Adjust Your Review Strategy, An Interview With @Chiropractic

One of the hardest questions to answer when anyone asks about online reputation management is how to deal with negative reviews. There are as many solutions as there are reviewers, and while it may be best to ignore some, responding to others with humour, a genuine desire to be better and a bit of imagination can go a lot further.

That’s why it caught my eye when the legendary @Chiropractic (come on, how many Chiropractors do you think there are in the world who know more about internet marketing than most internet marketers) aka Mike Dorausch tweeted about a negative review he had received, and the frankly genius way that he dealt with it.

This is the tweet I saw;

And being the nosey kind of person I am I immediately went to the site and read the review

I was immediately struck by how clean Mikes profile had been up to that point, and wondered, if I had seen it as a consumer, if I would have suspected it of being too clean. It’s a lot more common for people to review negative experiences than positive, so this review profile may indeed have raised some flags with me.
Instead of just talking to myself about it though, I thought I should get a better look at this partiular situation straight from the horses mouth.  So I emailed Mike and did a short interview on his experience of being negatively reviewed.

How do you think customers perceive a totally glowing review profile, and do you think having some less than glowing reviews can have a positive impact on customer perception (making the reviews seem more real?)

I think a totally glowing review profile can be of concern, and I’ve had some say it’s makes them question if all reviews are legitimate. As far as less than glowing reviews, I believe it depends on the type of negative review, in my experience it provides something to talk about and does help things appear real.

Can you explain how you handled the review, and what followed (both with the reviewer and putting the review on your wall)

We had a 2 star review on Yelp, which included some odd observations about our business, which made me curious. I took a screenshot of the review and printed it, taping it to the front desk where every client could read it (they all did). Observing how clients reacted was quite educational. Nobody publicly agreed with the reviewer but I asked each person if it would potentially affect them choosing a business had they not ever been to it. One of our new clients said they had read the review before calling, saying they thought it seemed out of context from what else was written about us online.

What do you think is more important as a small business, handling a review in terms of it’s impact on business, or working to turn it into a positive experience for you as an individual?

Both. I think very few people have any clue how much stress small business owners go through, so if it can be made positive it’s worth something. If the review is accurate, it’s an opportunity to improve on whatever can be done to see it doesn’t happen again. If it’s not accurate, there’s an opportunity to get feedback from clients confirming that. A few even went online to share their experiences, people that have been with us 1, 2 or 3 years, not merely for a single visit.

And finally, how exactly do you manage to stay so happy that people complain about it?

I love being a chiropractor and I believe that being passionate about what one does comes through to people. The reality is that there’s always someone who’s going to be turned off by another’s happiness, and they’ll often make an effort to bring you down. If we stop moving forward they win.

From talking to Mike about this particular situation, and thinking over how I have seen complaints most successfully dealt with in the past, I think I can boil the answer to the question ‘how should I deal with a negative review’ down to one far more simple answer than I ever could before;

Respond to negative reviews with a genuine desire to see things put right and improve on what went wrong, and if you can’t then perhaps no reasponse is the best response.

How To Create a Social Strategy

Habitat UK, Skittles, Nestle, Asus, and more are all tales of woe and warning for anyone going in to social media. Getting it wrong seems easier than getting it right at times. This is often because of lack of planning as opposed to level of difficulty.

As important as it is for SEO, planning your social media strategy is important to ensure minimal brand damage from mistakes. Social media, with its low barriers to entry, may seem easy to do. Many think ‘how hard can it be to tweet and update Facebook’? Well, as Nestle learned when the tit-for-tat between an angry consumer and one of its marketing team on Nestle’s public wall got paraded out by some media and social media experts as a premium example of what not to do, a lot can go wrong.

While some may see Skittles allowing all Twitter search results to be published to its home page as innovative, it became a place where users tried to out-gross each other. My screen-shot from the time has to be blanked due to the nature of the tweets showing. Making a blog of Facebook the homepage of your company may seem cutting edge but a blog can also be seen as unprofessional and Facebook is nota space wholly owned by the brand.

Getting the strategy right to both move in to social media and use it for SEO is not just important – it is essential. There are several things to plan but first and foremost is an inderstanding of the why. Understand why it is your business feels it should be in social media. There are a number of successstories from companies like ABN Amro, IBM, Vodafone and others regarding their forays into social media however they were success stories because a picture of success was planned from the outset.

After understanding your reasons and goals from being in social media, select the best outlet for that strategy. Twitter is not a broadcast medium and no matter what anyone says, Facebook is invisible unless you promote it to existing contacts. Understand the different social media platforms and what type of engagement they are useful for. MySpace may not be mainstream anymore but it is still perfect for music and Orkut is the only way you’ll get a Facebook-like platform in Brazil.

Next plan out what you are going to say and do in this platform. Having a strategy includes not just why and where but also what, how, when and who. Important in here is who will be the voice of the company and if that ‘voice’ leaves will the social media contact go with them or will they be restricted to the brand. Also how do you identify who the person is behind the brand if it is the brand tweeting. Vodafone handles this by having all tweets identified by initials. You have to trust the voice of your company and empower them to tweet according to the schedule and when necessary off schedule.

Connections and outreach should be part of your social media strategy. Understand and research who the influencers are in your vertical and reach out to them. Do not try and make demands of them and do not try and buy space on their blog/facebook page/etc. If done to manipulate rankings, purchased blog posts or links can harm both the place the link/blog is posted and the company purchasing the link/post can be penalised.

When all this is in place and your ‘who’ is in place knowing ‘what’ they are saying ‘where’ and ‘when’ they are interacting, by what method (how), then you will be ready to launch your social media strategy and succeed where others have floundered or failed.

How to Do Keyword Research

One of the things I think is most difficult to get right and yet is the most important factor for SEO is keyword research. The research that is done for SEO is quite different from the type done for PPC even though both are for search engines. This means while your PPC agency may have done some ‘keyword research’ it needs to be focused and refined for your SEO efforts.

Good keyword research is important because of the number of other critical SEO elements it affects (as well as PPC). The on-page targeting for non-cannibalised keywords is important. That is, don’t target the same keyword on lots of pages. The link building anchor text is important. Internal links and breadcrumb trails also use keywords. The titles, descriptions and URLs are also all affected by keyword research. Keyword research supporting a well optimised page can also reduce paid search costs. This one element of anything I believe has to be done right in order for everything else to flow properly from it.

In order to do good keyword research, the first step is to be open to new ideas. While seemingly fundamental, if a word or phrase sits at the core of branding and yet few use it, it would be more advisable to use the more popular word. If you provide “cookies” and yet insist on calling them “buttery flour chips” there will be issues with non-brand search exposures to your product. Google is good at understanding semantic relationships but even it needs some direction.

Write down groups of words relating to your product or service that you use internally. Next, expand that list to include what the industry you work in calls your product/service (a little spying on the competition). Expand that to how the media talks about your product or service. If you still have a small list, use this list set as a PPC keyword campaign and set the campaign to “broad match”. Keep it tight as a short term, low cost PPC campaign in Google. Crafting a compelling and relevant ad can be tricky but the insight gained from the keywords used to find your ad will expand your understanding of the keywords.

This should give you a core group of terms. Now, use the free online tools available to expand that list, refine it, measure the type of search traffic these terms generate and create a full comprehensive list of keywords that you think are relevant. The tools you can use for free are the Google AdWords Tool, SEOBook tool, and Wordtracker has some free data.

Next thing to do is map the strength of the competition and how much there is. If there are a lot of people competing for a term, or the top 10 are all very strong competitors, it may not be reasonable to target that word. Also be sure to check relevance. If a term has a high search volume but the search results are not relevant and the competition is strong then it may not be the right target.

By mapping the competitiveness of a word against the number of people looking for that term, you will get a very accurate measure of whether you should target that word. This is more complicated than slapping words into Google AdWords and dumping a spreadsheet of search terms and volumes which is what I’ve seen far too many agencies do. This adds real intelligence to your research and keyword selection. This will give you, and your business, a competitive edge.

Broaden your Marketing Mind

My silence on SEO Chicks over the last few months, and indeed lack of community involvement all round, has been something of a worry to me. While there was good reason for it (Like Moving counties twice, I’m now in Costa Rica, lucky devil that I am), it has given me some time to think about the role that the SEO community plays in influencing my marketing strategies for clients.

What I’ve found now that the dust has settled though, is that this temporary removal from the online marketing community, has helped me see things in a different light, helping me to develop better strategies, and understand my client’s customers better.

I have come to realise that the majority of the world does not see the internet the way I do, in fact there are even people out there, working in marketing, in their 20-30′s who have never heard of LOL Catz or The Oatmeal, true story.

So I wanted to give you my top 3 ways to try and gain some of the perspective of those poor unfortunates who aren’t jacked into the net 24/7 and aren’t being exposed to the witticisms of college humour & cracked every day, without you having to  go through the expense and stress of moving your life to another country.

Talk to people, and I don’t mean on Twitter

Yes that’s right folks, those IRL friends who laugh at you when you tell them about twitter, or call someone you have only met online a good friend. Those are the people you’re marketing to most of the time, and they have some great perspectives on how they would like to be marketed to.  All you need to do is tone down the lingo, explain some of your reasoning, and not laugh when they tell you how an animated gif of a cat is going to persuade them to buy that new car. Yes some of their ides will be dated or impossible to implement, but listen anyway, they might just  know something you don’t.

Turn off the internet

Oh yes my friend, I went there. You don’t necessarily have to go completely offline, but try downloading thunderbird and getting your emails offline for a day, close down the browser, and schedule some offline work to do. How about reading a book, one one of the many disciplines that overlaps the online marketing industry, traditional marketing or branding for instance. Or just take a team day at the park. You will be amazed at how quickly that little internet exhausted bit of your brain starts to recover and throw great ideas at you.

Pretend you’re here in Costa Rica with me

Now imagine yourself trying to find a pool cleaner, or a dentist, or pretty much anything really. You go to Google, and you find, nothing. Perhaps a blog post from an American Ex-pat complaining how they can’t find a pool cleaner! The internet has not yet become the tool for finding everything and anything here. If you’re anything like me your second thought will be ‘yellow pages’  , but no, you’ll be out of luck there too. People find things here through personal relationships. the pool cleaner is the brother in law of the cleaner, our car salesperson is the grandfather of the same friend who referred me to my dentist and so on and so forth. Everything here is word of mouth referral, and you can see the strength and effectiveness of those personal relationships everywhere, and no one is shy about making the recommendation. So go out and build your network, tell people about great services because they’re great, not because you’re marketing them, and you will find yourself in a stronger position for it.

So there you have it, 3 ways to be a better online marketer, by not being online!

How To Measure Success

One of the things I frequently get in trouble for is giving away too much information. I think that giving away too much insider information is what I am about to do below. My argument for sharing is that knowledge is power and by giving companies the skills and ability to understand what I do and how I do it, not only will they will better understand, appreciate and purchase services.

One of the things I get asked most often, next to “how do you choose an agency” is “how do you know if what they are measuring means anything”? Understanding what is being measured, how it is measured and how you can double check the measurements yourself if you choose to is an important part of understanding what your agency, or in-house SEO guru, is doing and how it is positively impacting your bottom line.

The below SEO ROI measurements can be used with different types of businesses. They are not restricted to one industry nor one type of measurement package. Where possible I’ve chosen measures which can be done easily and/or for free in order to keep costs low and understanding high.

In order for any measurement to have meaning, there needs to be a benchmark. Take the measurement you are going to track, record it and date it. If you then take the measure again, you have a point in time to compare it against. Always record your measurements at least monthly. For some sites weekly will be too frequently but less frequently than monthly may mean you miss something going wrong.

Visits from Organic Search Results – Measuring the number of visits in to your site purely from organic search results. To measure this, an on-site analytics package will give the most accurate representation of this number. Google Analytics is free and Omniture is my favourite but there are others available.

Number of Visitors from natural search Per Keyword – A breakdown of the number of visits from organic sources driven to the site via different keywords. The key here is that we’re breakingthis down by keyword and not just overall traffic. No other traffic such as direct or referred (from sites other than search engines or paid search) should be included. To measure, analytics must be installed and tracking incoming referrals. Most, if not all, analytics packages will break down incoming visits from search engines to give a per keyword value for visitors.

Conversions on Organic Traffic – This is a measure of the number of conversions made after a user clicked through from a natural search listing. More complex to measure as this does require the interaction between analytics and cookies. To measure, track user conversions where the last click is from natural search and leads to a sale or whatever you deem a conversion to be. To expand, measure where natural search is responsible for sending 2 or more visits by the same user to the site but where natural search is not necessarily the last click. Conversion rates = (conversions /visits)*100

Rankings for Keywords A ranking is where a particular site ranks for a particular keyword within a neutral set of search results. Neutral search results are where personalization and search history is not a factor in rankings – ie you must log out of Google and delete all cookies, close, reopen. Keywords are single or multiple words which are being targeted on page on the website being measured. To measure this, a neutral tool like Advanced Web Ranking which is able to gather non-personalised results. Failing the use of a tool, in Internet Explorer delete all cookies and history, close and reopen the browser and search for the term. This must be done prior to each search and if possible, a country-specific anonymiser should be used. Record that date this measurement was taken and link to the measured data.

These measurements, once you know what you are doing and have an action plan of execution, will help you see whether the changes are having an effect. Don’t worry if some changes take longer to show a difference – it can take up to 3 months for changes to be picked up by search engines.

SEO Questions – How Long is a Piece of String?

As a child, it used to piss me off no end when my parents would answer my frequent requests for quantification, with the above question.

“How long till we get there?” “When does it stop?” “What time does it get dark?” “How deep is water?” “How much do apples cost?” “How long do Goldfish live?” All such questions would be met with the question “How long is a piece of string?” It’s a colloquial saying which I think is fairly common in the UK, though for sake of clarity means, “It depends.”

Whilst of course it wouldn’t take much for a parent to guess the sort of parameters the childish mind is working within; fill in the necessary missing data points (origin, destination, average case etc.) and give a straight answer, however kids can fire off a phenomenal amount of unquantified questions per second. I find after ten or so in a row, I’ve lost all patience and then it’s time for a game of “Who can lick their own ear?” (Two minutes of silence, guaranteed. Bliss.)

Never getting a straight answer is annoying. As adults we can’t help but feel we’re being fobbed off, or worse; deceived in some way. So I can sympathise with many of the online marketing professionals that I meet, that complain that SEO professionals never seem to be able to give a straight answer; however when it comes to Search Engine Optimisation, I would argue that most good practitioners will decline to offer an immediate answer to questions like…

“How many links do I need?”

“How long till I get to page one?”

“What changes need to be made?”

“Why is my content not indexed?”

“How come [competitor] is number one?”

Given the sheer number of factors and dependencies, research and analysis is required to even begin to answer questions such as these. Even then, it would be foolhardy to give a guaranteed answer. However, I’m getting a bit sick of hearing myself say “It depends…” in response to every initial question in a first meeting (or words to that effect.) To the uninitiated it must seem at times as if SEO professionals have adopted the same tactics as the bad mechanic. This response is the SEO equivalent of raises bonnet, sharp intake of breath, tuts and shakes head.

Of course this isn’t really the case, and there are numerous, extremely valid reasons why any good SEO professional is unable to offer immediate answers to questions about quantification.

Multi-dimensional Attributes

Search engine algorithms are complex and comprise hundreds of componants, such componants being weighted and such weights varying frequently. Number of links is immaterial, without frame – in terms of quality, variety, position, type, relvancy, and a load of other weighted considerations assessed.

Factors Outside of One’s Control

We may be able to legislate for our own activities, however a great deal of dependencies are outside of our control – such as competitor activity, significant algorithmic updates, macro socio-economic factors.

Sector Relativity

Even when it comes to perceived wisdom, what is required and valid for one client, may be completely unsuitable for another client. As an example it is generally inadvisable to pursue site-wide footer links, such links being generally low quality, out of context and often unnatural; however in the IT hosting sector, the leading host companies (in business and SERPs) all have a huge majority of sitewide footer links in their backlin profiles. In this sector it is perfectly natural and valid for host company clients to have a “hosted by” footer link, to either the host URL or TOS page. Many high-trafficked and e-commerce brands link to their host as good quality hosting companies have extensive terms of service, codes of practise and sophistocated disaster recovery set-ups.

Resources

Although much of the technical and analytical resource required for SEO is provided by the SEO professional, when it comes to content marketing and sophistocated linkbuilding campaigns, much of this is dependent on the available resources and collatoral provided by the client.

Working with PR and marketing teams to leverage content and brand messaging is a much more efficient and effective strategy at times.

 

If you are buying or assessing SEO services, please do consider the above points and indeed there are many more reasons not detailed here as to why prospective agencies will not be able to provide on-the-spot answers and guaranteed parameters. In fact, if a prospective service provider does offer immediate quantified guarantees on aspects of your SEO objectives I’d be inclined to question their knowledge and proposed strategy in detail.

As always – DYOR!

 

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