boyd of ayrshire .com

The BreakDown

On Saturday 4th August I had the unpleasent experiance of my car breaking down 20 miles from home on a motorway. As I sat in the broken down vehicle I didn’t looked stressed or nervous, why, because I’ve been paying for a rescue service that I got included in my latest car insurance deal from Churchill.

The super deal I got on rescue cover was provided by Greenflag and I recieved 10% off at the time of taking this rescue cover package which costs only £109 a year.

As I travel from Ayrshire to Glasgow everyday it was important for me to be covered. The last thing I want to happen is my car breaking down on the M74.

So, I phoned the “Breakdown in the UK” number provided to me and with my policy number in hand I wait on the automated messages to finish so I tell the nice person on the other end of the phone my problem and they’d have a tow truck sent out in a flash to rescue me.

Finally,

Greenflag “Hi, Have you broken down” echoed through the phone to my delight.

Me “Yes,Sir” I anwsered back. Great we’ll be on our way soon.

Then things started to turn a little pear shaped.

Greenflag “Sir, Can I have your postcode?” Postcode provided.

Greenflag “Sir, There’s no policy at that postcode” Eh!

Greenflag “Sir, What’s your vehicle registration?” Registration provided

Greenflag “Sir, There’s no policy for that vehicle” Eh!

Greenflag”Sir, What’s your full name, address and postcode?” Provided,

Ok now I’m panicking, it’s really raining as it does in Scotland and I don’t know the telephone number of any garages. That’s because I have piece of mind with my Greenflag rescue cover.

Greenflag “Sir, We have no details for your name, address, postcode or vehicle, did you get your cover from Churchill?” Yes, I did, why, wait, I have the policy number of the insurance and the rescue cover package. Provided,

Greenflag “Sir, We have no policy for that, Can I transfer you to Churchill they can sort this out for you?” Ok, After listening to about 10 minutes of automated messages about car insurance fraud I was then notified and mortified that,

Churchill “The chuchill offices are now closed please call back………” Now panick has set in.

A quick call to one of those 118 numbers and I was transfered to a local breakdown company, the phone the rung once, explained my problem, breakdown truck arrived prompty and £180 was withdrawn from my wallet to pay the nice man.

The Fraud

So now it’s Monday morning and time to call Churchill to find out why they’ve been withdrawning money from my bank account every month and not providing the service that I’m paying for. In most cases this would be a form of fraud, wouldn’t it?

Green Flag “What’s your postcode”

Green Flag “I’m sorry Sir but nothing is coming up” I’ve heard this before.

Has anyone else had similiar problems?

Blogged with Flock

Tags: Churchill, Greenflag

Are you losing your own business?

Many businesses don’t consider their position on search engines below the number 1 spot. Out of the 10 listings on search engine pages most businesses presume that people searching for there businesses will click on the correct URL. How does a new customer know which is the correct URL?
A while back one of the eye tracking reports suggested that 85% of visitors to Google click on the first 3 positions. You need to ask yourself these questions.

Do you have a website listed in all 3 positions that promotes or protects your brand?

Do you control the content on all 3 websites?

Are you OK with letting 15% to 60% of potential business slip away?

If the answer is no you need to do more to protect your brand online, now.

By using these simple tips you can protect your brand terms on search engines from unsavory reviews and also claim back some business from resellers and affiliates or if your operating within the Travel industry, GDS systems.

• Domain Names
• When many companies enter on the internet to trade the usual only purchase a handful of domain names that incorporate there brand term. I most cases businesses purchase www.brand.com and www.brand.co.uk. This is a fundamental mistake, the remainder of the other domains, .org, .net, .tv etc are then left available for anyone to buy. Many of these domain names will be picked up by resellers and affiliates trying to generate sales of the back of brand terms being searched on Google, Yahoo and MSN.
  
• Solution: Buy up all variations of your brands domain name.

• Land, not Redirect
• A common mistake made by businesses when they purchase additional domain names relating to the brand terms is to simply redirect them to the main site i.e. point the .co.uk domain name to the .com domain name using 302 redirects. This offers zero benefit when protecting your brand, search engines will simply consider the main domain name to be the original site and then devalue the other domains that point to it.
• Solution: Create landing pages for the other domain names, the landing pages can consist of some sales material and deep link into the main site, it doesn’t have to be a full blown website. Setting up these landing pages on a separate server from the main site will also offer a small benefit.

• Blogging
• Get a blog, Get one now! Using a blog to output the latest news or special offers can help to combat brand theft. By simply signing up to a free blogging service such as wordpress.com and using your brand name in the blogs names such as http://brand.wordpress.com you can pick off another one of those positions on the search engine for your brand term.
• Solution: Open a wordpress.com account and use your brand term in the name of the blog. Remember to blog often and grow within your industries blogging community.
  

• Alerts
• You really need to be knowing when other websites are commenting on aspects of your business whether good or bad. To do this on a higher signup to Google Alerts, this will notify you when a website is talking about your brand and identify you websites using your brand terms to gain business. A way to monitor blogs and websites outside of Google is by setting up RSS feeds for search terms on Technorati,  visit Technorati and search for your brand, within the search you’ll see a RSS  subscride button. Add this to your preferred RSS reader.
• Solution: Setup Google Alerts and Technorait RSS feeds.

• Shift Focus
  
• When you start to receive bad online press and it filters through onto blogs one thing to do is to shift the focus by putting a press release or a special offer. Use the blogs you’ve created to distribute the new shift in focus. It is also possible to pay for blog posts on top bloggers websites. This could be a quick solution if your new blogs aren’t quite up to scratch.
• Solution: Push on new news via your blog and look at using a pay per post system like www.payperpost.com

I hope that some of these tips help you protect your brand within the online environment, these tips are just a sample of a full Online Brand Protection and Monitoring strategy. Hopefully they’ll be applied to your strategy.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: seo, travel, online brand protection,

Here is a simple list of tips you should consider if marketing your website locally.

1. Get listed in local online directories.

Examples for Ayrshire: http://www.browseayrshire.com, http://www.ayr-web.co.uk
How to find more: Search Google for Region or City plus directory

2. Join your local Chamber of Commerce.

Most UK Chamber of Commerce websites have an online directory of members and there websites.
Example For Ayrshire: http://www.ayrshire-chamber.org/directorylisting.asp

3. Get your service or product listed in local online classified ads

Example for Ayrshire: http:/./glasgow.gumtree.com, http://ayr.iclads.com/

4. Include your domain name on your business cards, flyers, ad’s etc

5. Write good content for your website.

This will help to retain visitors to your website and help to convert to sales over time. Remember to include the region and city that you operate in.

6. Start a blog.

Wordpress.com, Blogger.com and many more offer free hosted blogging services, use this blog platform to communicate with previous customers, leave testimonials and also describe products and services in greater detail. These blogging platforms are always very search engine friendly and would help to promote your business with really doing not much more than talking about what you do.
Example for Ayrshire: http://ayrshirescotlandbusinessnews.blogspot.com/

7. Check out your local council.

Some local councils have directories of all the companies within the local area.
Example for Ayrshire: http://www.south-ayrshire.gov.uk/Business/business_directory.asp

8. Good old Word of Mouth.

Tell everyone you know about what you do, get them to tell there friends and if they have a website, myspace or bebo account get them to link to your site or add you as a friend. If your friends do have myspace and bebo accounts get them to give you a free lesson on what it does.

9. Good old Shop Windows

If your along at your local shop and they have ad’s on the window then get your business listed in there, remember to include your website. People might see the ad and remember the domain name rather than the phone number.
Examples for Ayrshire: Most Spars, Tesco, Asda and Homebase

10. Get listed on Google Maps

Google maps in a great way to get listed at the top of google for your service or product. Simply set an account at google and follow the instructions to get listed. Google Local Business Centre http://tinyurl.com/3a8sh4

Blogged with Flock

Tags: SEO, Local, Google, Business, Marketing

So, A while back I was messing around with some stuff and I downloaded Flock, the social media web browser. At first I didn’t know what to do with it but now I’m getting the hang of it.

This is my first post from Flock to my Blog and is simply a test to see if it works. I was never a fan of firefox as the toolbars I downloaded left me with no space on my browser to actually see the websites.

My first reaction is that this is a great tool, it would also be great if it was possible to make Flock MyWorld templates that could to distributed out like wordpress templates. Maybe in the future this will be available.

One thing I do think will happen is that I’ll be posting shorter posts and more often, the rss feed reader is a great tool to help keep me up to date in the SEO world.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: SEO, Flock

Purple Internet Marketing Good or Bad?

I found this new Scottish based SEO company to other day via a Pay Per Click ad.
I was a little interested in there offer of a full SEO campaign for only £810 over 6 months, Yes! £810 for 6 months worth of search engine marketing to my site.
After reading a little more about this very interesting package I thought I’d just pass on my clients to them and make a killing. I’m a tad expensive at the moment.

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I read in a newspaper a while back the UK’s Post regulator was asking companies to consider using an alternative to the Royal Mail for there business post. I’ve been thinking for a while that maybe there’s a better solution to what I’m using at the moment.

History Note:  A while ago my better half setup a website to sell posters of anything that moves and pretty much anything that’s standing still. We (I) setup a business account with the Royal Mail, basically we fill a bag with poster tubes and head off for the post office once or twice a week. When we get there we get harrassed by the counter staff as they claim “We don’t usally do this”, so who does? We’ve been going to the same post office every Saturday morning know for over 6 months. The Post office have an additional “pick up from your door” service for an extra £260 a year, which isn’t bad, we just think we didn’t need that level of service. Plus Kim uses the Saturday morning mail run as the ideal way to get me in a town center on a Saturday.

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