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Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category

How to boost your GEO located SEM strategy

Tuesday, August 17th, 2010

What is a geo located SEM campaign?

A local geo-targeted campaign is an essential part of any marketing strategy for small to medium sized businesses. In particular, to have in place a correct GEO located SEO and PPC campaign is a great way of driving quality traffic to local websites.

A geo-targeted search marketing campaign is based on optimizing location long tail keywords in order to increase local leads and conversion rate.

To take advantage of the recent growth of geo located social websites like Foursquare and Gowalla, any web-savvy local business owners should start getting into social media marketing by launching its own geo targeted social campaign.

There are some interesting tools out there that help you get started with geo targeted social marketing.

Geo-targeted campaign tool

For example, GEOtoko is a nice platform that allows you to create your own geo targeted campaigns in a minute.

You can create location-based contests and sweepstakes to reward customers for checking in using Foursquare, Gowalla, Twitter, Yelp and so on. You can also post your updates directly in Facebook.

Once you have created your campaign, it is crucial to promote it on a daily basis through your social networking profiles as a constant reminder of the on-going contest to your potential customers.

Our first location based campaign

Here at Euston Digital we have recently launched our first location based campaign with GEOtoko, an interesting contest based on the tweets and checks-in that we receive daily.

For every tweet and check-in with Foursquare and Gowalla, from August 10 to August 17 we have been giving away a free website audit .

We think that geo-targeting marketing is a great addition to the overall SEM strategy of small to medium sized businesses, so keep your eyes on our blog for the latest tips on how to best strengthen your local popularity.

Start your own geo targeted campaign today for your chance to win more local leads!

Tags: geo marketing, local SEO, SEO, Social Media
Posted in Mobile, SEO, Social Media | No Comments »

SEO News Round Up

Friday, August 13th, 2010

Happy Friday Guys! We hope you enjoy some of our favourite picks from the last two weeks in search.

GENERAL SEO

Google can’t find the original source of content? – May update follow-up

What are biggest challenges for an SEO project? In this article you will find 9 essential  SEO action points.

Using Excel for SEO, in this article a nice collection of tips.

MOBILE SEO

Start thinking mobile SEO, how to optimise your website for iPad and tablets users.

Best practices for mobile search marketing campaigns in this article featured @searchengineland.

SOCIAL SEO

Twitter vs. Facebook – Twitter is imposing itself as the new “Answer Machine”. Why Google should fear Twitter.

What makes a tweet influential? New research by HP Labs’ Social Computing Lab, shows some interesting insights.

Foursquare vs. Facebook – Facebook is jumping into the geo-location game. And the winner is …

GLOBAL SEO

In this interesting article, Bill Hunt explains the SEO challenges of language detection, essential information to optimize local market content.

Other News from the World of Search

Google and Verizon, two leading players in Internet service and content, are nearing an agreement that could allow Verizon to speed some paid online content. What does this mean for SEO? Your site speed is an even more important factor now.

Posted in Link Building, SEO, Social Media | 1 Comment »

How to advertise on Facebook – a Beginner’s Guide

Tuesday, July 27th, 2010

According to recent stats, 1 in every 5 display ad is served within Facebook. That’s an incredible achievement for the social networking platform, which now boasts over 500m users.

There must be a reason why there’s so much advertising money pouring into Facebook, so if you want to find out what all the fuss is about, and would like to try it out, read on.

Set your expectations

Before you get going with Facebook, you need to set yourself some realistic expectations about the environment. If you’re from a search background, you need to radically downgrade your opinion of what a good Click Through Rate or Conversion Rate is.

With search, you’re giving people a product they’re actually looking for. Within Facebook, you’re catching them whilst they’re doing something else. They might fit your target market – and be potential buyers of your product – but they’re busy speaking to friends, looking at photos, spending some leisure time. So they’re much less receptive to your ad, and are less likely to be impressed by it. And they’re not in the environment to be ‘warmed up’ to your message.

So whilst your PPC search campaign may well achieve a CTR of 5% and a conversion rate of 5%, Facebook Ads are more likely to have a CTR of 0.05% and a conversion rate of nearer 1%.

Set some goals

There are plenty of ads within Facebook that have traditional goals. These ads lead to traditional websites, with a message and a call to action.

But some of the more successful Facebook advertising drives traffic towards a brand’s social media, be that another Facebook page, a group, or even an application.

Here the goal is more long term: the creation of a relationship between the brand and the individual, and the hope of some longer term sales. Marketers may well set their goal as a specific increase in the number of Fans or Follows.

For either method, you need to set your goal and relate it back to some financials. That’s easy for the traditional ad linking to a website – you should set a CPA and ROI value you want to hit. But for the latter, you need to place a value on having a fan, and what those fans do in terms of either buying from you or recommending you to others.

Set a CPC and a budget

Integral to defining your financials is setting a budget and maximum CPC. You should set the CPC much lower than the amount you are prepared to pay for a click from search, since the conversion rate will be lower. Once the system works out how many clicks your ad generates it may well push up the CPC you have to pay in order to get traffic.

As with AdWords, set the budget at a level that will not limit your exposure. A campaign that gets suspended because it hits a daily cap is not making efficient use of the platform.

Creative must-haves

This might be obvious, but ads with images get a much higher CTR than those without. Try to make the image intriguing – not just your logo – but at the same time it’s got to relate to your brand and product too.

Your message should follow similar rules to AdWords creative. Avoid excessive punctuation. Write clearly in correct English. Highlight benefits. And add urgency with your call to action.

Make sure you track your ad with a parameter. If you measure your campaigns with Google analytics just use the URL Builder. The chances are that you will be testing out a variety of creatives with a range of targeting options. Be sure to give each ad a unique tracking link to make optimisation much easier.

Reaching the right target market – demographics

Facebook lets you target your audience using some very precise targeting tools. You can choose from:

location
demographic
language

and you then get to delve into the keywords that people use to describe what they like.

Reaching the right target market – likes and interests

If your target market should be into fashion, it might be that they include words like ‘fashion’ and ‘clothes’ in their interests, so make sure you add them. But also try adding brand names too, even if they compete with your own. As you type your keywords, Facebook will make suggestions – so where relevant try to include those too.

Reaching the right market – Connections

Within Facebook, you can choose to target particular people who are only connected to a group or Facebook page that you look after, which means that you can actively reach out to your current audience.

Unless you’ve got a new product and want to get people back to your page or site, you might consider this a waste of money, so try excluding users with this connection.

Another option is to target ‘friends of connections’, so that your will be reaching out to those users who are connected to people that are already fans of your Facebook page. This is a really powerful feature: your users have probably mentioned you and your products in passing, which will have spiked their friend’s interest. When they see your ad, it acts to jog the memory and get them to your site. You’ve reached that user through word of mouth AND advertising, and they will be much more likely to buy.

Testing

The great thing about having so many targeting options is that you can test the performance of one audience against another. If you’re not sure whether you want to target web designers or web developers, then set up identical campaigns, creatives and targeting options but focus one around web designers and the other for web developers. Then measure the results you get from each.

This example is just a simple A/B, but the chances are that you have lots of different targeting options to test. Sketch out all the different options and go through testing each one.

This might seem laborious, but the prize is large: If you crack Facebook as an advertising platform, the potential to scale is huge.

Do you like my advertising?

You may have noticed that it’s possible for users to ‘like’ adverts without actually clicking on them. Aside from adding that advertiser to the list of likes within a users’ profile, it’s not completely clear what it means to an advertiser whose adverts are ‘liked’. Facebook themselves don’t say, but the chances are that if not already, it will have an impact on a ‘quality score’ that means your advert has a greater chance of being shown, and at a lower CPC.

Given this, ask your friends or followers to ‘like’ the ad if they see it – you may see the benefits later on.

That’s it

Facebook advertising can offer you the potential to reach a huge audience with some quite advanced targeting tools. Follow this guide to give you campaigns a good start. Think I’ve missed something? Leave us a comment below.

Posted in Display, Social Media | No Comments »

Good Reviews can now boost your AdWords campaign

Tuesday, July 13th, 2010

We’ve written previously about the importance of fostering positive review. Great user feedback should form the cornerstone of your social media strategy.

Reviews are set to become even more important, as is now Google starting to include ratings within your AdWords creative. Called ‘Seller Rating Extensions’, these are designed to make it easier for users to identify those merchants who are highly rated.

This is what they look like:

Appearing as a series of stars from Google Product Search, these rating are aggregated from a series of review sites across the web

In order to get star ratings on your ads, you need to be rated in Google Product Search with at least 4 or more stars, along with at least 30 reviews. Those searching can choose to look at the reviews before they visit your site. And you only get charged once they click to visit your website.

What to do?

If you’re not already appearing in Google Product Search, then now is the time to start to get listed. Let us know if you want help with that.

Once your product is live, make sure you work hard to get as many reviews as possible. Here’s some easy to follow advice on growing positive reviews. For in depth expert advice on that and other part of your social media marketing strategy, get in touch.

Tags: Google AdWords, reviews, Social Media
Posted in PPC, Social Media | No Comments »

Ratings and Reviews to appear on Google AdWords

Friday, April 23rd, 2010

Yesterday Google announced their Product Reviews Program. They’re going to start to include ratings and users reviews in their shopping results, search results and in AdWords too.

The whole point – they say – is to make consumers better informed about purchasing decisions.

Later on that day some keen eye PPC afficionados on Search Engine Land spotted user reviews and ratings appear on AdWords ads. Here’s what they saw.

We’ve spotted nothing yet, but this could well  be a game changer for any Pay Per Click campaign. Users will naturally gravitate to those with the best ratings, and even a modest rise in CTR for these advertisers will transform their campaigns.

So whilst its important to keep an eye on your quality score, all website owners should be working hard to manage their online reputation and foster positive reviews.

This ties together the marketing channels of PPC of Social media ever closer. To find out how Euston Digital can help you with that, get in touch.

Tags: adwords, pay per click, PPC, ratings, reviews
Posted in PPC, Social Media | No Comments »

How to get your content published on Google News

Tuesday, March 16th, 2010

Every day we speak to website owners who are obsessed with boosting the amount of traffic they get from Google. They want to be number 1 for searches that are relevant to their product or service.

But if you publish a blog, or regularly update the content on your website, you also have a crack and getting traffic from Google News.

Google News is a constantly updated feed of the latest news from publishers all over the world. Whilst the main news topics are often provided by major news organisations, content for the smaller topics and niche areas often comes from quite small publishers. And if you get it right, Google News can send you lots of traffic: Last year they sent 4bn visits to news publishers.

Here’s how to try to get your content into Google News

A/ In addition to your main sitemap, create a news Sitemap. If you have a WordPress site, you can also run the Google News Sitemap Generator plugin.

B/ Place your articles into folders and sub folders.

Again, if you run a WordPress blog then your articles will already be categorised in this way. This is so that Google know which news section your content is most appropriate for

C/ Start your article with your location. EG ‘London’. This is so that Google can place your content in the region that’s most relevant.

D/ Use a large non-clickable image at the top of your article, and give it a caption and alt tag

E/ Make sure your URLs are permanent and static. Again, if you are using WordPress then this will happen automatically.

The reason that you need static URLs is that Google needs to be able to easily locate specific content, and it doesn’t want your content to move around, as it makes it harder to place it in the right section.

F/ Use relevant keywords in title and main body.

This is probably a bit obvious, but make sure you use the keywords that your article is all about within your title. For example, if you’re doing an article about a new factory opening in Swindon, make sure the keywords ‘new factory’ and ’swindon’ are in the headline. This means that you’ll have to dispense with witty, leftfield or unusual headlines.

G/ Write a continuous article, in paragraph blocks, without breaking up your text with ads.

This makes sure Google is getting your whole story, not just the top segment.

So that’s all the stuff that helps you get indexed and published. But how do you boost your rankings in Google News?

1. To start with its good old link equity. Make sure you clearly link to your article from the powerful pages on the rest of your site. Use Social Media to try and quickly develop inbound links to your content

2. Is your news ‘new’ and ‘timely’? The nature of ‘news’ is that it tends to be short lived. Can you make the story on time before the world moves on? How recently have you posted your content? Link equity

3. Are you using citations and quotations? The best news stories quote their sources and often link to them. Make sure you use the most relevant ones.

4. Locally Relevant: Is your news pertinent to you local population? A good local story talks about local issues and how the news is relevant to them.

5. Popularity defined by Click Through Rate. Google wants to publish news that people are interested in. If your news article gets lots of interest, defined as the number of people clicking on your link divided by the number of people seeing it, then your ranking will be boosted.

Summary

Google News can be an important and valuable source of traffic to your site. If you regularly update your content with news, and you are operating in a niche area, then follow these guidelines to try and get published.

Had any luck with Google News? Leave us a comment below.

Tags: google news
Posted in Search Engines, Social Media | 2 Comments »

How to use LinkedIn to market your business

Thursday, January 14th, 2010

Social Media Marketing is the new media buzzphrase of the moment. The Internet is starting to burst with opinions and ideas of how to use social media to market your business.

We’ve not been afraid of that either, with our basic guide on how to use Twitter.

However, when people talk about social media they’re usually referring to Facebook, Twitter and sometimes MySpace.

The social network that is often overlooked is LinkedIn.

The traditional approach to LinkedIn is to use it to promote your own personal business interests and connections, often as a career tool. But the power of this business focused social network can be bring leads, sales & revenue too.

LinkedIn is a bit different

Whilst other social networks are good at reaching focused demographics, interest groups or the mass market, LinkedIn is a place to find specific individuals. For this reason, it makes more sense for sales of low volume high value products where decision makers are harder to find.

Using your employees’ contacts

LinkedIn is all about individual people reaching out to other specific individuals,. As a starting point, you need to utilize your and your employees network contacts, From there, you need to move onto people that they’re connected to (2nd degree contacts). And so the process will continue.

But don’t be Spammy

Every time you reach out using LinkedIn will will show your real, professional, and company name. Therefore its important not to turn off those contacts – or in other words, don’t be spammy. Every move you make, every contact you reach will be visitible to your networks, so bear that in mind so as not to appear over zealous.

How to get going

1. Find an ‘open networker’

An open networker is someone who has linked to as many people as they possibly can. They have messaged everyone in their network, and every new contact, to expand their contact list as much as possible.

To find an Open Networker (or LION – LinkedIn Open Networker), search on LinkedIn for ‘LION’. When you find one, invite them to your network. If they accept, you then have access to their 1st degree and 2nd degree contacts. Sometimes LIONs include their email address in their LinkedIn profile name, making it all the easier to invite them to your network, even though you’re not  connected to them at all.

You can also find open networks on TopLinked.com.

2. LinkedIn Answers

Anyone can ask a question on LinkedIn Answers. Anyone can answer. It allows you to interact with people who are not in your network, which of course helps to make new contacts.

If you ask a question many people can answer you. Once the question closes (after a few days or whenever you decide), you choose the ‘good’ answers. Of these “good” answers you then choose a ‘best’ answer.

The person who gave that answer gets an ‘expertise point’ that shows in their LinkedIn profile.

You could therefore use LinkedIn Answers to display your expertise.

In addition, people sometimes ask “where can I get a…” types of questions, often with regard to specific services. If you have a product or service that fits, you can answer these questions with a link to your website.

Sometimes it might be that you can offer a small answer, and then say ‘for more info’ or ‘for my full answer see…’ and then link to your blog, where you can answer the question in full.

3. Get recommended in ‘Services’

Another method is to get as many people in your 1st and 2nd degree networks to recommend you for a particular service. Some users will scour services to find a supplier. The more times you’ve been recommended, the greater the ‘reach’ of those recommendations. And the more positive your business looks.

4. Find ‘buyers’ in a organisation

Since every profile in a business includes a job title, its much easier to reach out to a specific person in order to try and sell to them. Most people will be connected to others in their organisation, so if your first degree contact is someone in a business you’re trying to target, the chances are that you can use their contacts to find the right individual..

5. Building Links

LinkedIn used to offer ‘followed’ links, which were an important method of link building as part of your Search Engine Optimisation program.

These days however, these links are either ‘no followed’ or redirected. Nevertheless, they can be an important source of referral traffic to your website. Links still get clicked on after all.

Make sure all employees have links to your website in their profile. Make sure the links are visible and can be crawled by the search engines by making all profiles include the “show website” feature. You can do this in “Edit My Public Profile“. Click “Full View” and also “Websites”.

That’s it

Often overlooked as a source of new business, LinkedIn is a powerful tool to reach specific buyers in organisations. Make the most of your network contacts using the techniques above.

If you want Euston Digital to help you with your Social Media marketing then get in touch. Any comments please leave them below.

Tags: Link Building, linkedin, SEO, Social Media
Posted in Link Building, Social Media | 1 Comment »

10 tips when using Twitter for your Business

Thursday, December 17th, 2009

Twitter represents a huge opportunity for any business to have a one-many conversation with their current and potential customers. Despite this only a minority of businesses have made the leap onto Twitter. Those that have are often unsure what to do when they start.

With that in mind, we’ve written a basic guide on how to use Twitter for your business.

Choosing a Full Name and Username.

Your details will be displayed in the page title (and therefore in the SERPs) as:

Fullname1 + Fullname2 (username) on Twitter

Therefore the full name and username will influence the keywords for which your Twitter profile will appear in the SERPs.

Either Choose:

Full Name1: Keyword1
Full Name2: Keyword2
Username: Company Name

Or

Full Name1: CompanyName
Full Name2: Blank
Username: Keyword

Following people

1.    To start off, just follow those people you are genuinely interested in. This might be your industry leader, your industry magazine, a national paper, or a commentator in your market.
2.     Follow your customers. Show that you’re taking an interest in your customers  by following them. Doing so encourages them to follow you back, and opens up  Twitter as a channel of communicate with them.
3.    Don’t follow people just because they follow you, unless they are your customer. If someone follows you and you don’t know who they are, and aren’t interested in what they’ve got to say, don’t follow them. A classic way to build your followerbase is by following people who follow you. But at the end of the day you end up receiving lots of irrelevant Tweets in your timeline, which makes it hard to discern those you are genuinely interested in.
4.    Try to avoid following people who have a high number of followers and follows. These will probably be using auto-follow tools to build their follower base. Lots are US based.

Tweet your News

1.    When you you add a new post onto your blog, Tweet it with a headline and a link.
2.    When you change your prices, have an offer, or have other news that you wouldn’t otherwise have on the blog, Tweet it
3.    If you have a problem, some downtime or delivery issues, make your followers aware by Tweeting that. Your natural tendency might be to hide bad news, but Twitterers will appreciate your openness. And far better that they find out about downtime from you, rather than finding out through some other means. You need to control that sort of news. And it might save your support team a few calls too.

Tweeting other people’s news and blog posts

1.    If you follow news from several websites and blogs, set up an feed reader that includes all your data sources.
2.    When you read something that you find interesting, Tweet a link to it and a summary, or your take. If its interesting your users will appreciate being notified of it, and may ‘respect’ your opinion a bit more.

Commenting on other people’s Tweets

1.    Try to read the Tweets of the people you follow. If you’re interested in what they’re saying, reply @them
2.    When people send you an @message, make sure you respond to it in a timely manner. Nothing stamps a conversation out as quickly as a gap of a few hours between Tweets.

ReTweeting (RT)

1.    When someone gives you, your website or your company a compliment then ReTweet it. To do this,  copy their Tweet into your own post and preface it with RT @them: This will create a positive glow to your profile, and demonstrates how good you are to your other followers.
2.    When you see somthing of interest that you want to attribute to the original person then RT their Tweet in the same way.
3.    Bond with your customers by occasionally retweeting their messages to your audience

Direct Messages

1.    If you want to keep it private, then direct message people (DM)
2.    Wehn someone Retweets your messages thank them privately with a DM
3.    If you’re asking someone to share potentially sensitive information then publicly ask them to DM you with the details.

Editorial Guidance for Tweets

1.    Include a mix of Tweets. Send links to your site, some to others, and occasionally have no links at all – just a statement. Use all types of Tweets, @Tweets and ReTweets.
2.    Tweet any comments you get on your blog comments and include a link to those comments. This shows your followers that there is a conversation going on, encourages people to get back to your website. Try to get a debate going
3.    Asking questions generate interest, interaction, conversation and answers
4.    Remember: a lot more people read your tweets than respond to them. If you’re using Twitter for customer service then its an opportunity to showcase your finest work!

Tools to save time

1.    Ping.fm: Useful for distributing your posts to multiple microblogging platforms
2.    Shorten URL Mozilla Add on. Lets you drag a URL shortner shortcut into your  browser toolbar, makes for quick URL shortening
3.    TweetDeck. A great desktop application that lets you monitor for mentions, searches and direct messages across multiple Twitter accounts.
4.    Tweetpic. Allows you to link images to your posts.

Tracking

Twitter traffic is hard to track with analytcs platforms it usually comes from redirects. These can help

1.    Bit.ly: This URL shortner can give you click data about the traffic that your shortened URLs are generate
2.    Gooogle Analytics / DC-Storm. More long winded. Manually add a tracking URL onto your website address before you shorten it.

This isn’t an A-Z of Twitter but is a good and easy guide to help your business start using this social media platform. Get it right and Twitter can become a powerful way to interact with your current and future customers.

If you need any help with your Social Media Marketing then please get in touch.

Tags: twitter
Posted in Social Media | 5 Comments »

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 »

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