Keeping your customers happy is the key to continued business. While sales performance is a primary concern for any business owner, it is all for nothing if you cannot retain your clientele. With this in mind, here is a brief Outrank complaints guide to help you deal with issues that come up.

Listen and Clarify the Issue

Before anything else, you must get to the root of the problem. Focus your full attention on understanding exactly what is wrong. Be respectful and attentive. Summarize the issue for the customer so that they know you have heard and understood the complaint.

Empathize and Apologize

You have to put yourself in the customer’s shoes. Everyone has been on the receiving end of terrible customer service at one time or another. Remember how you felt when you were treated unfairly or disregarded. Apologize to the customer for their inconvenience and be sincere.

Convince Them You’re On Their Side

This is the most important step for ending the interaction positively. A customer can tell by the tone of your voice and other verbal cues if you are interested in their welfare. Your whole approach to complaints has to hinge on a genuine desire to make the customer happy. If you convince them you will do as much as you can for them, it will give you volumes of credibility as a business.

Act Swiftly and Confidently

Outline what you can do to remedy the problem, and be honest about how your solution is fair for both parties. A customer’s reaction will largely depend on your confidence and the fairness of the resolution. Do what you say you’re going to do, and do it quickly.

We hope this Outrank complaints guide will help you improve your customer relationships and your company’s overall approach to service.

I’ve covered a lot of SEO ground on this blog so far. The basics of organic and local SEO have been introduced. Since a solid conceptual foundation has been laid, the goal of this post is to present hard evidence that supports the value of SEO. These findings will show you just how important (and profitable) these tactics are in business:

• In 2007, a Nielsen report revealed that 86% of respondents had gone online to find a local business.
• A Yahoo study profiling “ROBO (Research Online Buy Offline)” behavior revealed that online retail marketing campaigns resulted in a 43% increase in revenue. Consumers that were targeted online ended up being more likely to buy and spend more once actually in-store.

It is easy to see the importance of marketing on the Internet. However, it’s just as important to do it smartly. In SEO, this means getting (at least) a top 10 ranking:

• A leak from AOL suggested that sites that ranked #1 received 42% of clicks (known in the SEO industry as a ”click-through rate,” or CTR), with the second and third-ranked sites netting about 10% each. Results appearing after the first page received barely 10% combined.
• Studies focusing on Google have produced similar results.

SEO is an ever-changing battlefield, but for those companies that find a partner like Outrank.com to help them rank well for targeted keywords, there is immense money-making potential.

Local search is an aspect of search engine optimization (SEO) that businesses cannot ignore. In Google, the premier search engine, local search is known as Google Places (formerly the Local Business Center). You will recognize it as the map that pops up when you search for local terms like “Dallas remodeling,” displaying a small number of related businesses. These listings are separate from (and often displayed above) organic search results and are based on more localized factors. Accordingly, they require a largely separate set of SEO techniques. Local optimization provides a tremendous amount of opportunity for businesses–Outrank.com cannot stress this enough.

As more users search for local services using locally-oriented keywords, it becomes essential for small business owners to partner with a reliable company that can get them on the front page of the search engines for these valuable keywords.

Small business owners can help improve their listing by asking customers to post reviews while their listing is optimized by Outrank.com. Reviews increase the likelihood that your Google Places local listing will rank for your targeted keywords. Good reviews have been strongly linked to higher conversion rates by leading internet marketers because they improve the business’ credibility with potential customers.

Outrank.com provides a comprehensive service to achieve front page rankings in the search engines. It’s more important than ever for savvy business owners to entrust their SEO activities to a reliable firm that delivers front page rankings.