The official weblog of ClickBook.net. ClickBook streamlines the process of appointment scheduling for small business, schools and other organisations. For technical updates please visit the Technical Blog.

ClickBook delivers new customers straight to your schedule

Mark Demicoli  20 October 2010 03:45:45 PM
It seems the advantages of online booking just keep piling up.  We haven't made a huge noise about it so far, but one of our major goals has always been to streamline the connection between your ClickBook profile and the web, via all the big search engines.  Many who have paid someone to create a website for them may have heard the term "SEO" bandied around.  SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation.  Essentially, what this means is "making your website as attractive as possible to for search engines".  The more search-attractive your site is, the more traffic will be sent your way.  What 'attractive' means in this context is a whole art & science best left for another day, however I will mention one key pillar, and that is, how many 'attractive' websites are linking to your website.

Lets say you're Joe Plumber and Obama decides to put a link on his website to your website (this is called a 'backlink').  Suddenly, when people search for plumber, old Joe will appear at the very top of search listings, since such a prominent and popular website like Obama's is linking to him.

When you become a ClickBook service provider, your listing appears linked from the ClickBook homepage as far as search engines are concerned, which today has a fairly good 'attractiveness' score (4 out of 10).  What this means is that when someone searches for a business like yours, you are far more likely to be in the first page of results (or even on top), than if you simply had your own stand-alone website without anyone linking to it (or with lower ranked pages than the ClickBook.net home page).

To boil it down,

ClickBook = More New Customers

So why am I rattling on about this?  Well it's my job to rattle on about it, but last week we received this fascinating message from one of our more recent customers.  Alas, they have decided that they will not continue their trial of ClickBook, for perhaps the strangest reason we've ever seen.

" Hi, I would like to cancel my account as I have not found online booking to be right for my business. Somehow people are finding me on this site and making bookings which I cant fulfill, so it is not practical for me to keep this account open. Thanks [name suppressed] "


What a problem to have!