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Review Dos and Don’ts

Reviews / By

We all know how important reviews are, but to what length will people go to get reviews? This is a warning to all our friends and family, Google does not play nice if they think you are baiting or faking reviews.  Bright Local’s informative post, https://www.brightlocal.com/2018/11/26/risky-review-schemes-that-could-sink-your-business, gives very succinct details on how you could be putting all your hard-earned reviews in jeopardy by taking part in what might seem to be an innocent enough plan to get more reviews. Here are some chilling excerpts From their blog:

You cannot offer a reviewer any discount on services or products in exchange for reviews. One business I’m aware of offered all of their customers a 10% savings on their next purchase for leaving a review, so Google went and deleted two years’ worth of reviews.

I’ve also seen a thread where a business thanked everyone with a free drink after leaving a review. Google deleted over 400 reviews. Those 400 individuals still kept their free drink after their reviews were deleted by Google.

As a business owner, we are sure that you would not want to risk those types of penalties. Reviews are good, but they must be gotten by  means in accord with the Google Terms of Service, and we will list just a few here, with more coming down the road, including a software to help you get real reviews.

1. Ask- yes just ask, especially right after the sale. We print out half-sheets and ask clients to give us their impression of the service they just got, once they have done that, asking them to post it online is pretty easy. Writing the review is actually the more difficult part of the equation, and good old paper and ink are a good resource for that.
2. Have links to your online reviews right up at the top of your website, for people to find easily . This strategy not only helps with reviews, it helps build traffic to your website, and we know that the big G loves traffic, so its a win-win for you and your rankings.
3. Send an email thanking your clients for their business, if feasible. This will not work for all types of businesses, but it is a great strategy to stay in front of your customers, through their inbox, and your emails acan have the same links that your website has, right to your online reviews.
More to come…

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Pixabay Images Plugin

Graphics / By

We love WordPress! If you need to have a presence online, there is no better platform to allow you to not only have a beautiful website, but a supremely functional one.

Plugin Love #1

I will be sharing my favorite plugins, why I love them and how you can use them to improve your Online Marketing. Everyone knows the old adage, a picture is worth a 1000 words, and its true! But don’t get into trouble by downloading any old image you happen to find in a google image search.

In the last few years a number of free image sharing sites have popped up across the internet. I go into great detail on the Free Image Page, found here. But this post is about a quick and easy way to use pixabay images in your blog post. Its a plugin called Pixabay Images with 30,000+ downloads to date, it looks to be a robust solution to popping images into your posts and pages, for free, and never worrying about that crazy letter coming from the Getty Images legal counsel, who scour the web looking for potential copyright infringement lawsuits!!

Take a look at what I found with one click! (ok, I love sunrise on the beach!)

The plugin will automatically add attribution, but it’s not required, and you just have to remove it from the Caption setting in wordpress, if you don’t want to use it. Pixabay offers some very professional images, even with business themes, like this (keyword: woman shopping)

and this (keyword: family having fun, sometimes a touch of retro is what it takes)


So enjoy Pixabay Images, get creative and fun with it!

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