We like to switch things up a bit here at Bazaarvoice. When it comes to Net Promoter Score, most companies give a survey, in which each responder rates the company once on a scale of 0-10 as to whether or not they would recommend this business to a friend.  At Bazaarvoice, we use our review submission process to accomplish this task. Each time a contributor submits a review, they are asked, “Would you recommend this company to a friend?” So, if they submit multiple reviews, they have the opportunity to give multiple Net Promoter Scores.

In this way, we have a unique and powerful case where we can get multiple NPS from one contributor, and track it over time. This individualized information can be super insightful when paired with net promoter comments , which are collected along with the NPS to give contributors an opportunity to explain their rating. Our recommendation to handle multiple Net Promoter Scores:

1. Determine a timeframe for your NPS. (ie. Holiday NPS from Nov – Jan, or your company’s Q1)
2. Look at all NPS within that timeframe
3. If any contributors have submitted multiple NPS, take the most recent NPS for each contributor
4. Calculate your business’ NPS by subtracting percentage of detractors from percentage of promoters
5. Ta da! You have your NPS. Now trend this over time and see if customer sentiment towards your company is going up or down. Or you can compare yourself against others in the industry.

What’s our reasoning behind taking the most recent NPS? We assume you want to know how your customer’s would rate you right now and if they would recommend you to others. Perhaps they had a bad experience three months ago, but you reached out to them and now they would promote you to their friends and family. It only makes sense to use that last score as a way to determine their sentiment.

Other interesting stats and facts about NPS:

• Good: Two-thirds of contributors are promoters, rating the likelihood to recommend your company a 9 or 10 out of 10
• Bad: Only 16% are detractors, rating 6 or below
• Ugly: Detractors rate their product 46% lower than promoters
• Random: Detractors write 14% more than Promoters. Complaints are wordier and more detailed than praises

The million dollar question

“What can I do to improve my NPS?” I don’t want to point out the obvious, but NPS decreases as your product or service rating decreases. In other words, your company’s reputation and WOM is directly related to how people view your products, so improve those products and services! “Service” and “products” were some of the most frequent words in net promoter comments.  If you have great products and service, you will have a rocking Net Promoter Score, and thus be more profitable. In the words of Satmetrix:

“The Net Promoter Score, or NPS®, is a straightforward metric that holds companies and employees accountable for how they treat customers. It has gained popularity thanks to its simplicity and its linkage to profitable growth.”

Well, duh. Great Products + Awesome Customer Service = High NPS and High Profitability.

But there’s more you can do

Analyzing a sample of 30,000 net promoter comments from over 550 brands, we found that the store experience, especially having friendly and helpful staff, is crucial.

Promoters also rave about:

• prices
• delivery
• value
• selection/variety
• shipping,
• speedy service

What Promoters are saying:

Detractors are unhappy about:

• store experience
• online orders
• shipping
• and delivery

But poor customer service and product quality were still the largest offenders.

What Detractors are saying:

For a sky-high NPS, focus your resources first and foremost on products and service, and then on store experience, delivery, selection and shipping.

Note: This post was co-authored by Kurt Krake, Bazaarvoice advisory board member and President of Search-Werks

At this point, if you aren’t incorporating user-generated content (UGC) into your SEO content strategy, you are already behind. For several years, a trending topic in the SEO industry has been the power of “fresh” web content, that which is updated frequently. Benefits such as traffic from long tail keyword searches and boosted relevancy have always been very real, but an additional benefit has recently been given new attention.

After making infrastructure changes (called Caffeine) last year to allow for faster indexing & crawling of the web, Google recently announced a change to its “freshness algorithm,” which impacts what pages it shows to searchers, and is “designed to give you the most up-to-date results.” This algorithm change appears to affect up to 35% of Google searches which dwarfs the much talked about Panda Update.  Doing back of the envelope calculations, this affects roughly 11K searches/second and over 30B searches per month. This is clearly further affirmation of the Query Deserves Freshness concept that the SEO community has observed over the last couple of years. Google’s blog post to announce this algorithm change has three key use cases to follow for many types of websites.

The first example of a search that requires fresh content applies to news-related topics, and Google mentions:

"Now when you search for current events like [occupy oakland protest]… you’ll see more high-quality pages that might only be minutes old."

So, for websites that have a tendency to show fresh content every time Googlebot shows up, it’s likely those will get a boost from this update.

The second example Google uses is a recurring event. For example, it’s unlikely that this calendar will remain the #1 result for “seo conferences”:

Third, the post highlighted product content, describing it as, “information that changes often, but isn’t really a hot topic or a recurring event."  When content has been recently generated on an existing page, that page is more likely to rank than other pages with no new content. Google specifically discusses review content here, but this could apply to tweets, questions and answers, or any other type of user-generated content (UGC).

“Being a large merchant with hundreds of thousands of pages, it can be challenging to keep the entire site fresh,” commented a customer of ours, Mike Miller from Build.com, when we asked how he keeps his webpages fresh in the search engine algorithms:

 “I've come across many websites that spend far too much time focusing on optimizing for search engines and not enough focus on the customer.  I encourage my team to keep the customer top of mind at all times.

Promoting customers to submit product reviews and ask questions is an extremely useful method for keeping content fresh.  Customers tend to trust each other, so by providing tools for them to share their experiences creates an enjoyable buying experience.”

Here are some ways to reap the benefits of Google’s focus on freshness.

Keep XML sitemaps updated

This oldie but goodie tactic is often rushed or overlooked entirely. By adding appropriate priority and last update flags to the URLs in your sitemap, you can indicate to Google when page content is new. Also include mobile pages and video content in your sitemap!

Add social and news feeds

Add recent blog headlines, newsfeed items, or your Twitter feeds to high visibility parts of your site because fresh content is what tends to get tweeted about most. This ensures that prominent areas of your site have the fresh content Google is looking for!

Keep your content current

Develop a content strategy for your website based not only on target keywords with lots of traffic, but also ever-changing keywords for current issues, topics, or trends. Use Google Insights and trending on Twitter as keyword research tools to identify those current issues that you can develop a video, blog post, or tweet about. For example, a Christian ministry site posted a blog about using the term “Xmas” instead of “Christmas” – Does Writing ‘Xmas’ Take Christ out of Christmas? Every holiday season, this is a popular subject, so the site incorporated it into their content strategy and posted their point of view. Since this post  was timely, it generated lots of shares.

For major brand websites, which have been impacted both positively and negatively by this change, it is not practical to do large-scale content freshness updates to thousands of product detail pages individually. UGC is your best and most scalable method for meeting the freshness ranking signal across those pages (learn about our approach to content freshness).

Customer-centric SEO

As users, most of us probably realize the validity of finding the freshest content when we are looking for information. As web marketers, sometimes we forget that content we created just weeks ago may not be in line with this week’s topics or priorities. By following some of the steps above, you will not only be tackling long-tail traffic; you will also be improving your site’s relevance for topics that require freshness. Members of the Bazaarvoice SEO team have been speaking at conferences all year (most recently at #SESCHI) and during that time, companies have been eagerly finding out how to add UGC to their toolkit to benefit from fresh content.  Go forth and be fresh!

What strategies do you use to increase the amount of “fresh” content on your site?