Online Reputation Management Is Like a Sport

Boxing is one of my favorite sports.  Before any fight, the referee tells each boxer three simple rules:

1. Obey referee commands at all times
2. No punches below the belt (ouch)
3. Protect yourself at ALL times!

What does boxing have to do with Online Reputation Management (ORM)?  The third command given by the referee can also be used to describe online reputation management.

Let’s Define Online Reputation Management

ORM is the practice of monitoring the Internet reputation of a brand, company, product, person or service with the objective of suppressing negative comments or decreasing the visibility within the search engines.  The process entails three basic steps:

1. Monitor – Create a system to capture and track reviews, articles, forums or site links of your brand.  If you’re not actively monitoring the Internet you will never know what consumers are saying.
2. Evaluate – Before reacting, evaluate the impact of what you have found.  Don’t simply fly off the panhandle with a knee jerk reaction.  Consider the source where located, outlet, potential reach (visibility/impressions), timing, and any additional individual feedback, to determine the threat level.
3. Action – Have a plan in place to figure out the best way to deal with a negative listing.  Comment, don’t comment, draft a formal letter or refuting the claims are all traditional means of action.

Why Is ORM Important?

We live in a world where consumers play a vital role in the buying patterns of other consumers.  This viral word of mouth marketing, social bookmarking and social media engagement has taken some control away from advertisers and empowered consumers more then ever.  So wouldn’t you agree that knowing and acting upon what consumers say about your business is pretty important?  Yeah, I thought so!

Companies spend millions each year to build a brand name, protecting that investment (at all times – like boxing) is critical to long-term success.

In my coming posts I’ll discuss some of the free tools people can use to monitor online reputation.
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Advice For My Brother In Law

My brother in law is a stockbroker and sent me some articles to review that he is writing for a large article directory. These are his first online articles so I wanted to give him some advice on what translates into a good online article. This gave me the inspiration for this blog post.

Writing good articles can be synonymous with good SEO copy but too many times I hear from people they get writers block by trying to stuff as many valuable keywords into an article. This is the wrong approach to article writing.

1. Capture your reader’s attention with a solid title. Nothing worse then writing an article nobody ever reads. Use a title that convinces the reader to take the time and read your article. Having a good title can help separate your article from every other article? This is the first objective for any article writer. Get your article read!
2. Pick a topic that interests you. If you’re not passionate about the topic your writing about it will reflect in your copy. If you’re not interested in the topic you’re writing about, how can you expect your readers to be?
3. Readers love personal experience. They also want to be engaged and are willing to emotionally invest in what they read. Incorporating stores or experiences is a great way to capture and hold someone’s attention through your article
4. Don’t write specifically for long tail keywords. One thing I do is I will write an article without the keywords first, then go back and look at how I can incorporate certain keywords. This gives the article a much more natural feel instead of just trying to stuff as many high value keywords in an article.
5. Don’t over commercialize your article. If you are writing about a good or service, make sure that your providing an informative opportunity for the reader. If not, nobody will take your article seriously. Nobody wants to be sold to when they read, unless the expectation is they are reading a sales brochure. Leave mention of your product or website link at the bottom of your article, so it’s viewed as more of a soft sale.

Local Search – Better Wise Known as Fishing in Your Own Pond

Personally, I live off local search and local SEO!  Whether I’m looking for family activities, a movie, or (like this morning) a refrigerator repair guy, I always start my search online.  Unfortunately my refrigerator was discharging water from underneath and needed to be fixed.  So where did I turn?  My trusted Google local search directory.

What I found in my local search endeavor is typical of the way most businesses treat their local listings.  My search result provided me 4 local businesses and tons of organic listings.  My attention was solely focused on the local directory results.

Since I am busy I have little time to dilly dally around and just want the problem fixed.  I started at the top, local ranking 1 and dialed.  It is Saturday so I was hoping to find a place open to get quick relief.

• Call one – Ranking 1:  went to company voicemail, no success, however their local profile mentions they work 7 days a week.
• Call two – Ranking 2: NON WORKING TELEPHONE NUMBER!  I called it twice in fact to verify it wasn’t just a bad cell connection.
• Call three – Ranking 3: Success!  He can be at my house within two hours with a nominal fee.

My Local Search Marketing Results Diagnosis:

So let’s diagnosis my local search marketing end result.  I made three calls following the position order of my local results from Google.

• Ranking 1: Didn’t answer my call, but got the first crack at my business.  Unfortunately for them they missed a golden opportunity to make a quick sale.
• Ranking 2: Incredibly didn’t have a working telephone number.  This company is locked in second position for my local search results and they don’t have a working telephone number in the local directory.  Can you spell LOST Revenue?
• Ranking 3: Answered the phone, showed up 2 hours later, spent 10 minutes fixing a faulty hose, and was gone with an easy sale!

Local SEO Working For You?

If you go through the trouble of submitting your business into any of the local directories, verify the information you input.  It sounds simple enough, but I find this is a common problem with many small business listings.  Here are some additional tips for local search success:

1. There’s Gold in them there Hills:  Take action and get listed!  With most search engines local business listings are free.  All search engines have a local business directory so take advantage and file a profile.
2. Categorize your business:  Use the search engine category selections when placing your local listing.  Searchers commonly use categories to find local businesses and this aspect of your local search listing should be used.
3. Seek Online Testimonials:  Ask your customers to write reviews about your business.  This helps increase visibility, add credibility, and enhances your local listing profile.  This can also be a valuable tool to increase your brand value and protect your online brand reputation.
4. Update your profile regularly:  If your phone number, product offering, office hours, or service area changes, let your customer know through your local listing.
5. Add multiple locations:  If you have multiple locations for your business develop a unique local search listing profile for each location with fresh content, business descriptions, images and most importantly local phone number.
6. List Product and Services:  This helpful tip can help with your search engine optimization rankings.  Detail out the products and services your company provides to consumers or other businesses.
7. Advertise Online:  Local listings can work great in combination with paid advertisement placement for local keywords.  In some cases, these local keywords are inexpensive, highly targeted, and can provide multiple Page 1 placement whereby increasing the odds of someone finding your company.

Successful SEO Consultants Deploy LSI Strategies

SEO Consultants be cognizant that search engine optimization will be far more successful and will yield better long term results if latent semantic indexing (LSI) becomes a regular component of your SEO consulting techniques.

Normal search engine optimization is based on the premise that standard keyword searches look for a single keyword in a set of documents.  If that keyword is found in a document, the document is said to be relative to the search performed.  There is one inherent weakness in this approach, which is that there may be several other related documents in the document set that are not referenced because they do not contain the exact keyword searched for.  However, those documents may in fact relate closely to the keyword searched. Latent semantic indexing takes into account that documents containing similar words are relevant.  A savvy SEO consultant can use this to his advantage when working on search engine optimization for a site by including latent semantic indexing into their search engine optimization strategy.

In getting a site to rank well, chosen keywords are carefully placed throughout the posts and pages.  However, by utilizing the theory behind latent semantic indexing you can help web sites appear even more relevant, and thus more optimized, by including words that are included in what would be considered an LSI subset.  For example, when working on search engine optimization for a site you may be targeting the keyword, ‘GABA Supplements’.  If you were to also include related words, such as ‘natural sleep aid’, ‘insomnia natural remedy’, and ‘GABA neurotransmitter’ you would find that your site was visited by people searching for phrases relating to these additional words as well, thus increasing traffic to the site. Incorporating latent semantic indexing as a part of your search engine optimization will increase hits to the site and will therefore help your SEO rankings.

Integrating latent semantic indexing techniques into your search engine optimization consulting will reap future benefits as well.  Sites will remain more current even if some terms are no longer searched for as often.  The search engines will identify the site as having a broader information base than if one keyword alone was targeted.  With the goal of SEO consultant being to optimize a site for future as well as current use, utilizing this technique will help sites optimized in this way to consistently perform better over a longer period of time than sites that are focusing on one or two keywords only.

Hi EVERYONE!  I thought it appropriate to welcome everyone to my site and again thank you for stopping by.  My passion as you might have guessed is Internet Marketing, and in this blog I intend to share my experiences, knowledge base, and general feelings about the direction of online marketing.

I hope you’ll find my blog informative, fun, and a good source for a unique perspective regarding Internet Marketing.  I love interaction, so do not hesitate to contact me online, offline, or socially.  Also, I love feedback, so please weight in via comments on my blog and let me know your perspective.  If you have a suggestion for a new blog topic send it my way and I will gladly respond.

Learning is like rowing upstream: not to advance is to drop back ~ Chinese Proverb

Thanks again for dropping by…Cheers!