I will not be posting to my blog this week as I am doing my final move to Virginia. Who knew that moving could be so laborious and complicated.
Not only am I moving my residence, my office, but I am reorganizing my business into a Virginia entity all at the same time.
I have to say that I think I would be having a stroke if it were not for the kind and competent people at MyCorporation.com who are doing my Maryland dissolution and Virginia reorganization. They are handling all the details and paperwork as well as setting up my new federal EIN.
I used them before when I set up my Maryland corporation in 2008. If you are not a lawyer and do not know where to turn for help in setting up or even deciding what to do, www.MyCorporation.com is a great place to start.
I will not be set up in my new office until Friday August 28th, so there will be no additional blog posts this week. See you next week!
Recover your reputation online by embracing the online system.
Here’s a comment I found on Yelp about one of the businesses I cross paths with that when I saw it I cringed for them:
“…Terrible. My 8 year old was like, “OMG MOM what happened?” Called her to adjust, try to fix, whatever, she was rude and condescending beyond words… AND WAY over priced. She had the *** to tell me how much it would cost to fix them! She said it was a touch up… Losing her eyesight and hand is NOT steady, her mind is gone too! NUTS! ”
Consumers love Yelp and business owners hate Yelp, but as a business owner, you’d better learn how to work the Yelp system to your advantage. Reviews about your business happen on Yelp whether you have an account or not. Deciding not to claim your page there does not mean that your poor reviews will not show up, rather you simply have no way to rebut them . This is the same for Google Local. Google will build a page for your business where a review about you will be housed whether you claim the page or not.
As this business I mentioned with the poor review, has tons of really great reviews, it is a shame that this one review on Yelp is getting serious exposure on Google that is sure to damage their sales.
Better by far is to embrace the system, claim these page (Yelp and Google Local) and drive happy customers there by pointing emails to these pages and asking customers to review you online. One terrible review will not hurt you when you have 10, 20, or 50 fabulous reviews. There will always be “trolls” out there and consumers know it, but when you have only one review and it is a really poor one and Google is choosing to show it by your website listing, it can damage your business terribly.
Need more help with your image online? Ask us about our Brand Booster program or savvy solutions to help build your online and website reviews.
What was Google thinking when they back pedaled on the mobile search release?
Fresh from doing a SEO review of five client sites, I have to say that mobilegeddon is a bust, at least so far.
Google started the roll out of this much talked about algorithm that was to have impacted over 14% of the search results in the mobile search sphere on Monday April 21st. But as of April 30th, I was still seeing sites appear routinely in the mobile search space that were not mobile-friendly.
Does that mean that there was all this hype about nothing? No, not really. I suspect that Google got scared of crashing it’s search engine and money driver if it moved too fast to chop sites that had not moved into mobile. I suspect that they will over time tweak this as new sites enter the index that are mobile-friendly, but they have already back pedaled from their previous approach.
Earlier in the year in the pending change announcement Google stated that if you did not have a mobile-friendly site you would be dropped from the mobile index. Later, Google softened this approach to say, well maybe you’d be dropped, but if your website really matched the query best and even if you were not mobile-friendly they would show your site in the mobile results as most relevant – totally watering down the first announcement.
Then, Google AdWords reps started to say, well if your site is not mobile-friendly and you are using AdWords advertising, your non-mobile-friendly website would still show in the mobile results as an AdWords ads. Note the serious conflict here? Advertising vs. Search?
I think that as it got closer to the date, Google decided that there was too much money at stake and sites had simply not upgraded as they had thought they would.
I do suspect that over time there will be a “weeding” of sites from the mobile index but for now I think the change on Google’s part is being driven by a concern for a loss of revenue in AdWords and search relevancy versus the competition.
