I am moving my office this week and will back to blogging next week.
Feel my pain.Ā š
Online Reviews Can Damage Your Sales
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 theĀ *** to tell me how much it would cost to fix them! She said it was a touch up… Ā 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 askingĀ 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.
Mobilegeddon So Far Has Been a Bust
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 yearĀ 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 concernĀ for aĀ loss of revenue in AdWords and search relevancy versus the competition.
Building Links Using Article Directories is a Dead Strategy
Creating articles that were informational in nature with links back to your website in a bio and placing these on news sites, article directories, and ezine sites for use by other webmasters on their blogs and in their websites in a way to build incoming links is just another previously good tactic that Google has disavowed.
Unfortunately, there are many business owners who are still using this tactic and are encouraged to embrace this tactic by SEO firms mainly based in India. It is very important to know that using this type of tactic today may actually work against you.
Make sure to watch this video on this topic from Matt Cutts the lead web spam engineer from Google and the voice to my industry. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo75Og4M34Q
It is important to understand that this approach was highly useful and beneficial to websites one and definitely two years ago. But now using this tactic may actually drop your organic placement. Guest blogging is also another high profile tactic that has also fallen under Google’s eyes and has also been disavowed as a usable tactic to improve organic search placement.
With Google focusing on high quality unique content, that is not overly keyword dense, and has high user relevancy as tested through click through rate, time on page, and personal search history it is nearly impossible to scam your way to the top of the organic results.
A much better approach for placement today is to focus on improving the user experience on your website, refining the message, and promoting your site to generate traffic on social media and Google AdWords.
There will always be sites that are placed in the top ten slots on Google but getting there now is no longer an art form but rather creating the very best user experience that is the most relevant to a unique search query.