Your digital reputation consists of everything about you that is visible online.
SEO by sem[c] is all about getting you found more effectively online. Branded SEO is concerned with how you are found for your name. Non-branded SEO involves getting you found for what you do. The process of discovering and implementing this is a process of enhancing your reputation online so that it becomes an effective marketing tool.
What do you do if a search for your name prominently displays negative comments? What do you do if the statements are true? What is they’re false? How do you hide stuff on the Internet?
There are a number of terms for this being bandied about like “negative SEO” but we prefer “digital reputation repair” because we really believe that SEO should enhance your brand by clearly and ubiquitously linking it online with the most relevant non-brand terms in every possible way. These terms are the words that most people use when looking for your goods or services.
One of tricky parts of my writing about clients with these type of needs is that I can’t reveal anything about them other than their circumstances and those only in general terms. One of our clients wanted to erase all trace of themselves; their children, references linking them to specific businesses… everything. Another client found themselves attacked on Yelp! This was a bit unusual since their business wasn’t a restaurant, salon or any kind of retail operation. They found out the hard way that you can’t ignore it when a very likely prospect was unsatisfied over the initial dismissive approach.
Dealing with issues like these requires a custom strategy in each case that will ease the problems with your online reputation by emphasizing the positive using the target terms from the non-branded identity and exploring all the possibilities for correction.
One of our clients was recently forced to respond to a personal attack on both him and his business by individuals using social media. His business is not of a type that you would expect to be reviewed on Yelp. He did respond at length to the first attack “review”. This did not end the problem and other negative posts followed. This, in turn, worsened the situation to the point at which he was told by a very likely prospect that he was taken out of consideration for a professional engagement because of these negative reviews on Yelp.
What would you do?
First and foremost it is really important for you to respond. If you don’t respond you create the impression that the negative comments may have some validity. The nature of your response is critical. It’s natural to feel attacked because that is indeed the case. If you respond in a way that can be considered in any way defensive it will only make the matter worse. It may even invite “piling on”. sem[c] has created a plan to improve the situation on Yelp in a positive way that will give the users of that service a more accurate and balanced view of the situation.
It’s a good practice to think of your response as an opportunity to educate the public about what you are doing. You are not going to change the mind of the poster. Especially if, as in the case of our client, the poster is completely mistaken about what your role is and is complaining that you did or didn’t do something that has nothing to do with you. The beauty of a social media success is that your clients can say what you did for them. This is a great way to allow prospects to discover the answer to the all-important question “What’s in it for me?” (W.I.I.F.M.) in a very understandable and relatable way.
You can be absolutely sure that your prospects and clients don’t think about what you do the same way you do. This being the case you need to talk to them in the way they think, not you. You really want to answer the W.I.I.F.M. question… but how? In order to do that successfully it is to your advantage to know how people use search to look for what you do. Figuring that out for you is an important part of what sem[c] offers you.
Getting you found for that by Google and other search engines is the rest of what we do. Call, email or click.
There continue to be important new developments in online retail sales even after the nearly twenty years since commerce went online.
Brick and mortar retailers continue to struggle. Former powerhouses like Best Buy and Barnes and Noble appear to be in trouble largely due to their inability to compete effectively with Amazon and other online retailers.
An increase in the advantages offered by Amazon is close by as they roll out same day delivery in select markets. Walmart is also test marketing same day. Why go to a store at all?
Starting an online store has never been easier. sem[c] has worked successfully with a number of businesses creating online stores with Shopify. Can small retailers compete successfully with the giants? The answer is a qualified “yes”. As in any competition the underdog needs to promote an effective point of distinction.
Google AdWords has given retailers even more powerful online ad capabilities with their recent changes to their Product Listing Ads. This gives even more precision control to the marketing reach of even the smallest online store.
What is a good strategy for such a store? How do you position it for success?
A small online store will offer a curated collection of items for sale. The nature of that curation will be one point of distinction. Some other areas that can be promoted as distinctions include price, unique selections and service.
Price is a very important distinction. Being the highest in a list of retailers offering similar or the same product will be unlikely to lead to very many sales. Being the lowest in the same list might lead to sales but definitely cuts your margin. Large firms like Amazon and Walmart change their prices continuously during peak retail seasons like Black Friday and Monday.
Your store will not have the same type of pricing problem if you offer unique items. This is possible in a number of different ways like bundling or white labeling. Being able to offer one-of-a-kind anything requires a great deal of creativity and can involve a great deal of risk. It may require a Kickstarter finance campaign.
Google has created a map of the buying process that positions each type of online channel in relation to a purchase:
Google shows where the influence of various channels is closest to the sale in the buying process.
You can click on the graphic to adjust the display to show how this relationship varies from industry to industry.
This quantifies the delay in time between marketing and sales. The effects of SEO take months to realize but its value is seen by its proximity to an actual sale in the chart. The only channel that is closer is a direct click which means the prospect can go to the URL of the item of interest directly.
We have seen a lot of consternation about the direct effect one can expect from social media marketing. The chart proposes that it and display advertising are at the far end of assisting interaction whereas successful SEO and its benefit to organic results are closest to the last interaction or sale.
The Argonne National Lab in collaboration with the Chicago Institute of Art has conclusively proved that Pablo Picasso painted masterpieces using common housepaint:
This supports a more general idea that if you know what you are doing it doesn’t necessarily require any special tools or supplies to get it done. Picasso thought the type of paint he used to be so unimportant that he never discussed it. He didn’t decide that he wanted to do something with housepaint and wound up with “Guernica”. Quite the opposite.
We consulted on a project recently on which a particular platform for e-commerce was of interest to the client. There are several businesses under the same ownership and this platform was used for e-commerce on one of their websites. We have developed using this platform and our clients have found it to be a very good approach to e-commerce. The project overview was to refresh a legacy website that wasn’t working. The website had ineffective navigation and, as a result, a visitor had little chance of discovering much.
We prepared a proposal based on reskinning the content after using the sem[c] process to discover how best to optimize it. We included an innovative approach to utilizing an advanced search function of the e-commerce platform they had not used in their previous project. Our proposal was accepted.
The kickoff meeting revealed a very large amount of previously undisclosed information pertinent to how the businesses worked and their very different audiences. That is to say that is became very clear that part of the difficulty with the legacy website is that it really needed to be two. It also became clear that neither of these two websites would be doing e-commerce. Another surprise was that one of the websites needed to access information that the company was contractually prevented from showing on the Internet. Most importantly there was internal disagreement about all of those points.
The next day our client terminated us. The reason given was that we were not exclusive specialists in the e-commerce platform that was used for their e-commerce site. The only thing clear about what they needed to do with “our” project meant (to us) the platform was not a good fit to best fulfill their needs. Perversely, doing the project with that platform had become their only requirement despite their lack of clarity about what to do.
Your online presence needs to make it clear to your audience what you offer of value to them. The software you use is only a means to that end. It can help or hinder your goals. It’s very unlikely that a visitor will be so impressed with your unusual use of a serverside technology that they buy muffins from you.
The DISC model of behavioral types can be a valuable way to help identify how to best communicate with a person to generate the most leads. If you speak in a way that is most accessible to a person they are much more likely to understand your point. The DISC model can be visualized as a set of axis: This model predicts a dichotomy between “Task oriented” and “People oriented” behaviors. Another popular behavior model, Myers-Briggs, identifies a very similar thinking/feeling axis.
In ZMOT: Winning the Zero Moment of Truth we read: “The truth is that for many shoppers, the single most powerful impetus to buy is someone else’s endorsement.” The DISC model predicts that this would be most especially true for those on the “People Oriented” side. The Target Training International, Inc. DISC manual Chapter 11 shows the overall mean averages for each behavioral group as well as details when comparing gender and other variables. In general, the types of behavior models are fairly evenly distributed across the population.
The statement about endorsements in no way dismisses the probability that for around half of all shoppers the facts pertaining to their buying decision would be “the most powerful impetus to buy” because they are more “Task Oriented”. Equally true.
The point of this discussion is to underscore how important it is for marketing to speak effectively to all pertinent behavioral types.
The actual weighting of how important this dichotomy is for any particular business depends additionally on the type of business. For example the above average up-time stats for an ISP may be just as effective for that business as a Pinterest following is for sales of a particular dress.
The complexity of all this tends to increase over time. ZMOT shows an ever-increasing number of online influences involved in many types of buying decisions. Yet, confusion still exists in the business community about how this works.
sem[c] had a client who convinced himself that his 4.5/5 overall Yelp average was not valuable to his business because he couldn’t get Yelp to remove the reviews that he found offensive. His sales figures showed that females were an important demographic to his car repair business. He removed all website references to his business’ Yelp rating out of anger and against our very vocal objections. Almost immediately, he began reporting that he was getting fewer prospects from website contact. According to TTI, Inc. data, females are more frequently identified in “People Oriented” behavior patterns and consequently we would predict that endorsements would be particularly effective in influencing their buying decisions. Implementing a new AdWords campaign specifically targeted to a female audience more than doubled traffic to his sites but he reported no change in sales. Despite the obvious conclusion, he saw no reason to resume using the Yelp reviews as a sales tool.
In another Yelp anecdote, I had a personal response from a restaurant owner who offered me a $100 gift certificate to his place if I would “take down” my Yelp description of an unpleasant evening there because it lowered his average down to 4.5. Both of these examples show the desire of business owners to manipulate endorsements as well as the value to the consumer of a supplier like Yelp who resists being manipulated. Yelp realizes that impartiality is of the utmost importance to validity of their content. Both car repair and restaurants are types of businesses that are very influenced by Yelp for better or worse.
It remains important to practice the discipline of SEO which is to clearly identify your business NOT in the terms which you think of it but, rather, how others are looking for the benefits that your business offers. This will meld into the social media aspects of your business. A good record at Yelp can be an influential sales tool but you need to visibility from online marketing to build the lead generation that will allow prospects to see your ratings and to discover the facts about what your business offers them.
Wouldn’t it be great if SEO got you sales the day you started? While that is frequently the expectation, it ain’t gonna happen in the real world. The effect of successful SEO will increase the number of qualified prospects knowing about you. SEO takes time to achieve this level of success that is measured in months… a length of time that is far from instantaneous.
But even though a prospect is qualified they will be somewhere along the time line in their buying cycle. This is to say that they may not be at what the Google commissioned study “Winning the Zero Moment of Truth” refers to as ZMOT or the point at which the prospects decides to buy. Our friends at the Samurai Business Group teach that it is at this point that the prospect’s apparent reason is re-defined by their compelling reason and they make their purchase.
To better understand this let’s use a real-life example of a car repair shop. It’s easy to see that anyone that owns a car would have an apparent reason to buy car repair at some point. The ZMOT study shows that online research in the Automotive category can be intense months before a purchase. This suggests that there is great benefit in having your marketing make you one of the “usual suspects” for future customers that will buy several months in the future. SEO marketing in this case is an investment in the future success of your business. The ZMOT process also details the increasingly large number of online interactions now involved in many if not all buying decisions. It is no longer enough to simply have a good website. There is an entire virtual landscape in which your digital reputation is recorded. It has become a very good business priority to tend this landscape. Social media like Facebook, LinkedIn, Yelp and others are all little gardens in this landscape.
It is only when a prospect’s compelling reason asserts itself that they will make a purchase. Samurai teaches that those reasons include pain, fear of future pain or the prospect of gain. In our example of car repair the prospect of gain is probably the least persuasive. It could figure in when someone is about to sell a car on their own. Otherwise, a purchase will be made when the car is broken or likely to break soon. Once again, it’s easy to see that these two options have different degrees of urgency. The worse the problem the more quickly a purchase will be made. With proliferation of smart phones the research at the zero moment of truth may be done from the broken down car. It is only in this last resort that marketing might lead to a quick sale.
SEO marketing is our business. Contact us to find out more.
If it’s the Googlebot you really want to say something meaningful. “Take me to your leader” (position) would be nice wouldn’t it? But seriously, your website is visited on a regular basis by it and other ‘bots or crawlers and that leads to your site being catalogued. You can facilitate or impede this process fairly simply if you know what to do. That is the basis of the search engine optimization process.
Several of our clients have come to us recently with problems related to establishing proper communications with the Googlebot and the others. Your website’s robot conversation happens via a text file on your website called robots.txt and even not having one can cause problems.
We found one misconfigured example that resulted in Google’s description of the site being blocked and Google said so publicly. This is not a result you want clients and prospects to see. This misconfiguration had also had a negative effect on the search returns for this site. We corrected the problem and within several weeks the description appeared correctly and the site resumed moving upwards in search rankings.
This robots.txt file has a variety of uses. It can block access to all or parts of your site. It can block some or all ‘bots. One of our clients is using an older ecommerce system that changes expired product listings into pages that look like an error to Google. When Google indicates that your site is exhibiting hundreds of errors it will negatively affect your search rankings. We fixed this problem by using the robots.txt file to instruct the Googlebot and other ‘bots to not catalogue the problem pages related to expired listings from the crawl. Once again this had a positive effect on the site’s search rankings.
If you have questions about robots or anything to do with making your website a more effective business tool call me, text me, email me or tweet me.
