[dougfentiman]

Tom,

Like Uwe said Google is almost impossible to predict. Also, they have been making some big changes in how their search engines works, especially in last six months, and lots of ‘wierd’ things are going on.

As a general suggestion I would recommend you continue making comments and wait for things to sort themselves out. Keep in mind that Google evaluates “your” comments and the more you make the more credibility you will be awarded. A comment from someone who has made 100 comments has far more “trust” factor than someone with an incomplete profile and one or two comments…

Which leads to completing your Google user profile. Google may give your profile more credibility if you have made an effort to complete your account profile. Makes you more “ligitimate”. This may be one of the factors used in judging which comments to display.

Also good to make comments on other non-automotive businesses in your local area. Coffee shops, stores, resturants, etc. Builds up your reputation in google’s eyes. And, if your comments are associated with a variety of business types there is less supicion of them being spam or bogus.

Doug

[dougfentiman]

Complaints about project delays are very common in the website development industry. But this does not mean it is always the website developer’s fault. Similar to auto repair, the process of building a quality “marketing” website is very complex (and becoming more so every day) and most clients do not understand what is required to build a website. Not to point the finger at Gary, but in my experience the biggest contributor to website development delays is the website owner themselves. Boils down to them not making the effort to provide the materials and information only THEY can provide to the web developer. The speed of development and success of the end result is directly related to the input of the business owner. Yet the website developer is too often held responsible for things they have little, if any, control over.

Like any disagreement between people, solutions come from discussion and cooperation. If you don’t trust the company or person you are working with then you should sort that out before anything else. By the time you hire someone you should know what is expected from each party and whether they will do what they say they will. This is what references and reputation are for. All too often I get clients who are in a big rush and don’t want to do even the slightest bit of research or planning. The auto repair industry in particular is guilty of shop owners “running” their business rather than being a business “manager” who plan, execute, and monitor business functions such as marketing. It is an all too common problem of small business owners who don’t recognize the importance of marketing to the growth, let alone survival, of their business. If you don’t have the time to contribute to your marketing (and a website is core to that process) you may not have a business to “run” in the near future.

A good website is a joint effort of the website owner and the web developer. The website owner is responsible for providing the “raw materials” for website content. The developer is responsible for assembling that material into a website. The developer does not know anything about the nature of the business and must rely on the website owner to provide the information that prospective customers are looking for. Personally I do not expect the website owner to “write” the website’s content, but the website owner MUST provide the details about their business. The web developer can’t just make it up! (I have actually had people tell me to do this…!) I spend a great deal of effort in guiding and helping my clients to assemble the required information. Often it is just a check list of options that need to be selected (easy). Other info requires answering a series of questions that dig down to what makes your business tick – basically the info YOUR customers what to know. The information doesn’t need to be pretty (you don’t have to be a writer even know how to spell) but the “facts” about the business, in any form you provide them, are essential. Without this info the developer can’t do their part of the job! Recently I explained to one of my clients that it is similar to one of their customers asking them to do a tune up, but being unwilling to bring their car to the shop, and then blaming the shop for how poorly their car runs. A true no-win, exasperating situation.

Sure there are web developers who will throw together a “boiler plate” website with little more than a quick phone call to gather your business name, address, and phone number, but the results are mediocre at best. And as the search engines, and your competitors, get more sophisticated these cookie cutter websites will get pushed further down the pile. Sure you can spend a bundle on additional SEO and Adwords to increase traffic, but the real difference is in the results these websites produce. The key word is “conversion” or how many people who visit your website become a paying customer. Website “hits” do not equate to profits! Most times you could save yourself a bunch of dollars by just creating a simple one page website and spending the difference on other, more effective marketing.

I have been developing websites for many years, in a wide variety of industries, and the most difficult part of the job, bar none, is getting the client to provide the raw materials needed to build their website. So often they resist, blame the developer for delays, and some become impatient (some even abusive…) when they don’t quickly see something tangible (there is a LOT of work done before the website is viewable). In some cases I have just refunded all their money and written off all my time spent up to that point – the old story of “fire” your worst customers and cut your loses. With others who just need more “education” and support, I see this “issue” as just part of the development process. The smart ones eventually see the “light” and do what is required. Unfortunately they waste a lot of both their and the developer’s time. As you all know time is valuable and any business must charge for their time (services) or they don’t remain in business. It is the website owner’s decision on how they use the developer’s time they are paying for and they should not begrudge someone for charging for it.

I suspect the larger issue is a frustration with how competitive the general business market place has become and they being spoiled in the past with what I call “lazy” marketing. Too many shop owners just want to write a check once a year and not have to do anything. Unfortunately marketing no longer works that way. Consumers are fed up with that type of marketing, distrust it, and ignore it. They now want transparency and something to base their trust on. And they are seeking that from the Internet. Business owners must make more of an effort to become more transparent and use their “public reputation” to build consumer trust. And a website is the perfect tool to do that. But it won’t work without the “personalized” information only they can provide. The search engines are also very attuned to what consumers want and are getting very particular about who (which websites) will be rewarded. Quick setup, “boiler plate” websites that don’t provide what consumers, and search engines, want are not good value in the long run.

Thanks to Joe (Auto Safety Center in West Bend) for mentioning me. I remember he too had some doubts while WE were developing his website, but he listened to my coaching and pushing for doing it right, and he was very happy in the end. The results speak for themselves.

Doug

[dougfentiman]

I’ve taken payments through Paypal for years with very few problems. Rates are fair depending on transaction volume.

BUT, one loop hole people might burn you with is how they fund their payment. If they fund their payment to you with an “e-check” it will take Paypal about five days to process (clear) this type of payment and so the payment is considered “pending” until the check clears. If the e-check bounces the payment fails and Paypal cancels the payment… so customer has got their vehicle and you have an unpaid invoice with little recourse.

You should read the “fine print” on how Paypal deals with payments for sale of services vs sale of goods. If I am correct Paypal does not guarantee or mediate payments for services. Credit card chargebacks are responcibility of CC company. Payments funded by e-checks/bank transfer are not covered by Paypal (for payments for services). Basically no different than taking a personal check.

[dougfentiman]

David you need to think of the long term consequences of keeping an employee like this. He is a major financial liability both in direct costs such as poor productivity, increased insurance rates, work related litigation, etc. , and he WILL damage your customer relationships and reputation. Losing customers is bad enough but when they go away angry the damage to your reputation goes on causing damage long into the future. Also, with modern communications technology people have a much larger network of ‘friends’ and spreading the word, good or bad, has become so easy.

Today’s consumers have the power to destroy your business reputation with the push of just a few buttons. Social media is connecting people like never before and the number of people they can reach in seconds is astounding. All you need is for this guy’s apathetic attitude to anger someone enough to go online and write a nasty review about your service (or a bunch if they are really mad). The real scary part is that these negative comments remain there FOREVER available for anyone that does a search on your business name. Anything written about you becomes part of your online “social reputation”.

Social media is in sort of a Wild West era where people can write what they like, truthful or not, and it becomes public knowledge. If the information is negative you are in the undesirable position of having to do damage control. Even if you do resolve the issue and make the ‘person’ or customer happy the negative comment can most often not be removed. It is a black stain on your reputation that will live on the Web forever. It is far easier and wiser to prevent problems than try to solve them.

As Curt said above, this employee is NOT a team player. He has got some issues in his life which he is bringing to work and it unfairly impacts everyone else he works with. If you have discussed his job performance with him and nothing changed then it is time to go (the drivers license issue makes that easier). The problems he will cause will only escalate with time until something happens that will cause you major pain.

Shop owners need to become more conscious of and take the VALUE of their “online reputation” more seriously. Everything from what people say about you online to your company website creates a image of who and what you are. Search engines have become the shopper’s word-of-mouth reference when looking at doing business with you. Whether they drive by and see your sign, see an ad in the paper, receive a piece of direct mail, check out your website, the first thing they do is Google your business name and check out what people are saying about you. If all they find is a bunch of negative reviews they quickly move on to one of your many competitors. You have just wasted all your marketing efforts and $$$. Get rid of him – fast.

Although a bit off topic, the following story is related to managing the quality of the work that comes out of your shop and the resulting reputation that work creates. I have a prospective website customer who has been pondering whether to upgrade his website or not. He has been in business for 25 years and has built the shop up to a nice looking, well equipped 15-bay facility with a great location in a large bedroom community of a large city. It is one of the few cities today that has a reasonably good economy and the auto repair business is not that bad there. Unfortunately for this shop they are in a situation where business was very good for many years but has been on an escalating downhill slide over the last 5 years, and especially in the last three years.

The shop was built and prospered on walk-in customers and spent almost nothing on advertising over the preceding years. But that is not working any more. He recently spent about $1,500 a month on direct mail over the last six months with almost zero response. He is now even more convinced that advertising doesn’t work and is reluctant to spend even 10% of that on a website. First thing I did was Google his business name and within seconds I could see why his direct mail advertising didn’t work. And will probably never work.

The first three pages of a Google search on his business name are nothing but mostly bad reviews from unhappy customers. Some reviews go back as far as early as 2004. The large number of negative comments combined with their lack of response to them indicates a business that has not been concerned with customer satisfaction or their reputation. He acknowledged that in the past the sheer volume of business compensated for their poor business practices. And from a quick look I can see a connection between the increasing number of poor online reviews over time and the decreasing volume of business at the shop over the same time period. Not scientific but a reasonable deduction.

To top off their poor online presentation their company website is listed in the middle of page 5 for a search on the company name! The website was self made by the owner about six years ago and hasn’t been looked at since. It has major HTML code errors and uses programming code considered obsolete by search engines. These technical issues are the major reason for such poor placement in search results. And, from the readers standpoint, the content does not represent the company very well and no doubt only confirms the poor impression of any prospective customer who got past the negative reviews.

As I spoke to the shop owner on the phone I described what I was finding online and suggested a course of action:

1. before any further spending on advertising they must do damage control and clean up their online reputation;

2. impose rigid quality control of work produced in the shop. With such a long history of poor performance this would probably mean getting rid of most employees who now have bad work habits (maybe this is why there are so many bad techs floating around…);

3. implement routine customer satisfaction followup after EVERY job to catch ANY service failures. This can be done by phone or email. Having a satisfaction survey on your website can make it easy for your customer and lower the workload for you;

4. damage control of online negative reviews. Yes this is a lot of work but it must be done! Spend the time or hire someone to do it.

Claim your social media company listings/profiles and reply or comment on negative reviews in a supportive rather than defensive manner. Apologize for past issues and resolve current ones both online and by directly phoning the individual. Even if it isn’t your fault, take responsibility and resolve the issue. If you do a good job of making the person happy they may go back and make a positive followup comment on how you stood by your work. These ‘problem solved’ reviews can be even better than a plain positive review. They show your commitment to customer satisfaction and built trust.

If the person behind a negative review is being unreasonable, then take the time to thoroughly explain the situation and what you did to attempt a solution in your response comment. Generally people recognize that some people are unreasonable and are impossible to satisfy. A few negative reviews from whiners are forgiven if balanced with positive reviews.

5. Ask your happy customers to make positive reviews. New reviews will eventually push the negative reviews down into search results were people don’t see them. Also, five negative reviews look like far less of a concern if they are mixed with 50 positive reviews.

Make review requests part of your routine customer satisfaction followup. Review request response rates are much higher if done shortly after the work was performed. You can also ask customers for their email address and send them a thank you for their business and links to your review listings where they can write a review your shop. You should also place links to review websites on your site once you get the negative/positive review ratio balanced out.

6. Get a website that truly reflects your business and is the focal point for ALL your marketing. There is no sense driving people to your website with marketing, either conventional or online, if that website does not ‘convert’ viewers into paying customers. And when someone does an online search for your company name your website must be listed at the top of page one! This gives you the best chance of getting people onto your website where YOU have control over what is said to your customers. With short attention spans and an endless number of options on where to take their business, you need to make every potential customer contact count. Remove any reason for them to go to your competitors.

[dougfentiman]

Dave Eastman wrote:

> It would be good to do a post about hosting of the shops website and the importance of having control of that also.

Thanks for the comment Dave.

Hosting control is not as much of an issue as domain ownership and control. Sure you can run into web developers who can pull the same tricks as with domain name control, but website ‘ownership’ issues are usually not a problem if ownership is CLEARLY defined in your user agreement or design contract BEFORE hiring them.

There are rare cases where the website developer has built a website and claims to retain ownership due to ‘artistic’ rights. This was more common years ago when most web designers were artists and considered their websites a piece of ‘art’ rather than a service they were hired to perform. These problems are almost unheard of today. This is where that ownership clause in your website development contract covers your butt.

If you do have a problem most website hosting companies will give you control if you can provide documentation that you are the owner and have a right to control. This is usually much easier than domain ownership issues. Websites are nowhere as valuable as domain names so ownership control is not so anal.

Website Ownership

There are two ways to purchase a website. First is the traditional way where you hire a website designer who builds you a custom website from scratch. When the website is finished the designer gives you the files, you find a web host and put your website online. You own the files and are responsible for your website from that point on. You have total control of your website and also total responsibility for maintaining it.

Second way to buy a website is the ‘Website As a Service’ model. Each website gets a personalized custom design but uses a common, highly refined backend system that your website runs on. (This is NOT a template website! Your website has a custom look and content configured to suit your business.) With this model you own the content, text and photos, that your provide, but you do not own the system that displays your website. With Website As a Service the cost of development is shared by all clients and dramatically lowers the individual website cost.

To help you understand the difference I’ll use packaged software as an example. When you buy a piece of software you don’t ‘own’ the software. You have only purchased the ‘right’ to use the software. You do not get the ‘source code’ or programming that makes the software work. To get the source code you would need to pay the creators of the software a lot more to pay for all their costs to develop the software. Paying $200 for a program like MS Word is a very small price to pay for something that cost hundreds, if not thousands, of millions of dollars to develop. The other advantage to ‘leasing’ software is support. If you owned the software outright you would be responsible for solving your own bugs and security issues.

With Website As a Service you pay for setting up your website on the system and a support fee to maintain both your individual website and the system it runs on.

Hosting vs Support

There is big difference between website ‘hosting’ and ‘support’ or full service hosting.

Website “Hosting” refers to providing a web server where your website is placed. You are only paying for ‘space’ on a web server, email server, and the maintenance of the infrastructure, hardware, software, and Internet connection, which displays your website on the Web. Hosting does not include any services related to the files or computer code which compose your website. Hosting is a very small part of the cost of keeping your website online and operating correctly.

Website “Support” is where you get the services of an Internet Professional who manages and cares for your website. Often website support will include website hosting as a convenience to the client. Basically support is an economical alternative to paying for website care on an as needed basis at full hourly rate.

With today’s complex websites there is a great deal of routine maintenance required. Most websites are now being built on Content Management Systems (CMS) which require regular security updates and database maintenance. This is usually beyond the abilities of most shop owners and they need someone to care for their website. Support plans are an economical way to have someone monitor and keep their website performing as it should.

[dougfentiman]

PS. One of the things that bugs me about forums is the lack of an ‘edit’ button… my name in the post above is supposed to be at the bottom of the page but some how ended up in the middle…

[dougfentiman]

Thanks John,

Writing for the web is a lot more than just grammar and spelling. It is a complex mix of content, sales/marketing spin, SEO, grammar, and spelling skills which need to be used to satisfy both human readers and, almost more importantly, the search engines. Tipping the scales to either “reader” and your website doesn’t work. That is why finding a web savvy, marketing writer is so difficult. The ideal person would be highly knowledgeable of marketing, psychology, web design, business management, auto repair, and writing. No wonder the good ones want the big bucks…

College students are great for general editing but they don’t have the marketing nor web copyrighting skills that are so essential. I have a couple grad students (masters degree program) that I get to proof my writing, mostly spelling, however their grammar changes are always technically correct but drive the webpage’s SEO into the toilet. I have had many heated discussions about how to write web copy. I have offered to base their pay on the change in a webpage’s page rank. They are always humbled by just how fast “their” writing, and pay, gets hammered by Google dislike of their ‘good’ writing. A good example of when being correct doesn’t always bring home $$$.

Having also been a public school and adult education teacher I have spent many hours learning and correcting writing. I can write. But it takes lots of hard work and is not always the best use of my time.

Spelling is my weakness. Like you a spellchecker is a blessing and saves me countless hours every week! I remember my grade school teachers ranting about spelling being something that can be mastered and that I was just being lazy. I still believe they are wrong. Research into Multiple Intelligences seems to support the theory that our skills are a blend of different abilities with each having different strengths. There is strong support for the idea that people with strong technical and diagnostic skills are weak in language skills. It’s the excuse for my lousy spelling that I like anyways…

Doug

[dougfentiman]

I’d be happy with someone who could just edit my writing. Someone who knows both the repair business AND basic grammar and spelling would be a bonus!

I have hunted for a copywriter for quite a while now. Tried one of the job bid websites just to see what would turn up. Either English is not their first language (results are truly sad), they don’t have a creative cell in their body (this supposed to be MARKETING copy people!), or they want $5 per word (including all the ‘a’s ‘I’s and ‘it’s they can squeeze in…

If you find a good one maybe we can share!