite author is Dostoevsky, and his The Brothers Karamazov was especially impactful. The author in general, and this book in particular, impressed upon me the importance of the individual and his specific experiences to the meaning of life and society, even business. Every human interaction, including business transactions, is an opportunity to add meaning and value to someone’s life. Great companies are those that design their visions, products, and services with that impact in mind.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

At our company we insist that our product and customer-facing employees be themselves customers of our own products and services to understand the issues, problems, and concerns our customers face, and try to fix them before they even arise. The most remarkable aspect of having your employees as customers is that if and when they leave, they’ve become so comfortable with the company’s products and services and such believers in them that they often hire us afterwards as real customers and wind up becoming evangelizers.

Which tips would you recommend to your colleagues in your industry to help them to thrive and not “burn out”?

The worst form of business anxiety I’ve experienced as an executive is when looking over my shoulder at the competition. Although I do believe it is important to keep the competition in view, especially to stay on top of new industry ideas and concepts, it is more important to focus on the company itself and its customers and the ongoing balance between value delivery, pricing, and sales. Focusing on the competition is a defensive tactic that will drain any executive of energy and motivation, whereas focusing on customer value is an offensive tactic that can inspire.

Ok super. Now let’s jump to the main questions of our interview. The so-called “Retail Apocalypse” has been going on for about a decade. The Pandemic only made things much worse for retailers in general. While many retailers are struggling, some retailers, like Lululemon, Kroger, and Costco are quite profitable. Can you share a few lessons that other retailers can learn from the success of profitable retailers?

Key to retailer success in the long-term is to focus on points of specialization that make the retailer unique enough to its target market to justify higher margins when compared to the discounters or ecommerce. Retailers can use their market knowledge, experience, and expertise to build themed communities and not just stores, supplying expert advice, value-adding bundles, and community forums and events, for example. Home Depot, Lululemon, and REI are great examples of retailers that have focused on building experiential stores that cater to an industry where customers go to have their problems solved, rather than to just “shop”.

Amazon is going to exert pressure on all of retail for the foreseeable future. New Direct-To-Consumercompanies based in China are emerging that offer prices that are much cheaper than US and European brands. What would you advise retail companies and eCommerce companies, for them to be successful in the face of such strong competition?

US-based retailers have several advantages they can use to stand out in the marketplace, especially against foreign Direct-to-Consumer companies and Amazon. High among their advantages are their brick-and-mortar locations or close proximity to their customers. Retailers can merge their customer-facing operations between their physical presence and their web presence to create a coordinated and superior customer service experience that together is more convenient and impactful for the customer (for example, by making the return process more convenient and more prone to non-return resolutions). D2C companies will compete on price, and Amazon will compete with automation; national retailers must then deliver superior service quality, specialization, and/or customer experiences as an alternative.

What are the most common mistakes you have seen CEOs & founders make when they start a retail business? What can be done to avoid those errors?

The biggest mistake I see retail companies make is to expand too rapidly, whether a company’s product and service selection, its target market, or its footprint, only to see quality and margins suffer. Key to avoiding this mistake is for a CEO to develop a detailed business plan, maintain it, and diligently follow its brand messaging and ROI requirements when considering new expansions. If a product, service, or new location does not fit within the brand or is not generating the required returns, then shut them down. Knowing when to say “NO”, and saying it often, is a critical skill for a CEO.

This might be intuitive, but I think it’s helpful to specifically articulate it. In your words, can you share a few reasons why great customer service and a great customer experience is essential for success in business in general and for retail in particular?

To compete in the business world, and especially in retail, a brand must be “Top-of-Mind” for consumers to visit them when a need arises. A brand must either have a strong emotional attachment (or be a recent presence) to a consumer for it to surface above the noise, and that emotional attachment is usually derived from a unique and/or exceptional service experience. Advertising often and across several channels will help with the recency effect, but much more impactful and lasting would be to develop a strong bond between the customer and the brand via powerful customer experiences.

We have all had times either in a store, or online, when we’ve had a very poor experience as a customer or user. If the importance of a good customer experience is so intuitive, and apparent, where is the disconnect? How is it that so many companies do not make this a priority?

Customer Service delivery as a corporate strategy cuts across multiple company departments and competencies, making it difficult to plan, coordinate, and execute. Good customer service requires proper planning and positioning with the product or service being offered (Product Engineering and Marketing); proper staff hiring and training (HR); proper channel development (IT); and proper enforcement and follow-up (Customer-Facing Operations). Most large corporations are calcified by their organizational silos and have difficulties implementing cross-organizational strategies, so their customer service wounds up being delivered as an afterthought and in a disorganized manner. On the other hand, smaller companies can seldom find the time or managerial competency to properly bake their customer service strategies. Excellent, well-planned, and well-executed Customer Service is rare and a true path to differentiation.

Can you share with us a story from your experience about a customer who was “Wowed” by the experience you provided?

We had an elderly customer acquire a warranty service at the store but forgot to sign the warranty contract. He was unwilling to return to the store to sign the contract and did not know how to use email. We were able to service the customer at his home via our website using the CrozTop eSignature tool and have him sign the contract using his cellphone. He was grateful and surprised by how quickly and easily we were able to assist him.

Did that Wow! experience have any long term ripple effects? Can you share the story?

Our company quickly learned that we had to be able to service all types of customers by using and integrating our different channels. Some customers prefer to do things by themselves and be left alone, whereas others prefer handholding. Either way we learned that we needed to use technology to help every type of customer wherever they came in contact with us. Today’s technology allows for greater customer convenience and customers will shop around until they find what they want.

A fantastic retail experience isn’t just one specific thing. It can be a composite of many different subtle elements fused together. Can you help us break down and identify the different ingredients that come together to create a “fantastic retail experience”?

A ”fantastic” retail experience doesn’t happen by accident but has to be designed, planned, and executed, and it must start with the brand vision and message. Every aspect of the retail experience must reinforce the brand, starting with the advertising mix and content; the aesthetic theme of the stores; the service levels and availability; the product and service offerings; and post-purchase follow-through. All aspects must match and reinforce each other and the brand to avoid customer confusion and to get to top-of-mind.

Ok super. Here is the main question of our interview. Based on your experience and success, what are the five most important things one should know in order to create a fantastic retail experience that keeps bringing customers back for more? Please share a story or an example for each.

If you want to be able to succeed in retail, first order of business would be to clearly define your brand vision and message. Confused customers are lost customers, so your aesthetics, products, operations, and service levels must all match and reinforce each other.

Second is to define your target customer demographic and ideal persona to ensure that your marketing is focused and effective.

The third order of business is understanding that the process is the result. To get consistent revenues, margins, growth, and satisfaction, you must have consistent, well-designed, and well-understood processes in place for everyone to follow globally. Metrics and statistics are great in-so far as they are tools for adjusting and fine-tuning company processes but should not be meant to be end-consumables in-and-of themselves.

The fourth order of business follows from the third which is that although an executive’s focus should be on processes, a manager’s focus should be on his employees.

Fifth is that the employee’s focus should be on the customer. A manager needs to understand his customers to execute the proper employee hiring, training, and compensation plans to deliver the most value to them and the largest margin to the company, but the employees are the vehicles to meeting those goals and thus must be his focus. Well-hired, well-trained, well-compensated employees focused on their customers will yield fantastic results. Common business knowledge states that for the company the customer always comes first; but that is a recipe for inconsistency and chaos and puts the cart before the horse. Happy customers come from productive employees which come from fluid processes.

Thank you for all of that. We are nearly done. Here is our final ‘meaty’ question. You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 

Our company PointerTopwas created with just such a movement in mind — to create humanistic technology. Humans are naturally social, individualistic, and creative beings meant to extract meaning by interacting with each other. Using Automation or Artificial Intelligence (AI) to knock out human agents from commercial interactions misses the point of human interaction in general (to derive meaning from other humans), and misses the potential productivity derived from human creativity specifically. The real potential behind AI is to make human interaction faster, cheaper, more productive, and more convenient, but not to replace it. Our platform CrozTopwas designed with these benefits specifically in mind; to allow consumers to navigate websites productively with the assistance of automation when needed and for as long as possible, and then integrate human agents at the end to finish the transaction to increase satisfaction, basket size, and perform essential consumer education. The end-result is a happier, better-educated customer spending more money when compared to a self-navigating customer, and with far less labor involvement when compared to a call center transaction.

How can our readers further follow your work?

All my posts, articles, and interviews can be found at https://news.webtoq.com/, and my book “Why Freedom” can be found on Amazon.

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for the time you spent with this!

Original story from Authority Magazine

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Customers reward businesses with personalized service delivery

Twilio recently came out with a new report titled “State of Customer Engagement,” and the results speak to accelerating adoption of digital and web technologies by businesses to engage customers online. Customers are becoming more demanding of businesses as their expectations of online availability and ability increases, especially since they continue to increase the volume and breadth of their commercial interactions online. The businesses that respond to that demand by increasing the breadth and depth of their services online, as well as improving the digital experience overall, will differentiate themselves from their competition and be rewarded by loyal customers.

These are the main takeaways from Twilio’s report:

These are the five fundamentals of customer engagement, which emerged from our deep investigation of both consumer and B2C companies’ attitudes.

Make it digital

70% — that’s the average top line revenue increase among companies that invested in digital customer engagement over the past two years.

Make it personal

75% of companies think they’re providing good personalized experiences. But more than half of consumers disagree. There’s a lot of room for improvement.

Lose your cookies

81% of companies are completely or substantially reliant on third-party cookies — even though this critical data source will not be available after 2023.

Close the trust gap

95% of B2C companies believe consumers trust their ability to protect data, but only 65% of consumers actually do trust these companies.

Engage smarter

Gen Zs and Millennials are more than twice as likely as Baby Boomers to have experienced digital fatigue in the past 30 days. Creating better (not more) interactions can ensure business doesn’t suffer as a result.”

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11 Tips On Achieving Great SEO Results

What is SEO and how it works?

Search Engine Optimization is a way to get visitors from search engines like Google to your website. It is one of the most cost-effective marketing strategies available.

Through Search Engine Optimization or SEO, you can improve your website’s organic search engine ranking, thereby enhancing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website.

Websites that have a high organic ranking have a larger number of visitors as well.

Additionally, organic results are those results where you receive traffic that you do not have to pay for.

The effectiveness of SEO can be grasped by testing the quantity of traffic, quality of traffic, and the number of organic results.

Just ask yourself how often you use a search engine yourself.

If you want to find any information where do you go? You go to Google, right?

For example, if I want to find out about Java courses I will go to Google and will type “best java courses“.

Now I have visited Google because I have a problem and I am actively looking for a solution.

Now if I go to Facebook I am not looking actively for a solution, I went there just for timepass and I am not actively searching for the product.

So this makes traffic from search engines like Google very important.

The first result in Google will get almost 33% of the search traffic.

Google is promoting this website like a sales agent and promoting that website 24 X 7 365 days for free.

How Does SEO Work?

Search engines like Google and Bing might seem simple on the surface-level, but its internal mechanism is actually quite sophisticated.

For example, Google has a very sophisticated search algorithm that focuses on the quality of website content as well.

It is a very good idea for SEO experts to focus their efforts mainly on Google because it is the most used search engine in the world.

It will not shock you to learn that Google processes more than 2 trillion search queries on a yearly basis.

The actual functioning of a search engine’s algorithm is not public knowledge.

However, SEO experts can make very educated guesses with the help of data analytics.

Some factors that affect the performance of a search engine algorithm include social metrics, domain-level keyword usage, link features, etc.

What are the benefits of SEO?

Here are some of the biggest benefits that a Search Engine Optimization strategy will afford your website.

Primary Source Leads

Inbound marketing strategies are the most effective method of generating leads.

They perform consistently well in a number of formats – including Business to Business (B2B), Business to Customer (B2C), and non-profit organizations.

It has been definitively proven by reliable research that inbound marketing techniques like search engine optimization, social media optimization, and content marketing along with conversational marketing and sales provide consistently better results across all other platforms.

Higher Conversion Rate

The conversion rate of a website is a key performance indicator, using which one can test the website’s effectiveness.

The conversion rate is simply the percentage of the total visitors to a website who makes a purchase.

For example, out of 100 total visitors, if 40 makes a purchase, then the conversion rate is 40%.

In the long run, a concentrated SEO effort will improve your website’s organic ranking drastically.

Research has shown that this improved organic ranking will increase your website’s conversion rate.

Cost-Effectiveness of SEO

In the digitized world of the 21st century, it is very important to have a robust digital marketing strategy in place.

Search Engine Optimization is one of the most effective and economic digital marketing strategies out there.

An inbound lead generation technique like SEO can actually lower overall costs by 61% when compared to an outbound marketing technique.

This is because SEO lowers advertising costs such as Pay-Per-Click and banner ads.

Overall, a robust SEO strategy can greatly optimize your digital marketing expenses as well.

Now that you know the benefits of SEO, here are some helpful tips that you can use to get started on you website’s optimization process.

How to do SEO (Search engine optimization)?

To bring our website to the top of search engines you need to do 2 things correctly which are:-

  • On-page Optimisation
  • Off-page Optimisation

On-page optimization is a really important process for all kinds of websites and webpages.

Here are the 11 things you need to do onsite optimization

1. Starting with Keyword Research

A keyword is a phrase for which you want to rank up on search engines like ‘best earphones‘, ‘online digital marketing classes‘, ‘best online guitar classes‘.

A keyword can have a one-word phrase or a multiple word phrase whoever keywords having only 1-2 words are called broad keyword and keywords having 3 or more than 3 words are called long-tail keywords.

Understanding the difference between Broad vs Long-tail keywords

Let’s say a user searched in google for the keyword ‘phones‘. Here you will get a lot of wide results about what is phone, types, and a lot of irrelevant results. This is a broad keyword example.

However, if the user searched for ‘best mobile phone under 10000‘, this is very much specific what the user is looking for. This is a long-tail keyword example.

So which one you should focus on rank for?

The answer is long-tail keywords as they are easy to rank for compared to broad keywords.

Broad Keywords will bring high traffic but there will be a high competition too.

Whereas long-tail keywords will have medium-low traffic but the competition will be medium-low.

Broad keywords are only suited for websites that have higher domain authority.

For e.g. if you type ‘best phones’, you will see all the websites ranking on the 1st page of google which is having high authority.

You need to make an excel file with all the long-tail keywords which you want to rank for along with the search volume and competition.

You can use various tools to find the search volume of the keywords.

Check out this article on Best Keyword Research Tools

For e.g. you can use Keyword Everywhere chrome extension to find these details.

For this go to google and type Keyword everywhere chrome extension

Click on Add to Chrome

After installing the plugin, you will get an API key on your email.

Now click on Keyword everywhere icon at the top right-hand side of chrome and click on Settings and enter the API key.

Now click in Purchase Additional credits and purchase the credits.

Once you have purchased the credits go to Google and type any keyword. You will see stats like Volume, Competitions and related Keywords.

Try to find the keywords whose search volume is more than 1000, competition less than 0.4 and have at least 3 words.

Pro tip: If you will include conversational marketing and sales, it will help your visitors to convert at a faster rate.

2. Strategic Placement of Keywords

This was a very important element of SEO earlier.

In the 90s and early 2000s, keyword frequency and backlink spamming was the major strategy implemented by SEO experts.

However, since the Penguin Upgrade to Google’s algorithm, it has become much more sophisticated than before.

Keyword frequency isn’t as important as before. However, that does not mean that they are unimportant.

Strategic placement of keywords in the meta description, title tag, and H1 tags is extremely important.

By using and placing the relevant keywords in the proper place, your site’s organic ranking will improve considerably.

You should place your keyword in the h1 tag, 1st paragraph, and try to front-load the keywords.

Pro tip: Try to add 1 H2 heading for every 150 to 200 words.

3. Add Images With Alt Text & A Meaningful Name

The images that you host on your website can be optimized to attract traffic to your website from Google Image searches.

One of the most effective and easy ways to optimize your images is to add keyword-laden descriptions to your images’ alt text.

Adding well-written alt text to your images will make your website’s blog focused and well-targeted.

As images also create engagement as they can be shared externally on social media platforms, you should set a really good image title as well.

Strategically placing keywords in the name of the image is also an extremely effective idea.

4. Optimize the Per-Post Word Count

Data analytics have established that blogs that have an insufficient word count generally perform much worse than blogs which have a proper word count.

Search engines rank blogs with more words higher because they are statistically “more informative”.

For generic informative blog posts, you should post at least 1200 to 1300 words.

While creating content, it is always a very good idea to research the topic thoroughly and provide good information.

The quality of your content can play a huge role in your SEO strategy if you are dealing with highly competitive keywords.

5. Add Internal Links

By adding internal links, you can improve your blog’s ranking on search engines drastically.

By adding internal links to your other blog pages, you can increase the time an average viewer spends on your blog as well.

While interlinking, it is also recommended that you use your keywords as the anchor text.

However, you are advised to do this in moderation and not add too many links in the same blog.

Adding links to videos/content relevant to the material of your blog will show search engines that your content quality is up to scratch.

Make sure to only add links to content that are relevant to your blog’s niche.

6. Add External Links

Apart from internal links, external links can be massively helpful as well. You should be very careful about linking though.

Adding a blog’s link to websites/blogs that are not connected to your blog’s niche can be treated as spam by the search engine’s algorithm.

If done in moderation, linking out blogs/websites to relevant websites can improve the organic ranking of your website.

Make sure that you do not link out to sketchy or predatory websites.

By using do-follow and no-follow tags, you can keep tabs on your external links on trusted websites and sketchy websites respectively.

External links on respectable and relevant forums will increase the credibility and ranking of your website hugely.

7. Add meta title and description

To add meta description in WordPress you can install a plugin called ‘Yoast SEO’.

For this Just go to plugins-> Add new plugin -> Search for Yoast

Install and activate the Yoast plugin

Once Yoast plugin is installed you can go to your existing post and optimize it for search engine.

Go to post -> All post -> Edit your post-> Scroll down to the bottom of the post and you will find Yoast SEO box.

You need to enter your keyword in the focus Keyphrase field and click on edit snippet to enter the Meta title and description.

Yoast will automatically generate suggestions for you as what needs to be improved from an SEO on-page optimization point of view.

8. Use Short and Descriptive URLs

Instead of using long-winded and complicated URLs for your important web pages, you should use short and descriptive URLs instead.

Short and descriptive URLs that give the website visitor an idea of what your page contains will be treated preferentially by the search engine algorithm.

Searchers are also most likely to click on the link that closely resembles their search queries.

That is why a short and descriptive URL will attract potential customers to your website.

Aim for short and sweet URLs that are as descriptive and informative as possible.

Also, change your permalinks setting for optimized URL by visiting

Settings -> Permalink and save Post Name.

9. Optimize Your Page Speed

Google handles more than 86% of worldwide mobile search traffic.

Since most customers today use their smartphone to do their online shopping and browsing, you should optimize your page so that it loads very quickly.

Search engine users have very little patience and will stop browsing even the first-ranked page if it takes too long to load.

Apparently, 53% of users will leave a page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.

That is why Google reportedly treats page loading speed as a ranking factor.

Ensure that your website design is minimalistic and streamlined in such a way that it loads immediately.

This can be achieved by compressing image sizes and minimizing unnecessary HTML components.

10. Keep the Content Simple But Elegant

This is probably the most underrated but important piece of advice.

All of the above tips will prove to be useless unless you curate your website’s content to be simple, readable, and elegant.

It is also an excellent idea to incorporate as many infographics and diagrams you can into the content.

Actually, infographics increase traffic by 12% because you can embed links inside them.

Additionally, they can be shared externally on social media platforms as well. You can decrease the bounce rate by delivering relevant content to the users and by using conversational marketing and sales approach such as providing customer support so that users stays on your website for longer period of time.

11. HTTPS

Google considers https as a ranking signal. Https is encryption, which is important for sites dealing with payment.

You can add an SSL certificate from your host and make the website secure.

With the help of these tips, you can start doing your website’s on-site optimization yourself.

That’s all for on-page SEO optimization.

Learn off-page optimization from here -> Link Building guide 2020

Final thoughts

Apart from what’s mentioned above, you should optimize your website content in a way that improves indicative statistics like dwell time and external sharing. 

Also remember people are always expecting their need to get fulfilled immediately and as such you can use conversational marketing and sales approach such as 24/7 Customer Support, on top of SEO to get the best out of it.

Once on-page SEO is done properly, you can move to off-page optimization.

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Know how to be top-of-mind with your audience

To win a sale a product must be at the top of the consumer’s mind at the time of consumption; the consumer needs to be thinking of the product when making his purchasing decision to consider it and then pull the trigger. So, the question for marketers then is, how do you get to be top-of-mind at the right time? The answer is simple, but the execution is not. For products to be, or to rise, to top-of-mind at the time of consumption, products must be (i) recently seen; (ii) the brand must be intimately connected to the need in the consumer’s mind; or (iii) the consumer must have a strong emotional connection to the brand.

Points (i) and (ii) involve marketing strategy and advertising volume and quality, while point (iii) involves creating marketing experiences for audiences. Creating experiences is more than just marketing, but also involves product or service delivery and customer operations, which means a higher level of corporate strategizing and coordination among multiple corporate departments. The definition, creation, and execution of the customer experience is difficult to implement because of its complexity and explains why most companies get it wrong, especially the big ones.

Our new digitized world has warped corporate marketing strategies, growing larger digital branding and advertising budgets at the expense of the digital customer experience, where the focus has been on using technology to reduce expenses; these companies are taking money out of strategy (iii) to reduce overall expenses, but adding some back into strategies (i) and (ii) to compensate. This expense reduction has largely been done by removing the human interaction from the customer experience and replacing them with bots, AI, and self-help tools, at the expense of the customer’s time and service quality. Customers are frustrated with convoluted or non-existent support processes, and companies continue to frustrate their customers because they believe that pricing and better social media are the only ways to compete in today’s world. However, Starbucks would have ceased to exist if that were true; people are willing to purchase a $5 coffee to get the total Starbucks experience, and our new digitized world has not changed that. Exchanging the baristas and comfortable couches for automated kiosks would destroy the experience and the brand.

At WebToq we believe the real value of AI is not to remove the human experience, but to focus and enhance it; to use AI to make the sales and support process faster and more effective via data sharing, processing, and delivery to both the support agent and the customer. Think of how Starbucks uses a mobile app to share their menu and allow people to pre-order their drinks before going into the store, mixing technology with human delivery for a more effective solution; WebToq is busy inventing similar tactics online. The customer experience is the last interaction a customer will have with a brand, and if it involves a human interaction, it will be the most emotional, and thus the most memorable because of both the recency and strength of the memory.

We believe the companies of the future will use focused human interaction as the primary way to differentiate their brand, rather than relying only on marketing. After all, when all other companies have forced their customers to IVR bots and self-help wikis, it’s the company with the warm and personalized delivery that will stand out.

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Deliver Unexpected Value To Create A Memorable Brand

22 years after the Dot.Com bust and there are still armies of would-be entrepreneurs looking to build eCommerce businesses by throwing together a catalogue of drop-ship products, electronic shopping carts, and customer review systems, thinking that this lean business model will allow them to compete successfully on price and become digital millionaires. It is actually quite easy nowadays to build an eCommerce business using online templates and plug-and-play modules; however it is exactly because it is easy to do, building these lean-template businesses, that makes it difficult to differentiate, defend, and ultimately make profitable.

It is accepted, albeit controversial dogma in business school that Discount Pricing is not a strategy, but a tactic. Michael Porter, the godfather of contemporary business strategy, made the case that competing solely on price was a tactic that was easily copied, since any business could reduce costs, improve efficiencies, and boost volumes, without being able to build some sort of defendable walls to keep competitors away. These walls take time, effort, and/or capital to build, grow, and reinforce for the business behind the walls to be protected from competition so they can raise prices, and ultimately raise margins.

Strong brands, unique services and service delivery, intellectual property, unique resources, and unique talents are among many ways of adding extra value for the consumer and building defendable walls that make, mark, and show a difference for the business, its services, and its products versus those of competitors’. These value-adds bring in the consumer while the walls make it difficult for competitors to copy and compete with the business. But again, those walls or barriers to competition take money to create and grow, which means higher expenses, which then means higher prices and hopefully higher margins as well.

Apple with its strong brand; Starbucks with its unique service; Microsoft with its patents; and LVMH with its unique talents all command high prices and very high margins. They are highly differentiated businesses with highly defendable competitive positions. Whether traditional or digital, businesses need to find a defendable way to be different from the competition; a way to be able to add extra value to the consumer so they can justify higher margins and higher prices.

Want to know how to build a value-added and defendable digital strategy? Talk to one of our agents.

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Get out of the Customer Service Race-to-the-Bottom

Back in the late 80’s and 90’s discount marts and big box stores raced to the bottom of retail pricing. Still the retail world is still trying to get its bearings. Walmart, the movement’s juggernaut, innovated supply chains, distribution, inventory management, and operational execution to constantly reduce prices, and did it so well that it became a de facto strategy.  Retailers across the US, as well as suppliers and manufacturers working to meet the new demands of retailers, had adjust to this race-to-the-bottom, as consumers then came to expect ever decreasing prices.

The race-to-the-bottom only got worse in the 2000’s and 2010’s as Amazon and other online retailers used digital efficiencies and self-serve business models to increase selection while decreasing prices. Once again, discount pricing became a de facto strategy online, and consumers were habituated into expecting lower and lower prices.

Students of business, however, are taught that Discount Pricing is not a long-term business strategy, but rather a medium-term business tactic. You can win over customers in the medium-term by reducing costs and lowering prices, but eventually competitors will be able to copy what you do, and there is a limit to how many expenses you can wring from your operations.

Discount Pricing as a strategy or tactic

Discount Pricing as a strategy or tactic is a debatable point, but what is not debatable is that the end-result of solely competing on price leads to smaller margins and profitability. As companies cut ever more non-essential expenses from their operations to continue competing on price, eventually will run out of those expenses and will have to turn to essential expenses. What are those essential expenses? (i) Value-adding operations and (ii) margins. Cutting value-adding operations turns a business into a bland, vanilla commodity with only price as a source of differentiation and only volume-growth as a success strategy. And cutting margins, well that’s no business at all.

Because of Amazon’s online success, digital commerce to date has focused on web technologies that boost efficiencies. Such as eCarts, aggregated reviews, community support pages, chatbots, and other tools to make self-serve the driving force in eCommerce. ECommerce has thrived under this self-serve paradigm, growing exponentially in the last 20 years. But, like the Big Box trend before it, self-serve eCommerce has led to commoditization, low quality products and services, and increasing customer frustration.

How do you get out of the online race-to-the-bottom? 

How is a company that offers Premium Customer Service supposed to compete on the web? Do complex products with fine and detailed sales benefits processed online? How do you extend your luxury brand to the cloud, maintaining that sense of luxury as a point of differentiation?

In other words, how do you get out of the online race-to-the-bottom? The answer, of course, is a platform that reimagines the warmth and dynamism of a face-to-face experience and applies it to the cloud. A platform with instant video communications, showing faces and imparting emotions; a platform with video-and-presentation sharing for maximum impact. A platform with on-the-spot quotes and contract eSigning for instant gratification; and more.

The answer is a platform that allows well-trained representatives to show off their smiles, their knowledge, and their competence to their customers to create a unique, differentiated, and ultimately brandable experience. The answer to the tactic that races prices to the bottom is a strategy that elevates the customer experience to the top. A strategy brought to you by WebToq!

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Give your visitors the personalized attention they deserve

Everything in this life can be measured in terms of opportunities. And it is that, if you do not take them, they will pass you by as if they were flashes of shooting stars. The same thing happens when you have a business. There is always the possibility of selling your product, at the price you want, to the right person.

The problem is that it is very rare that the stars align so that someone is interested in the service you offer, at just the right moment. Any distraction and your client is already in another universe, looking for another brand or some other way to acquire the same product. It is for this simple reason that today, with so much competition, you need to look for other tools that offer personalized attention, and thus be able to make the most of your business.

How to Offer Personalized Attention?

Many choose to hire an external company or a call center to be able to finish capturing customers and make a sale. But you will know from experience that this tool can be a bit of a hassle, as well as being very expensive.

We have all received a thousand and one calls, and we no longer know what excuses to invent to get rid of the telephone agents. For this reason many people prefer not to call anymore. It is as if they have control of our life and there is not much we can do about it. So having this one option is no longer enough.

Another way to offer personalized attention is through chatbots. You must also know them. They are those little robots that answer on some internet pages, but then they don’t understand us very well and give us programmed and unhelpful answers.

Due to the lack of tools that offer good customer support, a software called WebToq emerged. This tool solves the limitations of chat and call center and adds new features that make customer service super personalized! Read on to find out how it works.

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WebToq: Convert Visitors Into Buyers

Imagine that your customers can come to your website looking for information and an online agent advises them on the information they are looking for and finds personalized solutions right then and there, without leaving the website. No need to call or do lengthy research! What’s more, imagine that the agent can exchange videos, images, and files with this online client to get exactly where he wanted.

This is WebToq. This company recently emerged to help those companies that are struggling with the limitations of their call center or that simply offer more complicated products or services than what can be sold with an online shopping cart.

It is an advanced tool that combines various software in order to offer more than just customer service. It is an experience never seen before!

Now you can turn your website into a sales and service channel where you can advise your customers as if they were in front of you. They just enter the page, start looking for information and that’s it! There are online agents to support, advise, and sell.

Chatbots and Chats vs. WebToq

The advantages offered by WebToq are much more advanced than those of a common chat.

The problem

In the first place, users will be speaking with an agent, that is, a person from your same company and not with programmed software, so the language becomes a little more human and warm. If the client requests something specific, your agent will know what to answer.

On the other hand, a traditional chat becomes a one-dimensional communication, that is, only text. Which makes the customer get bored, lose patience and, therefore, abandon the purchase process.

The solution

With WebToq, the conversation is much more versatile and dynamic, because beyond sending videos or directing the user to a specific search, it is possible to carry out a personalized and live session from the same website. Without asking the customer to download another app or open another browser tab. Nowadays, a human interaction that clarifies doubts could be the key to success in each sale.

In addition to chatting online with the agent to ask for help, WebToq also sends specific questionnaires, images, videos and audios, to find out which product best suits the user’s needs.

The user can also submit their own images to refer to what they are looking for. For example, you want to buy cable, but you don’t know which package or special is right for you. Maybe you want a car with functions to prevent accidents and you don’t know which model is the right one. Maybe you enter a realtor’s page and you prefer to be shown images and photos of houses instead of you looking for them. For these situations there is WebToq. The system allows the agent to send questionnaires in order to find the ideal product according to the needs and tastes of each visitor.

What makes it unique is that the user does not need to download any application or have a registration to access the tool. For example, GoToMeeting allows you to link online, but you need to register the conference beforehand and go to a new web page or app. .

The essential difference is that WebToq will already be installed within your page. This is because it is an integrated service called SAAS (Software As A Service for its figures in English). In this way, users will be able to communicate with you directly, send you messages, images, questionnaires and videos, at a very affordable price!

This way you will convert your visitors into buyers. They will not have to leave your page, nor search for a product for hours, much less depend on a call.

Click here to get this tool now.

Don’t Just Sell, Help

Consider that the more you know your users, the more you can help them become profitable and loyal customers.

Another mistake that is often made in customer service, especially in the digital part, is that the user is treated as just another number, or worse, like everyone else. This is one way of letting go of that precious opportunity to earn a customer’s loyalty. You must not allow it!

Offers a Unique Experience

Each customer is unique, and the best way to make a sale is to offer a personalized experience. Depending on the line of business, you must adapt the tools so that you impress all your customers.

To do this, WebToq developed software that allows you to modify the interface so that you can manage it in the way that best suits you. With this tool, you can place videos and links in such a way that your client does not waste time looking for a service.

For example, if you are a company that sells television services, you can send surveys to users so that you can recommend the right package. If you are a realtor you can send them videos or images of the houses as well as your own video tutorials explaining the process of buying or selling a house. You can let your imagination run wild and use WebToq to make it easy for your user to buy on the spot.

How does it work?

WebToq uses pre-made pages that you can choose from to suit your customers. These pages form a kind of “storyboard” or guide that is in the cloud.

This storyboard will be like the Bible for your sales, since it will establish the steps to follow in the customer service procedure. Thus, any member of your company or agent will be able to secure a purchase from your website, without having to direct the customer to a specific department. Amazing, don’t you think?

Note that this feature is only visible to employee

Try a Free Trial

WebToq has free trials and plans for all types of businesses. In addition to offering training so that your staff knows all the functions and makes the most of them. The quote is free and right now they are offering discounts so you can discover the wonders of this tool.

Innovate your business and increase your sales. Do not miss the opportunity. The moment is today.

Click here to try this tool.

Price

Costs vary depending on the number of customers you serve at the time. For example, there are companies that need 3 or 4 agents at the same time to answer different calls and thus not lose any customers. For this, there are different WebToq packages that are quite accessible and that adapt to the needs of your company.

Click here to see their prices.

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Key success tactics for high-contact industries

HIGH-TOUCH INDUSTRIES AT A DISADVANTAGE IN ECOMMERCE

High-touch industries such as B2B software, real estate, and telecommunications, that require the engagement of an virtual agent to sell and/ or service their products and services have been largely left behind by ecommerce technology, while low-touch industries such as books, apparel, electronics, and others thrive with continually evolving technologies.

Do-it-yourself website companies such as Shopify and Weebly are rife with shopping carts, inventory management, and similar solutions that assist users in building low-touch ecommerce sites quickly and efficiently. But when it comes to high-touch industries, these websites are largely relegated to informational portals that are constructed to lead customers to off-line communications such as email, calls, and store visits.  

INCREASING DEMAND FROM CUSTOMERS FOR ONLINE ENGAGEMENT

Customers today are increasingly demanding that their commercial needs be met online as they look for faster and easier ways to shop for products and services. Global retail ecommerce grew at an astonishing rate of 24.6% in 2021 and took up 11.7% of the total retail market[i]. Every day we find more examples of companies such as Amazon and EBay displacing traditional or brick-and-mortar counterparts as these counterparts are forced to retrench or restructure.

Similarly, customers are demanding online engagement with conversational marketing from high-touch service industries, and these industries are responding with omnichannel solutions such as integrated virtual assistants, apps, live chat software, digital marketing tools and self-guided support. However, regardless of these advancements, these industries continue to rely on in-person visits and call centers to close deals and provide support.

INCREASING DEMAND FROM BUSINESSES FOR ONLINE ENGAGEMENT

Businesses also are looking into increasing their online presence and evolve their technologies in order to (i) meet the increasing demand of their customers for online engagement, and (ii) to save money and increase productivity through cloud technologies.

Moving processes to the cloud saves businesses time and money as information becomes more available and synchronized; as customers engage the company’s support representatives less as they rely more on self-help technologies; and as customers become better informed with more timely and in-depth information. 

WEBTOQ’s PLATFORM ENABLES HIGH-TOUCH SALES AND SERVICE

WebToq is the solution that will enable businesses to move more of their customer-facing processes online, while improving productivity and meeting demand for online engagement at the same time. WebToq provides rich, on-demand, structured, and bidirectional communications between web user and agent that enable the sale and service of products and services online. 

  • Rich communications: With WebToq agents can engage a customer in a video call and share multimedia communications such as documents, images, videos, questionnaires, VOIP calls, whiteboarding, and more, in the pursuit of a sale or support.
  • On-demand: Agents are able to engage their customers directly through their website, rather than having to off-load the visit to a phone call or web conference. Contact is seamless and begins through the natural progression of a customer’s visit, whether when requesting specific information, an agent, live chat software, or initiating a sale.
  • Structured: Unlike a web-conference where an agent has to put together information on the fly, WebToq’s agent platform is structured to follow a script, with all pertinent information pre-loaded and the steps pre-arranged. This allows for consistent quality in agent communications as the right information is available at the right time, with minimal searching and waiting.
  • Bidirectional: Unlike co-browsing where an agent is merely assisting a customer through the navigation of a website and providing information to him, WebToq’s communications are bidirectional as the agent can receive questionnaire answers, files, voice and text, choice selections, and much more, that enable the closing of a sale or support case.
ONLINE ENGAGEMENT WILL REPRESENT A PRODUCTIVITY BOOST FOR HIGH-TOUCH COMPANIES

High-touch companies will see their productivity increase as they engage their customers online.

  • These companies will now be able to handle multiple customer sessions at a time, rather than one-at-a-time as demanded with a call
  • Off-load customer education and training to manuals and videos
  • Handle a transaction all at once, rather than having to go back-and-forth between visits, calls, faxes, and emails
  • Hire remote, stationary virtual agents only requiring writing fluency, rather than having to have local or traveling agents, or agents with perfect pronunciation and accents.

And, since WebToq is structured and pre-loaded, customer training will be quicker and easier, and customer sessions will be more consistent and effective.

HOW WEBTOQ WORKS

WEB INTEGRATIONTHE PROBLEM:
Companies can build hooks to WebToq into their websites via linking to specific WebToq content such as forms, guides, or videos, or by using WebToq’s live chat software.High-touch industries have missed out on many productivity and efficiency improvements available to low-touch industries via web and cloud technologies. Customers are demanding online transactions more and more, and high-touch industries need to comply to compete
AGENT PORTALTHE SOLUTION:
Agents log in to the agent portal and await a customer session to begin. Agent sessions are connected on a first-come-first-served basis. Agents then retain control of the customer session and proceed through the script.WebToq has developed a cloud platform that enables company representatives to communicate directly with customers through their websites using multimedia technologies and remote support tools. These rich, structured, on-demand, and bidirectional interactions allow high-touch companies to engage leads while they are still hot and inform customers better than self-guided navigation, and cheaper and with deeper information than through a phone call.
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