Pillars and Clusters

Whether it is known to most or not, the most important thing someone can do to make their website appear closer to the top of more user’s search bars is to simply make it neat. Search engines search through content with what is called a crawler. A search engine crawler quickly scans through countless web pages in mere moments; while the crawler scans these articles it tends to favor websites with neatly organized web pages. For this reason, steadily organized structures of a website’s pages are important to not only the appeal to a customer but also to the appeal of the crawler. The best organization method for appealing to a crawler is pillars and clusters. The structure of pillars and clusters can be better understood by the laid out picture below

Pillars

As can be seen in the picture above, the pillar is the core of a properly organized website. Overall a pillar is a web page that is composed of many hyperlinks that lead to other web pages. These other web pages are the clusters.

Clusters

While the pillar is the core of all the web pages the clusters are the smaller subpages that are all directly linked to the pillar webpage to discuss the pillar’s listed subtopics.

Consequences of Not Using Pillars and Clusters

Most website creators do not take the time to properly organize their web page’s content which often causes the structure of the website to look something like the picture down below. Although the crawler will see that there is a pillar for a web page it will not favor the fact that the clusters are randomly thrown about rather than directly attached to the pillar.

Social Monitoring

The two key components to keeping your brand relevant, above the competition, and your
customers happy in social media are social monitoring and social listening. These useful ways to gain insight on what people are saying about your brand work together, but are two different things. Social monitoring is a look at all the data from your metrics, and social listening provides the mood behind this data. It’s about what the customers are feeling that is leading to the metrics results, such as the engagement rate and brand mentions.

Social monitoring consists of metrics such as these:
● Brand mentions
● Relevant hashtags
● Competitor mentions
● Industry trends
● Engagement rate

Social listening consists of:
● Engagement with customers
● Social media sentiment
● Customer service
● Lead generation
● Product feedback
● Reputation management

You should monitor all channels to see what they’re saying about your brand. This is not easy to do all hours of the day, using a service like Google Alerts can help you know what is occurring concerning a specific topic. Taking a look at what is happening in your industry can be very helpful, and you can even see if your business or company is mentioned and if it’s in a positive or negative way. This is a good example of how the service Google Alerts can benefit you and your company. Anytime a topic that you pick relating to your industry is found on the internet, you will get an email with all of the articles related to that topic you chose. You can even put your business or company as one of the alert topics to monitor who is talking about your business.

You can use services like Facebook Business Suite(Page Manager) and Constant Contact to
help with customer engagement from social listening by using the platforms to write posts with the content, reply to comments, give customer service, and reach out to customers via email to offer sales or links to blog articles.

We use all of these services to help you to reach your customers the most effective, and get
the most return on your business.

You may think that social posting is more important than social listening, well it’s actually just as important. You can make posts all day, but if you’re not paying attention to what people are saying about the content of that post, you’re missing out on the opportunity to reply to comments, make relationships for social selling, give customer service, and manage problems if a customer complains about your product. You can take control of the situation and offer them a product replacement, a coupon for their next purchase, or whatever else fits the situation to make the customer satisfied. This then is handling the important concept of social media sentiment, you want everyone to be happy with your product and brand, and be commenting in a positive fashion, talking about your product in a way that makes others want to try it too. Social listening is also the time that you can offer helpful information to the customer, which in turn will not only help them but is another way to build a relationship with the customer. So when you make a post to any platform, you can’t leave it, you must be waiting to engage with your customers. It shows that you want to have a relationship with them and that you care about any problems a customer is having with your product.

We offer both social monitoring and listening to help you with all these aspects of managing
your brand and business on social media.

In summary, social monitoring and social listening are important parts of maintaining and
managing a brand and business. It can help build social business relationships, help you know how much of a return on your money you are getting for your ads, and get an overall picture of how your business and products are thriving. Taking the time to invest in social monitoring and listening, is a very wise, and lucrative choice that every business owner and company should make.