Measure Your Brand Effectiveness, Online

As most of you already know, Heardable.com is in beta, which means our service is far from perfect. But we do strive to make it better day by day. We love talking to fans of Heardable who take the time to send us a feedback via email or phone. Your comments and inqueries really do help us improve the user experience, tweak our our scoring algorithm, or repair bugs.

Recently we received an email from one of our site visitors. She raised some great points in her email -- and we tried our best to address each of them.

Q 1. I use a Wordpress plugin that formats my website in a way that makes it viewable on mobile browsers. Why am I not receiving any points in the portable subcategory?

A 1. Content portability has become the currency of successful online brands. A brand’s portability is a crucial sub-component of your overall Heardable Score. The more mobile devices your site is optimized for, the better positioned your brand will be to capitalize on the emerging mobile market. A brand's portability on Heardable.com is determined by detecting auto redirects for the major mobile devices such as iPhone, Kindle, HTC, Droid, Motorola, Nokia, Palm, RIM, Samsung and SonyEricsson. A high portable score means your firm takes the mobile market seriously and doesn’t assume that everyone visiting your website is doing so from a home/work computer with a large monitor. We also look at whether your brand follows industry standards for mobile web design. The total number of points a brand can earn for their portable subscore is 200.

We realize that several blog platforms now have plug-ins available that enable mobile browsers to detect and display an optimal website experience. This is on our development schedule for a September release. We'll do out best to speed up development so that brands who have gone out of their way to make their blog platforms mobile compliant will soon get the scoring credit they deserve.

Q 2. According to Google, I have 306 indexed pages and 2,021 inbound links. But I am only getting 58 points for my searchable subscore. What gives?

A 2. Heardable utilizes Yahoo as our official source for inbound links and number of indexed pages. We realize that the different search engines measure links and pages differently, but we chose Yahoo as our sole data source to keep the speed of our real-time search queries as fast as possible. Since we measure all brands the same way -- each brand is being treated fairly when you compare one brand to another using the Heardable.com service.

Your brand's searchable score is made up of four key factors:

1) # inbound links

2) # indexed pages

3) Detection of localized content

4) Basic SEO best practices such as the presence of H2 tags, meta descriptions, meta keywords, and page title.

Heardable weighs each of these four factors on a sliding scale based on a range of scores from highest to low, then we use our proprietary scoring algorithm to compile our final score. For example, a popular brand like cnn.com that has 37,703,969 inbound links, 34,804,979 indexed pages on their website, and local content unique to all the states in the US will generate a higher searchable score (cnn.com's was 157 out of 200 as of today).

Q 3. My Twitter account is plainly visible from the homepage of my website. Why am I not getting any sociable subscore credit for having my brand on Twitter?

A 3. I am afraid that inconsistent branding is the culprit. Our crawler searches Twitter and the other social networks looking for a match between your brand name and the brand extension used on the social network. For example, Heardable.com is our domain name and our handle on Twitter is Twitter.com/heardable. Our crawler then verifies the brand match by seeing if the public URL listed on the social site matches your domain name. In your case, it looks like your branded domain name is different from your Twitter extension. This is not a branding best practice. Whenever possible, you should use consistent branding all across the Internet. Here is a recent blog post on this topic:

Consistency: The Secret Sauce of Highly Trusted, Visible Brands

We realize that some brands choose to use different social media handles for a variety of legitimate reasons -- which is why we recently added the feedback section on our brand results page. Now brand owners like yourself can let us know what your social handles are on the various social sites our engine monitors. If you use different brand handles for social networking sites, be sure to let us know what your handles are so you can get credit for being a sociable brand!

Q 4. I have a contact form on my website but I don't seem to be getting actionable subscore credit for it.

A 4. Our initial crawl of your website is limited to 5 pages deep. We do this to ensure that our response time is as fast as possible, while providing our users with a good first assessment of a given brand. Each time a brand is rescanned on Heardable.com, our engine looks at more and more pages on a given site. Over time, hundreds of pages of a brand's website are in our system contributing to our overall analysis. As for our inability to detect your content form, we see that today was the first time we scanned your brand. Most likely, our crawler did not crawl the web page on your site where the contact form resides.

To improve your odds for our crawler being able to detect your form, try placing your contact form on additional pages of your website, or make sure you have a contact us link on your site. Having a contact will give you the same credit as if we had found the form. As long as we detect one of the other, you get credit. No additional credit is given if we detect both. Keep optimizing your website, syndicate content, and beef up your online branding efforts on social networks and then rescan your brand on Heardable.com from time to time. You will likely see a gradual improvement in your Heardable Score.