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Archive for October, 2009

What to do if someone is bad mouthing you in the Search Engine Results Page

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

In the last post, we found that thanks to the Internet, a customer complaint can be heard by a great number of people. Not only can they moan about you on a particular website, the chances are that their gripes will rank highly in the SERPs when people are looking for you.

Your website should definitely rank no.1 when people search for your brand. We’re now going to show you how to control the remaining 9 positions on the page, the ones where negative comments might show. Believe it or not, its possible to control the whole lot!

Social Media pages

To kick off, your social media accounts should have a strong chance of ranking highly for your brand.

(This isn’t the time to discuss social media, but having a Twitter and Facebook account for your business is important way for you to connect with your customers.)

Thanks to the power of these services, your Twitter, Facebook and (if you’ve done some video tutorials) Youtube pages should all be in the top 5 positions. So even if you haven’t yet bought into the idea of using social media for your business, using these accounts has the secondary benefit of helping you control the SERPs for your brand. Since your social media pages should be chock full of positive brand experience, their high ranking will mean the SERPs are shown in the best light possible.

Get good Reviews

It’s paramount for every consumer facing business to get good reviews. First of all, find the websites where your industry reviews tend to be published. You can do this by searching for ‘your market + reviews’. Compile a list of reviews websites relevant to your market.

When a customer next gives you positive feedback on email or over the phone, ask them if they wouldn’t mind leaving their feedback on one of the reviews websites on your list.

Here’s a list of good of general reviews websites.

pricegrabber.co.uk
reviewcentre.com
shopzilla.co.uk
ciao.co.uk
dealtime.co.uk
truste-marketing.co.uk
webuser.co.uk
maxxsave.co.uk
dooyoo.co.uk
resellerratings.com

Get a Google Local Business listing

As we mentioned before, a Google local business listing lets you generate high quality traffic from both Google local and Google maps. They are highly likely to rank well for brand searches too, so this is an easy win on two separate counts.

Use your website profile pages

There are many websites which automatically create a static page for each domain name that contains a small amount of information, usually from the domain whois record, all about your website. This includes the website name, a screen grab, the domain owner, and a traffic assessment.

These pages are created to grab brand traffic from the search engines, and are covered with Google ads. But as the domain owner, they do give you the opportunity to edit the information they include. These websites often rank well in the SERPs for brand searches. Editing yours allows you to control yet another result in the SERPs.

Here are some websites that offer this service:

websiteoutlook.com
weeviews.com
statbrain.com
aboutus.org
valuatemysite.com
quantcast.com

Think about getting a Wikipedia page?

The power of Wikipedia means that an entry all about your business will rank highly. Its not easy to succeed getting one of these, not least since your business needs to pass the notability guidelines.

The other problem is that a Wikipedia article can be edited by anyone, which means that you have to keep a close eye to check that no-one has been tampering with yours.

Respond to bad comments

Whilst this won’t stop bad comments from appearing in the first places, what it does to is show to anyone reading is that you are trying to respond to the customers’ complaint, and right the issue. Most people accepts that some customers will always complain, but if you fairly -and publicly – deal with that complaint, then readers will see the truth in what you’re trying to do.

And that’s it.

So if you do find some poor comments rankling highly for brand searches, it’s not the end of the world. Use all the tools listed above to make sure you control the whole page of the SERPS for your brand searches.

And there’s an upside too. By controlling the whole pages for your brand searches, you can show your website and company in the best possible light.

Tags: customer complaints
Posted in Search Engines, Social Media | 21 Comments »

Oh no! Someone is bad mouthing you in the Search Engine Results Page

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

Back in the dark old days before a few bright chaps at CERN decided to stick leads from one computer into the back of another, a complaining customer had few outlets for their rage.

The chances are, they’d moan to their friends, which would mean that you could kiss goodbye to getting any business from them.

If you were lucky they might ring up your product support line, which mean you’d at least get the chance to listen to their gripes and try and help them out.

The worst case scenario would be if they made it onto trading standards, or even ‘Watchdog’. Few businesses can survive a mauling from those two attack dogs.

Thanks to the Internet – and Web 2.0 especially – a complainer has a whole arsenal at their disposal. They can moan on their Facebook or Twitter, give you a terrible score on a review site, and start ranting on a blog or a forum.

Not only do these negative comments get read by visitors to those sites, they also have a strong chance to show up in the Search Engine Results pages (SERPs) when people are searching using your brand keywords.

Someone searching for your brand is most likely of all searchers to end up buying from you. They are, that is, until they see some bad reviews in the SERPs before they’ve even clicked onto your website!

As we mentioned before, Search Engines are currently engaged in the ‘Real Time’ arms race. They’re giving increased coverage to forum comments, blog posts and social network activity. Google themselves have boosted reviews up their own SERPs. All this means that bad comments are more likely than ever to appear in the SERPs when people are searching for your brand.

So that’s it. Game over. There’s nothing you can do about a poor review ranking highly for your brand, is there?

You bet there is. In the next post, we’ll show you how to take control of the whole 1st page of the SERPs for your own brand searches.

Tags: complaints, SEO, Social Media
Posted in Search Engines, Social Media | 1 Comment »