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SEO
SEO Advice where should one go for it?
January 21, 2010 | 
Author Although we are focused on Reputation Management, much of what we do includes SEO. So I thought I would list some of the sites I use to keep up to date with what’s going on in the industry.
SEOMOZ – This is a fantastic resource if you are serious about search engine optimisation. They very much back up what they say with tests they’ve ran and are developing some great tools.
SEOCHAT – This is one of the first forums I started using 6 years ago, to be honest its good for people starting out but for advanced SEO I find the forums a bit 1 trick pony.
SEOBOOK – Again another fantastic resource in the SEO industry
My favourite SEO Tools I use:
Advanced Link and Rank Manager – By Caphyon – This software is great for watching links and seeing where the competition has links from and new ones they add. Great back link evolution graph to watch how your links and competition grow over time.
WEBCEO – I use this tools for watching website ranking as I find it presents the the best looking report especially for clients.
SEOQUAKE – This is a fantastic tool for quick snapshots of a website SEO
GOOGLE ALERT – This is a great tool for finding out about what people maybe saying about you also good for finding opportunities for link building from related pages.
I’m sure there are loads of other great resources out there but these are some of the ones I use a lot for just SEO.
Employee Reputation critical for organizations
Just how good it is when an Organization says that ‘Employees are their assets’, well let’s keep this debate aside for now. But here we are going to highlight how employees’ reputation creates a huge impact on those who look at you from the other side and just how critical it is for the reputation of your company..
Your employees’ carries the attitude and brand of your company. Have you ever noticed when visiting any office and waiting at the front office. I think this is the best place to analyze how true the employees carry the brand. You can feel the elements of the company culture and values coming through in the way people speak to each other and how they greet you. After all, employees are the caretakers of a company’s brand.
Employees and corporate reputation goes hand in hand. Though company reputation is vital, but employees are also the key factor that link to manage it. This generates positive performance and ultimately cements a place for you in this competitive era. So how to keep a positive reputation of your organization is about recognizing the significant role employees’ play in the overall positioning of corporate reputation.
However, to encourage employees to ‘live the brand’ are not much practiced. It is further suggested that to highlight your brand through your employees there has to be solid strategies in place. So when employees are trained to do their part perfectly the battle is half won. Let the employees know what actions are effective in return that successfully portray your strong brand.
In my opinion a brief training exercise and the know-how of the company and its regulation will go a long way in shaping employee reputation. Apprise them of the various vulnerability that could sabotage their reputation; for example ‘A tech savvy employee when comes across some website that has negative thing about the organization, what he should be doing? Persuade them to take advantage of the situation and come up with better solution to counter that after all it’s reputation at stake.
Posted in Bad Press, Company Reputation, Damage Limitation, HR Reputation, Reputation Management, Reputation News, SEO | 
Tags: Bad Press, brand reputation, CEO Reputation, company reputation, employee reputation management, negative content, Reputation Management, reputation management news, SEO | 
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Tiger Woods Reputation- an accident!
When searching for ‘Tiger Woods’ on Google it didn’t bring up his official website, but something rather spicy to be precise.
Woods reputation has taken a beating no doubt, and now his announcement about indefinite leave from golf will further make matter worse. Companies and products that Woods endorse are caught sitting ducks. A rough estimates shows an already loss to incur is around $12 billion.
The positive reputation he has worked years to attain now shows above his official website. Being a celebrity your reputation is always at the crossroads and anything can hit you. Strangely in Mr. Woods’s case it was a (mysterious) accident.
It may be noted that before the accident Tiger Woods enjoyed 85% positive sentiments on social media. Interestingly a week post-accident it did not plunged to a very low either as a sudden impact. This was the ideal time to capitalize and minimize the damage, if only Mr. Woods had believed in Reputation Management.
With no proper damage control plan in place it was all expected. Surprisingly the reaction from the Woods clubhouse has been too slow and hazy. Tiger should realize that ‘No press is tantamount to Bad press‘ and he took his own time to clear the air. Meanwhile internet and the social media websites were flooded with more negative comments thus creating its own crisis. Negative comments later jumped to 40% from 15%, while the positive sentiment was at an all time low of 14%.
This whole affair will cost the golfer $100 million a year in endorsement income. Too late for the Tiger to be out of the woods if only he knew- “It takes hundreds of good golf shots to gain confidence, but only one bad one to lose it” - Jack Nicklaus .
Posted in Bad Press, Celebrity Reputation, Company Reputation, Negative Forums, Online PR, Reputation Management, Reputation News, Reputation Online, SEO, Social Network Sites | Tags: Bad Press, Golf, Tiger online reputation, Tiger wood accident, Tiger Woods, Tiger woods reputation, Tiger woods story | 6 Comments »
Reputation management – Is your good business getting a bad name
When you get a spam mail do not delete it and take sometime to read it (do not reply or react). If you notice the content of the mails are mostly promotional about all kinds of business. The majority of spam mails is to do with breast enlargement or about male enhancement. Do not be surprised to know that these mail as they claim comes from bigger companies than you own.
Now that’s a bait!
Some people ignorant of the fact what spam mail are suppose to be tend to reply them. What tempts them to respond is something interesting, well! It’s the big names like MSN, Amazon or Paypal attached to this email.
Now that’s what we call bait – you being skeptical shoot an email to that owner only to know it was spam. Unfortunately the damage is already done, you have authenticated and confirmed your email address, and now the spammer has all sources at his disposal to flood your Inbox.
What is the point.
Well give it a thought! If the spammer thinks that using reputed companies like MSN, Amazon or Paypal is perfectly fine, what makes you think that your business is safe. As we all know burglars are always on the lookout for huge cache, and they en route their plans using smaller companies because they know with smaller companies it is always a win-win situation. If this situation is not handled properly, imagine the kind of damage your business will inherit, you may even close your shop.
How to shield
Now urgency has pounced on you, there is nothing as important, but to shield your reputation before more people gives it a bad name. This not only results in loosing business even your identity too.
Smart move, you want somebody to take responsibility and guard your business and personal reputation.
Reputation managers will then try to capitalize on the already done damage until such time your reputation is secure. This is probably the best option and least you worry about the reputation of your business.
Send out a strong message and let no one think about using your company’s goodwill to fill their own coffers in future.
Posted in Bad Press, Company Reputation, Journalists and Reporters, Reputation Management, Reputation News, Reputation Online, SEO | Tags: Bad Press, business reputation, company reputation, negative reviews, reputation management blogs, reputation management news, Spam mail reputation | No Comments »
Reputation Management and Online PR for 2010
2010 is going to be an interesting year for SEO, Reputation Management and Online PR, there could not of been a better example of how the communication world is changing, with this years Christmas number 1. TV vs Facebook; X Factor vs Rage Against The Machine. 2010 will see a real shift towards groups of people on social sites really making a difference and having access to many tools to shout out even louder. Tools like Facebook, Twitter to name a few are only part of it, with the introduction of Google’s sidewiki which allows people, customers, competition to write remarks about a website without any control. There is no opt out of sidewiki, customers will love it, businesses who have a bad track record of customer service will hate it.
Many companies will need to allow for Reputation Management to be in their marketing budget for 2010, but this is not a negative, far from it. In the last 5 years there has been a massive shift from traditional advertising to online advertising because, if done correctly the returns on investment can be far greater than traditional advertising. Plus if you focus some of your efforts on organic SEO and RM you will see them as an investment rather than just a cost. Compare that to a TV advert, once you’ve spent you budget the advert is gone, unless someone has recorded off the TV, but even then most people just fast forward through the adverts.
How Reputation Management Works
So you’ve decided you want to focus your efforts on improving your position online and spent a wee fortune on SEO, what happens next?
The customer finds your site and now knows your company name, it is at this point that Reputation Management and Online PR play their roll, because if the customer has not bookmarked your website they will put your company name in instead. It only then takes one negative comment on a forum to start effecting your sales and the reason for this, if that negative comment appears on the first page of the search results and starts to attract more negative comments it doesn’t take long for it to rise up the search results and ultimately be sitting directly below your own site. Having a negative result directly below your own company website can attract up to 70% of your potential customers to click on it first rather than click on your site. Pushing the negative forum down the SERP’s is where RM and SEO come into play.
If personalised search results are here to stay, then click through rates could be one of the determining factors for which site will show for your company name. Maybe PPC campaigns will help with CTR and make certain sites perform better, but the jury is still out on this.
If 2010 for your business is about converting more of the right customers then reputation management has to be up there in the marketing budget. There is no point spending 1000′s on advertising only to loose all those potential sales because of negative things being said about your business. So here is our top tips for 2010.
Neat acronym for the process of online reputation management:
- L = Listen
- E = Engage
- A = Address
- R = Respond
- N = Next…
Companies need to start with listening about what people are saying before they respond (aka that does not mean REACT)
Response needs to be thought through and considered and addresses the problem.
Step 1 – Listen…
Try Google Alert (www.google.com/alert) and subscribe for alerts for your company name or key product names. A good way to stay on top of discussions on a daily basis via email. You can then track those comments and remarks back to the source and if appropriate leave a comment yourself. This is free and easy to manage. You can move on to trackur or distilled for more coherent reporting tools.
(Keotag is another good free service – www.keotag.com)
Step 2 – Engage
Reach out to critics and engage with them. Most important, you have to ADDRESS the underlying issue. They have to feel that they have been HEARD and also UNDERSTOOD. You need to know what has happened and what has gone wrong and why. Some criticisms can be unfounded, but many times, criticism has due cause and can be resolved.
Step 3 - Address
Before you can respond to online conversations, you need to address the underlying problems or incidents within your organisation. Criticism offers a learning process, but it is wasted if you dont make use of it. A customer problem can be a one-off or can turn out to be a symptom of a much wider systemic problem that the company needs to work on.
Step 4 – Respond
It is important that the response carries some weight and not be a low level customer-service operative. It should carry executive weight, acknowledge, apologise and then correct . If you give a meaningful and authoritative response then your critic can become an evangelist.
Step 5 – Next…
Move onto next issue… or in other words restart the process. Too many marketing and reputation managers tend to work from crisis to crisis and do not develop a systematic approach to their online reputation management. An iterative, patient process that builds up a real knowledge of the online environment, who’s talking and where and why allows you to shape and join important conversations rather than always being caught out by emerging threads.
Coda:
Executives within the organisation need to understand the brand and its message, but most importantly have a strong sympathy for the reputation. It needs to be important for them what people say about and experience with your company.
Having a clear and precise feedback structure for customers to vent both positive and negative comments is a fantastic way to deal with damage limitation. If people see you responding and listening then 95% of customers will be satisfied. Not doing this means more people will find forums and blogs to have a go.
Get Your Head Around Social Network Sites
Many of the issues and problems we’ve seen in 2009 I believe will be escalated for 2010, Companies need to understand social network sites and how they will play a part in reputation management. They are a great RM and customer feedback tool if managed correctly. Another big benefit of signing up to all the SNS’s is it stops other people pretending to be you, again another issue we came across this year. The final and probably just as important point, if you own the account and the page and follow the best SEO rules you may well stop negative pages from the same SNS site showing up in the search engines as Google only tends to show one possibly 2 pages from the same site in the first 3 pages.
By protecting your company name and brand the other outset is of course you have more positive pages talking about your company, and the bigger the net the more fish you catch.
Happy Christmas and looking forward to 2010.
Constant monitoring to manage your Online Reputation
When talking about Online Reputation Management(ORM) we mean monitoring web 2 media like; blogs, social forums or network or video streaming sites for negative content. So how do you defend your product or organization when somebody is beating you blue with all that negative comments. Needless to say negative comments severely dent the reputation of an organization and the brand.
It’s a global phenomenon – positive or negative if attracts million hits will always rank on top. We need to understand that negative comment comes in all notorious forms and languages, type ‘Microsoft sucks’ on Google and see for yourself. So it becomes extensively important to protect your brand when consumers/competitors have larger ground to air their views.
Pushing down negative comments on search engines is what most Reputation management companies do, but it’s a temporary solution while the issue is still at large. So in our opinion relegating negative comments monitoring along with brand content optimization is the best option. Branded content in the search will stave-off negative contents.
Constant monitoring becomes very important to manage your online reputation. But how do you keep track about all that bad mouthing your new product gets? Setting Google or Yahoo alerts can be handy. Searching with adjectives or modifiers like “sucks”, “worst”, “bad” with your keyword will give you a better idea what others think about your product.
Implementing manual monitoring will be more effective to check results. A tool in place that would alert the business owner if there is any negative comments about the product out there will be great. You will be able to check the authenticity of the negative comments and take action immediately if urgent.
Employing proactive monitoring system enables you to get an insight about the content and the customer’s understanding about your brand. This further will let you interact with the customer directly and sort issues amicably. Your instant action can save your product identity, and let Reputation management be a part of your best practice.
Have Builders heard of SEO, PR and Reputation Management
It’s amazing to see a whole industry melt down in such a short time, with the credit crunch and now the recession many house builders have gone belly up. This is not helped by the fact that many have forgotten or never had to market themselves. In the good old days you just built a house and bingo 2 days later it was sold. Actually many were sold before they were even built. It’s not just builders whole countries also got it wrong, you only have to see places like Dubai who have had to been bailed out.
The result is many builders just don’t know how to market themselves, today its now more critical than ever to do it right. With a few buyers out there you have to fight to get their attention and ultimately their business. More often a builder will spend more on grass than they will on marketing their properties.
Question, if you have an estate to sell worth say, 10 million, how much would you spend on marketing your homes? Topsider Homes and Perthshire Builders are great examples of companies who do understand the importance of marketing. Never has it been easier to communicate with customers than today with twitter, blogs and other social network sites.
Should a builder just rely on a estate agent will they do the best they can? or do they have so many properties on the books they just don’t have the luxury of putting you at the top. The only person the builder can rely on to market it’s business is the builder itself. Embracing online PR, SEO and search engine marketing could be the difference between a builder making it through these tough times and the one that does not.
Posted in Online PR, Reputation Management, SEO | Tags: builder, Online PR, perthshire builders, PR / Public Relations, Reputation Management, topsider homes | No Comments »
Bad press, damage limitation, PR, crisis management, brand protection
Bad press, damage limitation, PR, crisis management, brand protection, call it what you like, the minute you put online in front of any of these phrases changes the requirements of a company who can help. So who do you need to help mange your reputation on the net?
When you find you have negative content appearing in the search engines where do you go? Sure negative comments can be a positive thing if you have had a serious issue and have shown to have dealt with it after listening to your customers. More often than not however it can be an ex employer, competition or customer who has taken a particular disliking for the company and very difficult to show you have dealt with the complaint.
Reputation Management is about showing your company in the correct light and create understanding. It is unlike advertising, whose main goal and focus is to generate sales and awareness. Like PR, reputation management should be a planned exercise, with the goal of making the public, customers and suppliers see that the company understands the needs and wants of all parties involved. You can’t do this if there is only negative content showing on the first page of the search engines.
How you go about producing this positive content must be done honestly and in a manageable structure, otherwise you could take the wrong path. See this example from the NY Times
Lifestyle Lift, a cosmetic surgery company, has reached a settlement with the State of New York over its attempts to fake positive consumer reviews on the Web, the New York attorney general’s office said Tuesday. The company had ordered employees to pretend they were satisfied customers and write glowing reviews of its face-lift procedure on Web sites, according to the attorney general’s statement. Lifestyle Lift also created its own sites of face-lift reviews to appear as independent sources.
One e-mail message, discovered by the attorney general’s office, told employees to “devote the day to doing more postings on the Web as a satisfied client.”
So it’s important that you get the right advice, having an online reputation management strategy can save you a lot of time, effort and money. Leaving it till its a big issue can sometimes hurt you and damage your reputation beyond repair.
How Do Negative Search Results Hurt You
Quite often a company will only find out if there is negative pages or comments on the Internet when a customer remarks on it or says they have decided to go else where because of what they have read on the net.
It’s humans nature to write about a negative experience, it allows you to get it off your chest when they feel hard done by. The bigger problem is, customers who have had a fantastic experience very rarely write about it. Because of this the Internet can become very one sided towards the negative end not because of what you have done, but because of how human nature is.
More often than not, businesses don’t know how much negative results appearing in the search engines is costing them, they can only take a stab at the losses. Reputation Management is best seen as an investment that will pay back dividends. Towns in previous centuries would build a defence wall to protect themselves rather than wait until they were attacked Reputation Management is exactly the same.
So you can spend a small fortune on SEO, only to be totally undermined by having negative results for your company name. So for example lets say my company name is BB Widgets Suppliers and I sell blue widgets, I’ve focused my SEO on ranking highly for the keywords Blue Widgets. Now that the customer has found me if they don’t bookmark my site then they are likely to google BB Widgets Suppliers as they now know your company name. It is at this point that if negative content is ranking highly for your company name then all that SEO work has gone out the window.
Reputation Management Don’t Leave Till It Hits The Fan
Over the last 12 months we have been focused on reputation management and are often contacted by companies and individuals who have an issue with negative content showing in the search results. Often by this time it’s to late and the damage is done. It’s much more difficult to bury a web page once it has gained momentum and reached the first page of Google. It’s a bit like cancer, if you catch it early enough or do the things that will help reduce the chances of getting it in the first place like not smoking then you have a much greater chance of stopping or preventing it. However leave it and ignore the symptoms and you could have a major issue that in some cases can be fatal.
So reputation management is often seen as a luxury rather than a necessity until of course it’s to late and they have been hit by some negative content that’s effecting their sales. This could not be further from the truth, by thinking and adapting your business to take in reputation management as part of the marketing mix cannot only help prevent negative content rising to the top of search engines but also help throw a bigger net out to catch more customers and create more sales.
Another great positive outcome of reputation management is as you start to monitor what’s being said about your company or product through the web, blogs, social sites like twitter, you can soon get feedback of what customers think about you or your product. Sites like Twitter allow you to search keywords in peoples tweets, Google Alerts is another great tool to spot any potential issues, there is also quite a few products out there to help monitor the internet as a whole and spot potential issues.
Here are a couple of our main Dos and Don’t s to help get you on your way:
- Do sign up to as many social network sites using your company name as the user name, even if you don’t use all the sites, it stops other people from pretending to be you.
- Do control comments on 3rd party sites, if you a prone to getting negative remark, either turn off remarks or allow only remarks once they have been approved.
- Do keep blogs and main social sites like facebook and twitter up to date, it shows that you are an active company. Make sure to also link to these resources from your site and email signature, this will help with the ranking of these 3rd party sites for your company name.
- Don’t try and fight a thread publicly on a forum, more often than not you will attract more negative comments back and also encourage google to rank the thread higher. If thread is untrue and libellous contact the site owner and ask for the thread to be removed.
- Don’t ignore negative content, the attitude from PR companies reference damage limitation is to ignore it, as more often than not the bad press will go away after a few days. This is the complete opposite with the net, if you leave it, it can gain momentum and become a bigger issue. Unlike a paper that is thrown away the following day, on the net it’s there 24 hours, 7 days a week. The only way to deal with such content is to either have it removed (very difficult and time consuming) or bury it.
In the old days celebrities read about themselves in newspapers and magazines, today celebrity stories abound across the web and some of the most popular searches in search engines are for celebrity names. Indeed, some of the fastest moving stories arise around celebrity misdemeanour’s and misadventures. Every trip and slip of a celebrity is analysed and commented on by an army of consumer reviewers, fans and critics. It is an on going piece of work to make sure that your reputation is protected by continuing putting out positive content out there.
The simplest way to explain how to combat negative content is if you have 1 website then you can only possibly control maybe two spots on the first page of the search results. The other 8 or 9 spots are therefore open to anybody else who wants to write about you. By creating blogs, more websites, sub domains and social network pages then you have more opportunity to control the first page.
One last bit of advice we have gained this year, if you are starting a business or launching a product take time to research a name. If you don’t want a big presence on the net then choose a company name that is very generic for example Direct Shoes. This will stop negative content coming up about your business as the keywords are far to general. However if you do want to be found on the net then use a more specific name like AZA Direct Shoes (hope that company does not exist or they need some SEO help), but be aware it also means that anything negative about your business could also rise to the top of the results a lot easier.