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greengabbards · 7 years ago

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Ultimate Reputation Management Guide Pt 8

In this part of the series, we’re shifting gears a bit so we can dig into how to create great content for your company blog. In this lesson, we’re going to show you a number of examples of great company blogs, give you a ton of ideas for blog post topics, and teach you our five secrets to writing great content in less than two hours. We’ll also give you hard data that you can use to know exactly when to publish and how often you should blog.

Examples of Great Company Blogs

The first thing I wanted to share in this lesson are some of the best examples of company blogs that are out there today. These are my top five personal favorites, and I’ll share with you specific examples of blog posts (in the links) so you know exactly what I like about each one.

#1 – The Zillow Blog

Insert Zillow Blog Media

The Zillow blog is a real estate niche blog, but has a ton of great examples of building expertise in a specific vertical while also coming up with creative ways to reach a wider audience.

In this post about how to get approved for a mortgage, they share in-depth details that establish the company as industry experts on the topic of housing.

They also run sweepstakes to reach a wider audience, such as this blog post that generates additional reviews for lenders on the Zillow site, using the iPad to create incentive.

Finally, they create celebrity-related postings called “eye candy” that give insider details about which celebrities are selling and renting their homes. Everyone loves to take a peek inside a celebrity’s home, so people are natural curious and come for the images.

#2 – The Whole Foods Blog

Insert Whole Foods Blog Media

Whole Foods is a large grocery chain that specializes in organic, fresh, and unique food options. They created a series on Home Composting that generated a number of comments from foodies. Any time you can create a series, the posts will promote each other and boost pageviews.

Whole Foods also knows that its customer base loves “green” cleaning products, so they tied their content to Spring Cleaning in an original way. Just like you might tie discounts or coupons to a relevant holiday, you can also do holiday tie-ins with your blog content.

#3 – Marriott Blog

Insert Marriott Blog Media

The Marriott, a hotel chain, puts its CEO front and center with its blog. This helps establish trust, authenticity, and vulnerability. It also adds a personal touch.

#4 – The Cleanest Line Blog

Insert Media Here

Patagonia, an outdoor clothing company, takes a different approach with The Cleanest Line. They’ve created a place where employees, customers, and fans can interact.

They highlight true stories of customers with a series called Worn Wear. Because their customers are so dedicated to the brand, they are also able to write posts that go into deep detail about their product features.

#5 – The Wegmans Blog

Insert Wegman Media

The Wegmans blog is the last example. What I like about this blog is that they incorporate author images at the top of each post, which helps establish credibility and trust and makes the blog more personal (Google loves Author Profiles-More on This Later). They also try to highlight changes they make based on customer feedback, which helps get their customers invested in the company because they feel they can directly affect outcomes by voicing their opinions.

My Five Secrets To Writing Great Content

Now that I’ve shown you my five favorite company blogs, let’s talk about how to turn your company blog into an exciting place that readers want to visit. It all starts with great content.

Would it surprise you to hear that it takes me less than two hours to write each of the posts in this series?

The thing about great content is that it doesn’t need to take a long time, if you know the secret shortcuts that will help you produce amazing work in fewer than two hours. Here are some of my secrets:

Secret #1 – Blog About the Things You Are Passionate About

It is no surprise that you will be able to write content faster when you know a lot about the topic because you are passionate about it. When you build a blog around topics that you love, your enthusiasm for the content will shine through. You’ll also have a lot of knowledge from reading about the topic after work hours and keeping up with industry news related to your topic.

I don’t know if you can tell, but I am super passionate about reputation management. There’s no way I would be able to write a dozen-part guide otherwise! Because I’m so passionate about reputation management and because I know the topic in such great detail, I’m able to produce amazing content that is really useful to my clients and readers.

Secret #2 – Get Inspired by Similar Blogs and Websites

One of the insider secrets to finding topics that people are excited to read about and share with their friends is looking for ideas that have already been proven to have virality. You can find these ideas by looking at other blogs that are closely related to your industry.

For example, if you wanted to write about fitness topics, you might go to Tim Ferriss’s blog, the 4-Hour Work Week, and look at some of his most popular posts. One post that has served as pillar content for his site as well as inspiration for his New York Times bestseller, the 4-Hour Body, is a post called How to Lose 20 lbs. of Fat in 30 Days… Without Doing Any Exercise.

This post has received nearly 6000 comments and has been shared over 10,000 times on social networking sites. You could steal this headline and write your own post that is similar in format for your readers.

For example, you might write a post called “How to Lose 20 Pounds of Fat in 30 Days if You are a Woman.” Anyone who studies diet and exercise topics knows that women have different needs and considerations than men when it comes to losing weight quickly. Of course, you would need to have the content to back this headline up, but you could write a similar post that includes your rules for women and a case study of one of your clients that you helped lose weight quickly. You could also include pictures and a simple list of “Yes” foods, similar to how Tim Ferriss does it.

Secret #3 – Create an Outline

Once I decide on my topic, the first thing I always do is create an outline of exactly what I want to include in the post. I start with a very basic outline and then I continue to fill in the details with any links to research I want to include or any case studies that may be relevant to the article.

The thing that sets great content apart from the rest of the internet is adding facts that back up the points made in the article. Any time you can incorporate research that supports your opinion, you add great value to the reader. The same thing goes for case studies, stories, examples, insider tips, frameworks, and digestible lists.

I include all of these in my outline so I won’t get distracted by needing to look up something on the internet in the middle of my writing flow. This step typically takes me 10-15 minutes.

Secret #4 – Separate Writing From Editing

After you finish your outline, you’ll need to do two additional steps:

you’ll need to write the post

you’ll need to edit the post

IN that order, not at the same time

Many people try to do both at once, but that’s a huge mistake! One of my greatest secrets for writing amazing content quickly is that I’m very good at separating my writing process from my editing process.

When I get into the writing zone, I type as fast as I can without worrying about formatting, grammar, fixing any errors, or making each sentence perfect. My goal when I’m writing is to get all the information out of my head and onto the screen as fast as I can, putting everything in as close to the order as possible to what I want the final product to look like. The writing portion typically takes me an hour or less.

Next, I do the editing portion. This is where I do things like rearrange the content, rewrite the sub-headers for search engine optimization, improve the flow of the blog post, add anything I forgot, and correct grammar and spelling errors. This often only takes me 15 minutes, especially if I give the post some time to rest. I find that if I wait a day and come back to it with fresh eyes, the editing happens even faster.

Secret #5 – Add Images and Post on Social Networks

We live in a visual society, so including an image in your content can truly increase your sharing results on social networks. You already have a great headline and great content, so taking this extra step will really put your content above all the rest.

Once you’ve added your images, you should post and share on all your social networks. You might also consider scheduling additional tweets and shares using the buffer app so that you can continue to promote your content over the next several weeks and months. The reason content gets lots of shares is because you continue to share it. If you’re not promoting your content, no one else will.

Think of it this way: you know that your content has value and is going to help your reader once you put it in their hands. That means it’s your duty to get your content into as many readers hands as possible so that you can keep helping people long after you finished writing your blog post. Every time you share content, you’re giving people a gift, so don’t be shy!

What To Write About

We strongly encourage our clients to use secret #2 when choosing what to write about. There are tons of benefits, especially because the headline and the topic are often already tried and tested. It’s much easier to write about a topic you know has already done well on social networks than it is to come up with topics you think might do well. Still, I wanted to share a few other ideas that we encourage our clients to write about, because they tend to be popular and simple to put together:

Create Guides and Series – People love series, and often when they find one great post they are looking for another by the same author. A series increases pageviews, builds trust, and helps you establish a relationship with your potential client. It also increases the conversion rate to your newsletter.

Take Advantage of Holiday Trends – Business owners in retail will know all about the benefits of tying marketing to relevant holidays. The benefits of creating blog content tied to holidays is that there is a renewed annual interest in the same content year after year, which can make the article more and more valuable over time. For example, if you have a photography business, why not create a blog post with your favorite fireworks images over the past several years?

Highlight Customers – Whenever you can highlight a customer, you do three things—turn that customer into a fan for life, build trust with other customers, and create an amazing conversion piece that serves as both a case study and testimonial to your product or service.

Crafting Your Voice

It’s really important for you blog posts to have a bit of personality injected into them. When I write blog posts for you, I hope that my personality shines through so you can tell that I’m genuine in my expertise and passionate about reputation management. Here are a few guidelines for crafting your unique blogging voice:

Be authentic – When you write like you speak, your natural personality and voice will come through in the words.

Be transparent – Share failures and successes and be honest in your dealings. People can spot a fake.

Give advice – A great blog post shares an opinion and provides an actionable step the reader can take. Blog posts that readers can’t take action on are fairly worthless, so make sure you are saying something of value and sharing your perspective in a way that will help your readers.

Ask for feedback – At the end of each post, encourage readers to chime in with their own thoughts.

Raise the level of discourse – State your opinions respectfully and be respectful of others who don’t agree with you. Your blog posts should be viewed as conversations, not attacks. Don’t aim to offend!

How Often To Write and When To Publish

One of the questions I get from every client I work with is how often should I be writing on my blog and when are the best times of day to publish to get the maximum results?

Let’s start with the first question:

How often should you write on your blog?

Dan Zarrella, a data scientist at Hubspot, analyzed the top 1000 blogs on the web and found that frequency of posting was highly correlated to the amount of traffic per day.

Blogs that posted one or more times per day saw triple the unique visitors per month and double the incoming links than blogs that posted fewer than once per day.

Now, I know that you’re a business owner and posting multiple times per day probably isn’t realistic, but the research shows that the more frequently you post, the more traffic and incoming links you’ll get. Pretty simple, right?

We tell our clients that they should post as many times as possible, as long as the content is great. If they are creating high-quality content each time, there is no reason not to post as frequently as possible. You won’t annoy your readers or overwhelmed them; instead, you’ll continue to attract inbound leads and new potential customers.

Now for the second question:

When is the best time of day to publish to get the maximum results on social networks?

Dan Zarrella studied activity on both Twitter and Facebook and found the following:

Twitter Retweet Times

People are most likely to retweet between the daylight hours, particularly starting at noon EST and continuing until about midnight EST. Retweets hit a peak around 4pm EST.

Retweet activity peaks later in the workweek, particularly on Friday at 4pm EST. Weekends remain low.

Facebook Sharing by Day of the Week

People are most likely to share on Facebook during the weekends. According to Wired, 50% of employers block Facebook at work, which may account for the discrepancy.

Facebook Sharing by Hour of Day (EST)

Facebook sharing tends to happen throughout the day, with the peaks being around 9am EST (before regular work hours) and in the evenings around 7pm EST (just after regular work hours).

When Do You Read Blogs

Dan Zarella also published his results on a survey of over 1,400 blog readers and found that the most popular time for reading blogs is in the morning. As the day continues, fewer and fewer people read blogs regularly.

To summarize all this data, Reputation Hacks has three simple guidelines to answer this question:

#1 – We recommend that clients with business-related blogs post during the week, while clients with lifestyle or special interest blogs have a little more flexibility in terms of which audience they prefer to target with their content.

#2 – We recommend that clients schedule their blog posts to publish in the morning, but schedule their tweets and other sharing to happen in the afternoon at peak hours.

#3 – We recommend posting some blog posts later in the week, when fewer blogs are publishing. Plenty of readers enjoy catching up on their blog feeds over the weekend, and it is important to catch the attention of this demographic.

Of course, the most important part is to write great content! Posting great content consistently is what will bring the leads, clients, and customers to your company website.

Thanks for reading this part of the guide and if you have any questions, remember you can email me at [email protected].

https://greengabbard.com/reputation-management/ultimate-reputation-management-guide-pt-8/

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greengabbards · 7 years ago

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Ultimate Reputation Management Guide Pt 7

What is Google AutoComplete and why does it matter? If you go to the Google homepage, you’ll notice that the minute you start typing in a keyword phrase, Google will begin to offer you suggestions that finish the phrase. This functionality is called Google AutoComplete and is a great tool for doing research or for coming up with better phrases to search for. It’s also good for when you’re looking for something that might be a longer keyword phrase because often, Google is able to figure it out and you don’t have to type the entire phrase in.

Unfortunately, Google AutoComplete can work against you in a big way when you’re dealing with reputation management for your company or personal brand. In this lesson, we’ll go over the history of Google AutoComplete and also talk about how companies have, in the past, gotten Google to remove AutoComplete suggestions from their search results.

The History of Google AutoComplete

Google created this feature in 2008 in the hopes that it could predict what people were searching for and automatically load those results before people even finish typing in their search request. The functionality was originally available in 2004 as an experimental feature. It’s been called a few different names, including Google Suggest and Google AutoComplete. The feature recently came back into general interest for bloggers and website owners when additional functionality called Google Instant Search was launched in 2010. This functionality is what enables Google to load results before a user types in the full keyword phrase.

How Google AutoComplete Works

These results are based on the suggestions that Google comes up with for how people actually search. The most popular search terms come up first. For example, if you typed in the phrase “why did she,” you’ll see Google Suggest results like, “why did she break up with me” and “why did she cheat.” These are the most popular keyword phrases that start with the phrase “why did she.”

We don’t know everything about how Google comes up with their suggested results, but we know that these results are impacted primarily by what terms are popular in a specific region and language. That means that people in the UK might see results that are different than yours if you live in Boston. Likewise, people in San Francisco might also see different results than you, so it is not necessarily broken down by country, but rather by region.

Other factors include any personalization that is already factored into your account (if you are signed into your Google account through Gmail or Drive), any spelling corrections or de-duplications from misspelled keywords, and the timing of when you are doing a search.

The last factor is especially good news for anyone who has a reputation management problem because it means that over time, you can change and affect the Google Suggest results the same way you can change and the fact the Google search results. Let’s talk about how to do this.

How To Change Google Suggest Results

Google AutoComplete is driven by actual search results, which means that it is affected and influenced by what people are actually typing in to the search box. One way to change and influence these search results is to have a number of people all over the world type in the search results that you want related to your company into Google’s search box.

To do this well, you’ll need to get a ton of users that have unique IP addresses to type the search queries that you want into Google on an ongoing basis so that you can keep control over what the Google instant results are showing.

What You’ll Need

We’re going to go over three methods for doing this. Before we get into any of these methods, you’ll need to have two things ready to go. First, you’ll need to have up to six keyword phrases you would rather see when someone searches your company name. These can be either positive or neutral search terms, like [your company name] + “Twitter” or [your company name] + “Facebook”.

The second thing you’ll need is content that matches the search terms you want Google AutoComplete to show in its results. Ideally, you’ll want this content to be ranked in the first spot for the keyword phrase you are using. You can refresh your memory on how to do this by going back to the lesson I wrote about search engine optimization in part 4 of this reputation management guide.

Once you have these two critical pieces in place, you can create a campaign that helps you change the Google AutoComplete results.

The Three Ways To Influence Google AutoComplete

There are a number of ways to get this accomplished, and we are going to go over the pros and cons of each of them.

Using Amazon MTurk

If your name has a fairly small amount of search traffic, you might be able to run a campaign using Amazon MTurk. If you’re not familiar with the service, it essentially allows you to create HITs, which are small tasks that can be performed online from anywhere in the world. You can set the amount you want to pay per task (often pennies per task), and then you also pay a small fee to Amazon MTurk to publish your HIT in their system.

You’ll want to construct your instruction form for the workers carefully because it’s challenging to get good results if you don’t. I’ve run campaigns like this many times before and have a fully formatted and optimized form that I use for my clients. If you want to create your own form, the general items that you’ll need to include are:

The search phrase that you want the worker to use in Google search

The title and the description of the content that you would like for them to click on once the search results come up

Additional information that would help you verify that they actually completed the task. For example, you might ask them to copy and paste the second paragraph of the content into a text box.

The more specific you can be with your instructions, and the less ambiguity you can have in what specifically you need from them to mark their HIT complete (this is how they get paid), the better results you will get and the less you will spend per worker and task.

You want to run your campaign over the course of several weeks. After two or three weeks, you can check Google AutoComplete results to see if you affected them. At this point, you’ll be focusing on adjusting your campaign and tweaking various details like price point per HIT and number of tasks per day to get the best results for the least amount of money.

Using Proxies

You can also do this an easier way, which is to use proxies. Proxies make it look like you have a different IP address, which looks to Google like you have many people in various locations taking the same action, even as it’s all happening from one computer or one IP address.

You can figure out how long it will take to bump out the unwanted Google Instant result from the search page by looking up the number of global monthly searches that are occurring for the exact phrase. For example, if you were looking at your Google AutoComplete results and saw that [your company name] + “scam” was featured as a top result, you would want to look up the number of global monthly searches for [your company name] + “scam.” You can do this using Google’s free keyword tool.

From there, you’ll want to run a larger number of searches through the proxy than the undesirable search term is getting. For example, if the undesired search term is getting 100 monthly searches, you want to run more than 100 to bump it out of the results and replace it.

Unfortunately, because Google does not disclose its full algorithm, it’s not completely clear how much more will be necessary. Google weighs historical data differently than the recent data, but a ton of historical data could still weigh heavily in current Google AutoComplete results. That means that even if the search for the phrase is low for the current month, it may still be difficult to bump the result from Google AutoComplete.

It comes down to a matter of how much you’d be willing to invest in the service, because the more searches you run through the proxy, the more it’s going to cost. It can take several months to see results.

Using Ads

The final way to change Google AutoComplete results is by taking out an ad on a highly trafficked website, a television show, a radio station program, or a social networking site. If you are able to get enough search traffic through one or more of these means, we recommend using an online method of advertising because you can link directly to the Google search term that you want people to use. Instead of linking the add to your website, you link the add to a search on Google, like this: click here.

You have to be careful with this method because it might be confusing to users who click on your ads. If possible, we want to use this opportunity to kill two birds by influencing Google’s AutoComplete results and driving more traffic, leads, and potential customers to your website.

Though this adds an extra step in the process of getting people to your website, you can explain it by running an online scavenger hunt or a contest that turns the act of searching into a game. This also ensures that people not only click on your search term, but also that they click through to the content you have related to that search term.

If you’re using this method, you’ll need to think through the mechanics of it to make sure you’re optimizing it for multiple goals.

Even when you get into the search results using any of these methods, remember that you’ll have to keep the searches up at a certain level for each term in order to maintain the results. Remember, reputation management is an ongoing process that doesn’t end when you have your search results the way you want them. The work continues because we want to build long-term assets that protect you from having a reputation management problem in the future.

The One Way To Remove Google AutoComplete Results

The first three methods are conventional ways to influence Google AutoComplete. There is one final method that may get results as well.

Using the Law

A number of companies from France, Italy, and Ireland have sued Google for defamation following suggestions that included words like “scam,” “rapist,” “satanist,” and “convicted” after their company or personal name.

Google has, for the most part, acquiesced to these companies to avoid litigation. Though this is an extreme method for getting results, Google is willing to censor their AutoComplete suggestions on a case-by-case basis for certain companies in order to avoid defamation and libel suits.

There are a small number of other reasons that Google removes suggestions from Google AutoComplete. Those reasons mostly have to do with security and include things like hate speech, protected groups, personally identifiable information, adult content-related porn, legally mandated removals, and piracy-related suggestions. If you can find a reason for them to censor your Google AutoComplete results, you can file a complaint and try to get it taken down.

These are the main ways that I use to influence Google AutoComplete results for my clients. Thanks for reading this part of the guide and if you have any questions, you can email me at [email protected].

https://greengabbard.com/reputation-management/ultimate-reputation-management-guide-pt-7/

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greengabbards · 7 years ago

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Ultimate Reputation Management Guide Pt 6

In the last lesson, we talked about how you can create a number of assets, including WordPress installs, Facebook pages, Twitter profiles, Blogger blogs, and number of other websites and social media accounts you might need to build a strong reputation online. In this lesson, I will teach you how to develop your asset linking strategy, which will help your SEO tremendously by helping you interlink your websites to increase your Google Page Rank.

As we touched on in a previous lesson, it’s really important to get your linking strategy correct. Google is very good at ferreting out people who try to use linking strategies to game their system. One of the most important factors Google uses to determine where your page should rank is the number of backlinks you have to your site. This means that you have to be cautious when creating backlinks through social media profiles or any websites you own because there is a right way to do it and a wrong way. If you do it the wrong way, Google will penalize you in search results and may even deindex your website, which means that your website won’t show up in Google search results at all. This could cost your brand a ton of traffic, and since we obviously don’t want that, we’re going to teach you how to link to your websites in a way that improves your search engine rankings.

Red Flags to Asset Linking

Now, there are many dangers to asset linking that you should be aware of. These have come about thanks to Google’s update called Panda 3.4. This update devalues your backlinks when you commit the following actions:

Linking to your site with the same exact anchor text from a number of sites

Having a high velocity of links going to your site (a large number of links in a small time period)

Trading links with websites that do not have a high Google PageRank

All of these actions used to be common practice in search engine optimization, but have more recently fallen out of favor because Google devalues these links and these backlinks do not help you rise in the search results.

What Google is looking for instead is a natural progression of growth on your website. This means that Google wants to see backlinks that come slowly over time from a variety of websites using a variety of anchor text. Remember, Google’s goal is to produce the best search results for people, using an algorithm. They rely on information that comes from people, like backlinks, to weigh heavily in their algorithm and count as a human vote for the credibility of a website.

How To Create a Natural Backlinking Strategy For Your Website

I can teach you how to get backlinks to your site in an authentic way that looks natural to Google’s search engine algorithm. We have a three-step process that will help you build these links without getting penalized in Google:

Step 1: Create a Map of All Your Online Assets

In part five of this series on reputation management, we talked about creating your company assets like “[company name] reviews.com” or “[company name] reviews” as a Facebook page or as a Twitter account. The first thing you want to do is group all these assets according to the keyword used to create them. For example, under your “reviews” grouping, you’ll put all of your assets that target the keyword “reviews.” You’ll also group all the assets that target the keyword “[company name] [your city] .com,” and so on. We recommend that you do these groupings in an Excel spreadsheet so you can stay organized.

Step 2: Choose a Focal Point in Each Grouping

The #1 rule in creating an asset linking strategy is that you can’t have all of your sites pointing to each other randomly. There must be one main site that all the other sites are pointing to reep the rewards of this strategy. So in each grouping, you need to choose a focal site that you can link all the other sites to.

The focal point for your grouping is usually going to be your main “.com” asset. For example, your focal point for the “reviews” group would be “[company name] reviews.com.”

All of your focal point assets are going to eventually link to your main company website. This creates a three-tiered hierarchy of links, which we have found is the safest way to influence Google search results without looking unnatural and setting off a red flag.

Step 3: Link All Your Assets in Each Grouping to the Focal Point in Each Grouping

Lastly, you want to go to each site and put a link to the focal point of the grouping that site is in. This is going to increase your Google PageRank and will let Google know that this asset is the main one. Google will give this asset the most weight and the most credibility in its search engine results. Furthermore, all of these assets on sites like Quora, Facebook, and Twitter are going to lead to your focal points, which are each going to point back to your main company site.

Pitfalls to Avoid When Creating an Asset Linking Strategy

Before I set you loose with this asset linking strategy, I want to caution you against some of the recent updates that have caused companies short or long-term positional drops without warning. The best way to link to your site strategically and naturally is to know the things that Google is looking for when trying to ferret out over-optimized sites.

1. Acquiring Excessive Links in a Short Amount of Time (Link Acquisition Velocity)

You want to keep track of your site’s link acquisition velocity because not only could you make a mistake and link too quickly, but your competitors could also attempt to use this tactic to get your website delisted from Google. You can check your site’s link acquisition velocity using one of two tools:

Ahrefs

Majestic

Also, don’t think that you can try to avoid this pitfall by gaining links from authoritative sites only. While you want to gain backlinks from sites with authority, if your website suddenly spikes with authoritative backlinks it may still send a red flag to Google. You can check this by using a link profile tool created by Tom Anthony.

Finally, though it may be tempting to buy backlinks in order to increase your search engine ranking quickly, these rarely end up being worthwhile. First of all, Google does not allow paid links of any kind and if they find out you’ve purchased backlinks for your website, you will be penalized. Second, these links are rarely worth it because, while they might drive some traffic, it will likely be of low quality.

2. Excessive Site-wide Links From Websites that Link to You

Site-wide links are the ones found in a blog roll, sidebar, header, or footer. These types of links show up on every page of your website, which comes up in Google search algorithm as a website linking to you excessively. You can check who is linking to you with a site-wide link using Google Webmaster tools. Go to your site on the web and click on links to your site. You’ll be able to see the people who are linking to you most. If anyone is linking to you more than 20 times, they are probably linking to you with a site-wide link.

While Google’s Webmaster Tools is probably the quickest way to check on this, it doesn’t always report on the backlinks that Google actually sees. If you want to get more information, you can use a third-party service such as:

Ahrefs

Majestic SEO

Open Site Explorer (Soon to be depricated)

Keep in mind, however, that these sites are not trying to replicate Google’s behavior, and may also provide significantly skewed data. This can happen when Google removes a site from its index but the third-party tool still reports those links. Most of these third party tools do not account for deindexed websites and will simply provide you with all the information about all the websites that link to yours.

Another problem with site-wide links is that they look like link exchanges. A link exchange is when someone links to you in return for you linking to him or her. Google frowns upon this backlink method, though they don’t ban it completely.

Often, link exchanges get you into more trouble than they are worth because you are linking to a website that may not be high quality, which hurts you, and you are gaining a link from a website that might not be sending you high quality traffic. We recommend avoiding link exchanges with anyone who does not have a highly relevant site to yours.

3. Similar Anchor Text in Every Backlink

Humans who are not coordinating their efforts to link to a particular site would naturally use different anchor text in every backlink. Google gets very suspicious when it sees a number of sites that link to one website with the same anchor text. This means that in your linking hierarchy, you want to use a variety of anchor text phrases that are related to your keywords.

A great example of a company who had this problem is JCPenney. They tried to game the system by getting unrelated websites to link to them using a single keyword phrase as anchor text. The New York Times found out how JCPenney had gained such a high ranking in Google so quickly and outed them in the press. A Google employee named Matt Cutts ended up deranking them because they were in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines.

You can check the anchor text of all your backlinks by exporting anchor text data from as many different sources as you can find. We recommend:

Ahrefs

Majestic SEO

Open Site Explorer

First, export the anchor texted you find from all of these sites and put it into one spreadsheet. Then, you want to start filtering the data to get one cohesive data set that makes sense for what you’re trying to understand. We recommend filtering out the following:

Duplicates – Since you are pulling from multiple tools, you’re likely to find duplicate data

Dead links – Google doesn’t use these because they are from sites that used to link to you but currently don’t

No follow links – Google doesn’t follow these and they are unlikely to cause over-optimization issues

Site-wide links – Google counts a link from a domain to a particular page on your website once, so you should too

Links from websites that have been de-indexed by Google – Since Google is not looking at these, there’s no point for you to look at them either

From there, you can use Excel to classify different anchor text variations and spot weaknesses in your backlinks. You’ll need to use your data analysis skills and may want to create a couple graphs to help you see patterns in the data. You also want to look for any keywords that have an excess of backlinks associated with them.

Advanced Techniques For Ranking Higher in Google Search Results

Now that we’ve gone over all the mistakes people make, I want to share with you a few advanced tips that will help you make your link building look natural.

1. Using Junk Anchors

In the real world, not everyone is going to link to your website using optimized anchor text. In fact, a number a people are going to link to your website using phrases like, “Click Here!” Or “Read Now.” This is the type of text that people use when they are creating calls-to-action within their text. You can actually rank faster in Google search results if you include these types of junk anchors in your optimization.

A bonus reason to use these junk anchors in your copy is that they help increase conversion for the click-through rate of the link. Since your goal is to drive as much traffic to your website as possible, this advanced tip can help you improve your traffic results.

2. Using Semantic Keyword Phrases

Semantics is the study of meaning and interpretation in words. You want to use semantic keywords when linking to your content. By using semantically equivalent words in your keyword phrases, you can better describe to Google what your website is about.

The classic example of semantic keywords is “lemon.” Does it refer to a color, a fruit, a scent? In this case, it refers to a defective car. So instead of using “lemon” as the anchor text, you would want to use longer phrases like, “how to spot a lemon on the used car lot.” Then, you’d want to come up with semantically equivalent phrases, like “how to spot a defective car on the used car lot.”

If you’re interested in digging deeper into this topic, Brian Clark of Copyblogger has provided a simple guide to semantic keyword research on his website.

3. Using Brand Mentions as Anchor Text

Typically, when humans link to each other they use names and brands within the anchor text. For example, if John Carpenter wanted to link to something I’ve written on greengabbard's blog, he would probably link using an anchor text that read something like, “I came across this awesome article on search engine optimization by Micah Gabbard of greenGabbard Media.” because people like to give credit where credit is due, Google often rewards brand mentions within the anchor text. Link strategies that do not include brand mentions signal to Google that someone is trying to game their system.

4. Gaining Social Links on Social Media Websites

Google’s #1 goal is to create search engine results that are relevant to as many people as possible, so it is always looking for ways to incorporate social proof into its algorithm. That’s why gaining attention from humans is so valuable to search engine optimization. You want to get as many shares for your content as you can cross social media outlets like Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, StumbleUpon, and many other social sharing sites.

You can increase social sharing by putting links to share prominently at the bottom of all of your content and by asking your readers to share the content within your blog posts. You can also create great content that social influencers find valuable and want to promote to their audiences. We’ll go into much more detail about how to create excellent content in a later lesson in this reputation management guide.

Creating a Long-Lasting Linking Strategy

While this asset linking strategy may take a little longer to generate results in Google search, I guarantee that it’s the best way to teach Google about your website. We’ve seen companies go overboard when creating online assets because they immediately start linking each asset to all their other assets. This helps get as many links as possible, but it also creates a link exchange, which looks unnatural and sends a red flag to Google. We have seen this backfire many times and have watched companies lose all the rankings because Google has delisted them from search engine results.

It’s worthwhile to take your time and create a hierarchy of links with your linking strategy. This will position you for long-term success.

Thanks for reading this part of the guide

If you have any questions about reputation management, shoot me an email at [email protected]

https://greengabbard.com/reputation-management/ultimate-reputation-management-guide-pt-6/

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greengabbards · 7 years ago

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Ultimate Reputation Management Guide Pt 5

In traditional SEO, the goal is to create one very powerful site that ranks at the top for your target keywords. The goal is to generate leads through this site and convert at a high level. In a way, it’s easy in its simplicity because you only have to focus on this one site: all external links to one site and it’s internal pages to make it as powerful as possible.

While a similar strategy is applied to reputation management, SEO is only the tip of the iceberg. The goal of reputation management is to protect your online identity from those who wish to do it harm. To accomplish this goal, you need a plethora of online assets on the front page of Google, not just one.

Why you need a myriad of assets

Lets say your company.com ranks at the front page of Google for athletic shoes. This is great because you’re going to get lots of leads and customers with this keyword. But what if right below in the 2nd and 3rd position of Google there are two negative reviews about your site. Even though your main site ranks well, you will still lose customers because the next two results on Google are negative. This is where reputation management comes in and positions you to control the top 10, 20, and even 30 results of Google.

Strategic online asset creation is about creating the right assets that will rank for the right keywords to occupy the first 3 pages of Google.

The Main Strategy Behind Online Asset Creation

The overarching principle can be summarized in the following way:

Create assets to rank for your target keywords

Create GREAT content and build links to earn page rank and rank for target keywords

Intelligently link from these online assets to your main sites to give them an SEO boost

The more sites you create in a legitimate way, the better

It’s not enough to create these online assets; as I stated in the beginning of this post, SEO is a big part of reputation management. Each site must be optimized to rank well and earn page rank. Once this is established, you can use these powerful ancillary sites to point to your main sites and give them extra link juice to rank well on search engines, thereby increasing traffic and leads for your business.

Online Assets to Create

Create your own websites

The first group of online assets to create are the .com’s and .net’s that match the phrasing of your target keywords. A common .com that you need to get is yourcompanyreviews.com. If this is not available, look to purchasing the domain name away from the owner, or purchase a variation of the domain:

yourcompany-reviews.com

yourcompanyreviews.net

yourcompanyreviews.org

In addition, create pages on your site that match the target keywords that you’re going after. This can be easily done by adding a /reviews to your main domain:

yourcompany.com/reviews

yourcompany.net/reviews

Easy set up through WordPress

A simple, direct way to build sites and keep them updated is to use a WordPress Install. We use WordPress installs on all of our clients sites that need to rank well for a keyword and need to be updated on a consistent basis.

I’ve found the easiest theme to set up and customize is The Thesis Theme for WordPress.

Social Media Assets

In addition to .com’s and .net’s, you’ll need to create a social profile for each of your target keywords. The following are social assets that we’ve created for our partners and that you should create for yourself as well:

Facebook

Make sure to get the proper vanity URL: facebook.com/yourcompanyreviews

Twitter

Remember to get more than just the reviews username for your company. See below how we’re also targeting different keywords for reputation management.

Squidoo

Squidoo is a terrific way to become an expert in a target vertical. Using Squidoo, you can build lenses that serve as expert pieces about a topic. These lenses tend to rank decently well on search engines.

Quora

Quora is a great place to establish expertise via a popular Q&A site. I recommend Quora over Q&A sites such as Yahoo Answers and LinkedIn Answers.

Keep in mind that Quora is a place for individuals — not companies or brands. Therefore, you’ll need to choose your company representative and create a Quora account through their personal Facebook profile.

WordPress and Blogger

WordPress and Blogger have similar uses. Create a blog that contains the keywords you’re targeting in the URL and update it with great content twice per month.

YouTube

YouTube is a great Quick Fix resource to dominate certain low-hanging keywords.

Flickr and Slideshare

Similar to YouTube, Flickr and Slideshare are great Quick Fix strategies to get photos and presentations online that can rank for keywords. Though these sites are not as powerful as YouTube, you can still hit the 2nd or 3rd page of Google using these social sites.

Tumblr

Tumblr is a cross between Twitter and a Blog. It’s not necessary to write unique content for Tumblr; rather, it’s best to use it as a platform to promote other online assets.

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Next Steps

Create the online assets for each of your target keywords. Take the time to create a good design, fill out the about section, and link to the appropriate profiles. If you create a yourcompanyreviews.tumblr.com, then it should link to yourcompanyreviews.com.

If you have any questions about reputation management, shoot me an email at [email protected]

https://greengabbard.com/reputation-management/ultimate-reputation-management-guide-pt-5/

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greengabbards · 7 years ago

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Ultimate Reputation Management Guide Pt 4

So far in the series, we’ve talked about how important Google search results are to reputation management. You understand the importance of ranking well for specific keywords, but you might be wondering how to find the right keywords in the first place. In this lesson, we'll cover exactly how to find the right keywords for your company and how to know which are the most important to rank well for. We will also cover keyword analysis and strategy for reputation management vs. for SEO and share a case study of one of our clients who created an additional 5 figures in revenue with just one strategically designed piece of content! Let's dig in.

Keyword Analysis for Reputation Management

There are a number of ways to come up with a list of keywords that you want to use in your reputation management campaign. We are going to talk about five below, and we’re confident that by the end of this lesson you'll have a long list of phrases that you should begin to focus your efforts on.

Also, we always recommend to our clients that they organize their keyword phrases in an Excel or Google spreadsheet because eventually we are going to show you how to prioritize these keywords to get the fastest results. Make sure you leave an extra column for this in your spreadsheet, because the second step is the most valuable one, and we'll be sharing it with you in this lesson. Here are the five categories of keywords you'll want to brainstorm:

#1 – Your Company Name

First, you want to see what results come up in Google for your company name. In this category, you simply want to focus on the top 20 results. What you're looking for is anything negative, such as a ripoff report, a complaint, or a bad review. You'll want to list any keyword phrases that are associated with any negative results that you find in your top 20 results on your spreadsheet.

You can come up with keyword phrases by looking at the title, the link structure, and the description of the search result. If needed, you may want to review the lesson on search engine optimization, because we are essentially reverse-engineering Google search results to come up with keyword phrases that the content is ranking highly for.

#2 – Your Company Name + Common Search Phrases

The second thing you want to do when looking for keywords that are relevant to your reputation management campaign is to come up with a list of things that people might type into Google search when looking for negative posts about your company. We always start with a short list that combines the company name with the keywords listed below:

Reviews

Scam

Rip-off

Complaint

#3 – Your Company Name + Google Autocomplete Phrases

Third, we recommend that you check your company name and look at any terms that Google AutoComplete uses. What you want to look for are any negative terms that are associated when you type in your company name. Sometimes we see Google AutoComplete adding the word “scam” or “complaints” to the end of your company name. This is one of the highest priorities you want to focus on because those key phrases are the ones that people who aren't even looking for anything negative about you online will end up using in their search. That means that customers who may already like you or may be ready to purchase are getting sidetracked by bad reviews and complaints that might sway their decision.

#4 – Your Company Name + Locale-Specific Keywords

Next, look at your company name + additional keyword phrases that are specific to the company. For example, if you're a real estate agent in California, we would add your company name + California.

For one of our clients, we checked their company name plus their city and looked at the top 20 search results. We found that this was one of the highest volume search terms that the company had, and when we dug through the Google results, there was a negative review within the top five results. Because the term has a lot of traffic, and because one of the top search results was a negative review, we made this term one of our priorities. It became very important for us to rank high in search results for this term because the company would gain a ton of additional business simply by making a strong first impression in this keyword search and pushing the negative review on to the fourth or fifth page of Google search results.

#5 – Your Google Analytics Account

Lastly, you'll want to check the keyword phrases that are showing up in your Google Analytics account. If you don't have a Google Analytics account, you'll want to get one, because this will help you ferret out any negative keyword phrases that you are already ranking highly for. These are some of the best keyword phrases to find because you will be able to change the content to something more positive, since you already own a high ranking in the search results for that term.

Keyword Strategy For Reputation Management

If you compile the list from the five categories above, you should have at least 40 to 50 keyword phrases in your spreadsheet. From here, we need to sort and prioritize the different keyword phrases because we can only focus on so many. We want to look for the keyword phrases that are going to give us the largest gains in terms of traffic. We also want to prioritize the keyword phrases that have the most negative search results, because we'll gain a lot by ranking highly for these terms.

Separate Dominate vs Remove

The first step is to separate what you need to dominate versus what you need to remove from Google Autocomplete. The terms that you'll most likely need to focus on first are the ones showing up in Google Autocomplete. The next priorities are likely going to be your company name + city and your company name + “reviews.” You're going to use these terms in a later lesson about online asset creation, where we're going to use these key terms to create social profiles and accounts.

Let's talk a bit about Google AutoComplete. Now, you probably don't necessarily need to dominate the keyword phrases that you found with Google AutoComplete—you just want to hold a ranking for them. The reason we don't want to spend a lot of time on these keyword phrases is because if people are Googling them, it will be very hard for us to be in the #1 or #2 spot.

We may be able to break into the top 10, but as we talked about in an earlier lesson, the majority of the traffic goes to the top 3-4 spots in Google search. This is really important to remember about Google's search algorithm: it is essentially a zero-sum game. What that means is that we can only get significant gains if we can dominate the search results for a specific keyword phrase. If we can't dominate the search results, which we'll define as owning the top 1 to 3 spots, then we are not going to get a ton of benefit from our efforts.

Instead of trying to dominate the search results for these terms, we want to use the negative results to our advantage, which we'll talk about more in the case study.

Later in this guide, we will also talk about how to influence Google AutoComplete so that it stops showing these keyword phrases and instead shows the keyword phrases we want people to search for.

Reputation Management Keyword Analysis vs. SEO Keyword Analysis

So how is reputation management keyword analysis different from SEO keyword analysis? With search engine optimization, the goal is to come up with keywords that are related to your industry. For example, if you were the owner of a surf shop ecommerce store, you might have keyword phrases like “long board,” “surfboard,” “scuba diving,” or “wetsuit.” You would go to Google AdWords and use their tools to check the competition and the traffic volume you might gain by ranking highly for the term. This means the keyword phrases that you would try to dominate would probably need to be very specific and might include phrases such as “classic nine-foot long board” or “classic white nine-foot long board.”

However, you wouldn't necessarily use your company name or your city because those keyword phrases are only relevant to reputation management. The overarching goal of search engine optimization is to target people who don't necessarily know who you are but are searching for relevant keyword phrases that may lead them to your company. With reputation management, you are targeting people who already know you and your company and who are simply researching you and your company to make a purchasing decision.

Here's another way to think about it:

Search engine optimization is primarily for gaining leads who might turn into customers while reputation management is primarily for not losing customers who might be close to making a purchase.

We strongly encourage you to look at search engine optimization and how you can get more traffic with specific keywords using the lesson on search engine optimization as well as several lessons we'll be posting in the future. For the purpose of this lesson, we are simply focusing on keywords that relate to your company name, your company city, and a small set of common words associated with negative search results.

Case Study: The CEO Video That Earned An Extra 5-Figures Per Month

One of our clients had a major issue when people Googled the company name. The top 10 results were filled with links to rip-off reports on various sites. Through our analysis, we were able to pinpoint that most of these sites were ranking highly for the keyword “reviews” along with a number of variations of keywords that included the city name.

Because we notice this pattern in our analysis, we were able to strategically respond to the various rip-off reports that were showing up in the search results. We decided to do this by featuring the CEO of the company in a video, directly responding to the bad reviews. This helped the company do three very important things that are crucial to utilizing our reputation management framework:

The CEO was able to establish credibility, show personality, and build trust because he was openly addressing something that one of his attractors had written online about him

Once a potential customer saw him on video, they instantly felt a rapport with him and saw that he was a good person who was genuinely trying to help people with his company

This helped the CEO earn these people's trust while also discrediting the ripoff reports

The keywords we wanted to rank for were ones that included “rip-off,” “complaint,” the city where the CEO had his company, and the CEO's name. By matching the content to these keywords, we were able to incorporate these keywords into the title, the description, and the alt tags without causing any confusion to the people who viewed it.

The Results

Three months ago, if you typed in the company name and looked at the Google AutoComplete keywords for that search term, people might see something that said the company name + “reviews” or “rip-off.” People would click on that keyword phrase and see all the bad reviews of the company.

Now, the first result they see is the video we made that ranks well for these keywords. They may still see the rip-off reports, because those are really difficult to get rid of especially when the term “rip-off” is in the domain name (for example, ripoffreport.com), but now those results work in our favor rather than to our detriment. Although it is possible, with the know how, to push down these reports some companies simply do not want that results. We were able to turn a negative impression into a positive impression, even without dominating the Google Autocomplete phrase.

This has been extremely helpful in retaining potential customers. We were able to prove this when we started receiving feedback from the sales team. The sales team was getting emails and calls where the customer would say that they were hesitant to make the purchase, but once they saw the CEO's video they felt more comfortable and went ahead and made the purchase right away. We continue to hear from 3-5 people per month who say that the video help them decide to purchase. And that's just the people who said something; there are likely many other people who would not be as forthcoming with that information even though they ended up purchasing the service.

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This is why it's so important to run a keyword analysis and go through the keyword strategy steps to understand where you can make the most impact in search engine results. By doing a little research, you'll be able to hone in on the keyword terms that will get you the fastest and largest results. The video we created with the CEO was able to rank very quickly because of the type of content it was and because of the keywords we had unconvered, and the company was able to immediately save sales that they would have otherwise lost. When we quantified what this one video was worth, the amount ended up being five figures per month. How's that for return on investment?

https://greengabbard.com/reputation-management/ultimate-reputation-management-guide-pt-4/

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greengabbards · 7 years ago

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Ultimate Reputation Management Guide Pt 3

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization is so important to reputation management because Google is one of the most highly trafficked search engines in the world. Because Google owns so much of the market share for search, we can focus solely on this search engine to get 95% of the results. I studied the Google search engine algorithm for years and have figured out many of the most relevant factors that go into how Google decides what websites are most relevant to a search for any keyword phrase.

Content is King

So how does Google figure out which are the most relevant links for your search? First, it looks at the website content across every website that it indexes. If you want your website to rank well in Google search for keyword phrases, you must make sure that the content on your site is optimized for the Google algorithm. For this, you must incorporate the keyword phrases that you want to rank well for into your site’s content. This is the number one factor to remember when considering on-page search engine optimization.

But of course, marketing is the Queen — and you know who runs the household

The other way that Google figures out the most relevant links for any search is by looking at how many external websites link to the content on your website. Who is linking back to your site? Who is sharing your content on major social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn? Not surprisingly, it’s easy to game the system with on-page factors, but off-page factors are a bit harder. External links and social shares are off-page search engine optimization factors, which makes them even more important than putting keyword phrases into your content. In fact, external links is probably the most crucial factor that Google uses in determining whether your site is worthy of being linked to you for any given keyword phrase.

So, as you can see, on-page search engine optimization is important and can help you establish a strong baseline in search results for your website. When you optimize your content for on-page factors, it makes it easy for Google’s crawlers to go through your site and understand exactly what it’s about. Still, it’s not enough; you must also get those external links back to your site. We’ll talk about how to do this through networking, guest blogging, and writing articles for publications in later parts of this reputation management guide.

How People Interact with Search Engines

In the US, there are more than 20 billion searches per month. That’s a lot of people searching! This means that there’s a lot of traffic coming from Google, and we want to capture some of that relevant traffic for your website. This is important, because Google is sending that traffic to whoever is on that front page of the Google search results. If it’s not you, it’s probably your competitor. So, if Google is sending that traffic to somebody, shouldn’t it be you?

Top placement gets all the clicks

Why the front page? Well, the number one position on Google for any given keyword phrase receives roughly 18.2% of the clicks, while the second position only receives 10.1% of the clicks and the third position only receives about 7.2% of the clicks. Everything lower than the fourth position gets fewer than 2% of the clicks. This means that it’s not only important to be on the front page of Google for the keyword phrases your customers are searching for, but it’s also important to continue to climb the ranks until you are number one in search results. The difference in traffic between the first and second position on Google could easily double your business.

If you look at a heat map, you’ll see that the majority of where a person clicks on Google’s search page is on the top left side of the page or the top right side of the page where the ads are. That means that if you’re not at the top of the page (and if you’re buying ads, if you’re not in the top one or two ads) then you probably won’t get a click. The number one slot is of the utmost importance in the results, so that should be the goal for search engine optimization. If you can’t reach the number one spot, you probably still need to be in the top 3 results to make search engine optimization worth your time, because that’s where all the clicks are going to be.

How to Get Into the Number One Spot on Google

If you want to see your content on Google in the top position for your relevant keyword phrases, you must start seeing your content the way Google would. In this lesson, we’re going to teach you how to claim the number one spot on Google for your relevant keyword phrases.

Search engines use a markup called Schema to understand content on the webpage. With Schema markup, you’re able to include instructions to Google about what your page is about without having your readers see those instructions. You can do this by enclosing those instructions within tags. Where going to explain exactly how to put these instructions on your website using Schema in this lesson of the reputation management guide.

We are also going to go into on-page optimization in detail and talk briefly about off-page optimization. The details of these topics are important because they make a substantial difference in Google search rankings.

On-Page Optimization

In this section, I will be talking about several factors that help you optimize your website on the page. Now, at this point, we won’t be talking a ton about how to write great content because we’re going to be covering it in future lessons. For now, we’re just going to be looking at the technical side of creating content so that we can put the foundations in place for when we get to the blogging lessons, which will provide much more detail about creating great content.

Tags

There are several tags you want to be aware of if you’re trying to optimize your site for search engines. Here are some of the main ones that we’ll be talking about throughout this lesson:

Title Tag – This is what shows up in search engine results, and Google also looks at it to determine what the content on the page is about. It’s very important!

Description tags – This shows up in search engine results even though it is not used by Google to determine keywords. However, it’s a wonderful opportunity to convince users to click on your link over someone else’s. You only have 150 characters, so I always recommend using this tag to sell the user on your unique selling proposition.

Alt tags – These can be applied to a number of elements on your website, including images and links. These help Google analyze and classify your non-textual-based content, like your photos.

At GreenGabbard, we have a plug-in we use to set these tags, so you don’t even have to know the HTML coding to do so. We’ll talk about it more in our lesson on setting up a blog.

We also have a few general tips on tags that we recommend to all our clients:

When in doubt, place important keywords closer to the top, front, or beginning. Google’s search algorithm often discards the ends of longer titles, content, and keyword strings.

Create unique titles, tags, and descriptions. This helps Google distinguish between pages and keeps you from looking spammy to search engines. The more specific and accurate you can be with your titles.

Include your brand name if possible. Your brand name is one of your keywords, so you should include it every chance you get.

Write for humans. Everything you write should be descriptive and readable for humans as well as search engines. Remember that most off-page optimization happens because people like your content. You need people to link to you, to share what you created with the world, and to read and comment on your content. Think about the entire experience while creating content, and don’t just create content that search engines will crawl.

Link structures

Your link structure is extremely important for search engine optimization, yet many people get it wrong. There are two things to know about how you are linking your content:

Incorporate Keywords into Your Links

For starters, Google looks to your link structure to find keyword phrases. Therefore, if you own a domain name that has keywords in it, you’ll probably rank higher for those keywords that somebody who just has a webpage with those keywords on it. Now, don’t think that you must have your keyword phrase in your domain name to take advantage of this; you can also include keywords in the link to your content. Here’s a splendid example of a SEO-optimized link and a poorly structured link:

Optimized: https://greengabbard.com/reputation-management/ultimate-reputation-management-guide/

Poor: http://greengabbard.com/?p=0421A (not a real link)

The first link includes relevant keyword phrases so that Google knows what the page is about. The second link just has some random characters in it and doesn’t provide Google with any additional information as to what they should expect from this content.

As a caveat to this, make sure you don’t go overboard or stuff your link with keywords. This makes the link harder to copy, paste, and remember, which creates a poor user experience.

Link Between Pages

The second thing to know about link structures is that Google prefers when your website is well linked within its pages. Google finds links by going to a website and crawling every link that’s on the homepage, then crawling every link that’s on each child page, and so on. If your website is set up to where your pages are not linked to each other, then Google will have a tough time finding specific pages on your site. These are called orphan pages, and even if they are relevant to your keywords, Google is not going to find them, crawl them, or know that they are part of your website. It’s a bit like doing a bunch of work and not getting any recognition for it.

If you want to make sure that you have no orphan pages on your site, you can create a site map. A site map is a file that you can put on your server that provides Google with instructions on how to get to every single page on your website. Site maps are very simple to make, so there’s no excuse not to have one.

I recommend using an XML site map instead of an HTML site map because the XML site map updates automatically every time you update your website. If you run your website WordPress, WordPress allows you an effortless way to create a site map and keeps it up-to-date for Google (So minimal effort needed with WP). You can also check out a comprehensive list of tools that Google recommends for creating XML site maps.

There is another reason to link to your own site within its pages. The more connected your pages are the faster Google will index them and the more Google will understand that your website is about a small number of specific topics. This makes Google more likely to rank you for specific keyword phrases that it finds throughout your site.

Think of it this way: if someone had a site where they posted about reputation management, the book Twilight, winter coats, pillows, and penguin mating, Google wouldn’t really want that website to rank well for any of the terms. But if you had a website that talked about penguin mating, penguin habits, penguin diet, penguin habitats, and penguin relationships, then Google would want to rank that website or keyword phrases that contained Penguins. This makes sense because Google would rather send someone looking for information on Penguins to a site that was all about penguins instead of the site where there were only one or two webpages about penguins.

At greenGabbard, we recommend using WordPress because it handles the issue of creating SEO-friendly link structures automatically. There is no reason to let a technical glitch derail your website or your search engine rankings. We’ll talk more about WordPress in the section on blogging content.

Keywords

There are several best practices that will help you rank for the keyword phrases you want on your website. Here are a few tips that we recommend:

Use your keyword in your title. The closer your keyword is to the beginning of your title, the better, because Google only uses the first 65-75 characters in a title to search for keywords. If you are using permalinks in WordPress, this also helps you put your keyword at the beginning of your link structure.

Use your keyword in your link structure. We talked about why this was important in the section on link structures.

Use your keyword in the first sentence of your content. This is important because Google looks at keywords that are near the top of your page to determine what the content is about.

Choose just three of your top keyword phrases and use them three times throughout your content. If your content is especially long, you can probably get away with using your keywords a little bit more often. Just remember that ultimately you are writing for humans because humans are the ones who link to your content, which helps you rank better in Google search results.

Use your keyword in the alt attribute of each image used in your content. This helps you rank well in Google’s image search. If someone sees your image and clicks on it, Google will take them to your webpage. While it may not send a lot of traffic, it can bring valuable traffic, especially if your images are related to your content.

Use your keyword in your meta-description tag. The meta-description is used as the description for your content in Google search results. It’s not used in Google’s algorithm, but it does help you get clicks from people you see it on the search result page.

**Warning- Beware Not to Over Optimize Your Site Structure or It Will Hurt**

Technical issues that may prevent Google from crawling your site

There are a few technical issues that may cause problems when Google is trying to crawl your site. Many of these have to do with not using standard HTML formatting on your site or in your content. Here are a few issues that we see most often:

Submission-required forms (often used to protect pages with a password login)

Links in Flash or other non-HTML formats

Pages blocked by the Meta Robots tag or Robots.txt file (often used by webmasters to restrict access to their webpages)

Again, if any of this seems foreign to you, I am going to give you a way to make sure you don’t have these technical issues in a future lesson where I share the exact technology we set our clients up with.

What if you don’t want Google to crawl certain pages of your site?

There are some valid reasons that you may not want Google to crawl certain pages of your site. In these cases, there are a few tags you can use to tell Google what to do. Here are several:

Follow/nofollow – Using the “nofollow” tag tells search engines not to crawl a specific link. The default for any link is “follow.”

Index/noindex – Using the “noindex” tag tells search engines to exclude a page from their results. The default for any page is “index.”

Noarchive and nosnippet – Noarchive tells search engines not to cache the page, and nosnippet tells search engines not to add a description to the page’s title and URL in the search results.

Page Load Speed

It may surprise you that this is one of the factors that Google uses to determine search engine rank, but they’ve started to use it in recent years because a faster page load time indicates credibility. Most web users expect your website to load in two seconds or less and will abandon your site if it loads in three seconds or more. Furthermore, 79% of web shoppers will not become repeat customers if they have trouble with site performance. Don’t let page load speed be the reason you leave money on the table!

There are some great tools that can help you determine below time on your website. Here is the one that we use at GreenGabbard: PageSpeed Tools

This tool will help you figure out how you can drastically reduce your page load time and will give you specific recommendations to fix any issues it finds.

Off-Page Search Engine Optimization

Off-page search engine optimization is an incredibly important part of ranking well in Google search results. We are going to go into this and much more detail in later lessons, but the most important thing to remember for off page search engine optimization is that you must build links to your site from authoritative sites with high Google page rankings.

At GreenGabbard, we do not recommend purchasing links to get these external links back to your site. Our saying here is that if it’s easy to do, it’s most likely not worth doing. Google also knows this trick and often penalizes any websites that is caught doing it.

Instead, we recommend guest blogging and creating click bait articles and info-graphics that will give authoritative websites a reason to link back to you. Again, we believe in creating websites for humans in addition to search engines. When you create content that’s of high value to people who own authoritative websites, they have a reason to link back to you.

https://greengabbard.com/reputation-management/ultimate-reputation-management-guide-pt-3/

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greengabbards · 7 years ago

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Ultimate Reputation Management Guide Pt 2

The Eight Core Principles of Reputation Management

If you look at the octalysis diagrams, you can see that octalysis for reputation management is broken down into eight different segments. The top half of the diagram is called the Quick Fix section and contains the various tactics you can use to get fast reputation management results. Along the bottom half of the diagram, you’ll see the tactics that help your brand create a Long-Lasting Defense against poor reviews. These tactics will take much longer to see results from, but they do the most to shield your company from garnering a bad reputation.

The “Quick Fix” Reputation Management Tactics

Let’s dive deeper into these diagrams. Under the quick fix section, we have video and images, which is by far one of the fastest ways to get ranked for specific keywords in Google search results. This is because there is significantly less competition than there would be with textual content. Creating images and video has a higher barrier to entry and can take a higher level of technology and performance skills to make it professional; this is what makes it ripe for the taking. However, it’s also very easy to lose rank on video and images because there’s so much competition.

On the wings, you’ll see social media and public relations, which are also good quick fix tactics. Social media often helps your company rank on the front page, but when you compete with sites that have a high Google page rank, like Wikipedia and Ripoff Report, you’ll likely see your social media get bumped down the list. Similarly, public relations work well to create a big rush of press in a short amount of time; though you’ll get a big boost on search rankings from good press, your press release will fade from the top page of Google within 30 to 60 days. An amazing public relations campaign can create large wins for about 60 days, but after that a company needs either another PR push or a solid, long-term asset online.

The tactics in the quick fix section can bring results as early as 30 days, which is perfect for a company, individual, or brand that has a reputation problem right now. The quick fix section can help you bridge the gap in the short term while you work to build some of the long-lasting defense assets shown in the bottom half of the octalysis diagram.

The Long-Lasting Defense Reputation Management Tactics

On the bottom half of the octalysis diagram, you’ll notice blogging, SEO, and personal branding tactics. Each of these tactics requires a significant investment of time, talent, and creativity. Executing these tactics means creating lots of great content that is optimized for Google’s search engine algorithm. I’ll be honest: each of these tactics is difficult to execute well, especially if your company doesn’t have much experience with content creation. However, you can always get help with these tasks if you need it. The bottom half of the octalysis diagram, the long-lasting defense tactics, will start showing results within 3-6 months, provided your company creates the right types of content consistently.

The Content-Driven and Relationship-Driven Reputation Management Tactics

You’ll notice that the sides of the octalysis diagram also have tactics listed. On the left side, we have the Content-Driven section of reputation management, while the right side has the Relationship-Driven section of reputation management.

The Content-Driven side consists of social media, review sites (like Ripoff Report, Angie’s List, Yelp, and more), and blogging. Each of these content opportunities has the advantage of allowing anyone to post, which means that you can join and start creating content without approval from anyone. On the other side, the Relationship-Driven section consists of public relations, external links, and personal branding, all of which have gatekeepers.

You might wonder, gatekeepers? Well, getting a nice public relations push requires you to convince editors, writers, and reporters to talk about your company in their publications. Getting external links, which is crucial to search engine optimization success, requires you to convince other website owners to link to your company website or blog. And getting recognized for your personal branding requires you to have relationships with the right people who can provide you access to guest blogging and speaking opportunities. Each of these tactics will help you gain more clients and increase revenue, but they rely on your ability to build relationships with others in relevant decision-making positions, so that they choose you when they have an opportunity available.

How to Use Octalysis to Measure Your Online Reputation

Look at the image above. This is an actual Octalysis for one of my clients before we started working with them.

You’ll notice that they were doing relatively well in the Quick Fix section but were doing very poorly in the Long-Lasting Defense and Relationship Driven sections.

The client had created social profiles and videos, but just wasn’t producing enough high-quality content to rank well for targeted key-phrases. Furthermore, they were not dominating terms such as “reviews” or “complaints”.

The CEO of the company had no personal brand online; actually, it was worse — he had a negative personal brand online, which was greatly hurting the company. They worked with an SEO company, so they were doing decently well with SEO, but they just weren’t getting quality external links from relevant and high page rank sites.

We used this analysis to measure what they need to start doing right now and make recommendations for our first steps to dominate their reputation online.

A Summary Breakdown of Each Core Principle

Throughout the reputation management guide, we’ll be diving deeper into each of these core principles with an entire lesson dedicated to each one. Here’s a summary of each core principle:

Search Engine Optimization

We’re going to cover everything you need to know about search engine optimization, which includes the basics, like what alt tags, meta descriptions, and on-page and off-page factors are. We’ll also talk about some more advanced material, like keyword strategy and analysis for your company’s most important phrases.

We’ll help you figure out how to take advantage of long-tail search terms, and we’ll also discuss common keyword phrases that are specific to reputation management, like “[company name] scam,” “[company name] reviews,” “[company name] testimonials.” We’ll talk about several websites you can and should have for your company in order to own the search results for a variety of keyword phrases. For example, you might have “yourcompanynamereviews.com” and “yourcompanyname.com/reviews/” or even “reviews.companyname.com/”, each of which needs its own content and reputation management strategy.

We’ll talk about the differences between SEO and reputation management, because reputation management is quite a bit more complex than simply getting one website to rank well in search results. We’ll also go over the biggest mistakes companies make when they try to do this themselves without knowing how Google’s algorithm works, and how these mistakes ultimately hurt the company’s chances of ranking well in search results. One of those mistakes, creating a ton of online assets and simply linking them to each other, is a surprising no-no that can give you negative results, unless constructed a certain way! We are going to go into much more detail about this in the session because we want to make sure you avoid these problems.

Lastly, we’re going to talk about how to fix Google’s pesky auto-complete feature, which adds words like “reviews,” “scam,” and “Ripoff Report” to your company’s name when someone types it into the search box. (Nice that they do that, isn’t it?) We’ll show you some methods to get this fixed; it’s difficult, but there are things that have worked in the past that we can apply to your situation.

Blogging

In the lesson on blogging, we’re going to focus on the content strategy, which is one of the core principles of blogging. Content strategy simply means creating the best content possible that encompasses best practices for SEO, personal branding, and human-readability. Our strategy is not like most firms which focus on banging out 400-600 word posts that are keyword heavy; instead, we focus on content that is readable for both humans and search engines and that provides tons and tons of value to the reader.

Remember, Google’s search algorithm is simply a mechanism that tries to find the most valuable content for any given keyword phrase. If you are providing tons of value to a reader with massive blog posts of 1500+ words, then you don’t need to worry about gaming Google’s system, because people will link to you, people will share it, and Google will find it and display it prominently in its search results.

We’ll also talk about how to optimize a blog with plugins. Real quickly—how can you create a blog in 9 minutes or less, that’s optimized for search engines and social sharing, and can help you gain as much exposure as possible in a short amount of time? We’ll share our blog technology and plugin secrets, so you don’t have to spend hours researching the technology to power your content—simply download these few things and it just works.

Review Sites

In the lesson on review sites, we’ll talk about the intricacies of Ripoff Report, including details about how people post on Ripoff Report and how companies have been successful in working with Ripoff Report. We’ll also go through a few case studies of companies that have been unsuccessful at suing Ripoff Report. If you’re having trouble with Ripoff Report, this is a great lesson for tackling that challenge area.

We’ll also cover Yelp in detail. As I mentioned in the first lesson, the difference between a four-star and a three-star restaurant rating on Yelp is huge. We’ll talk about how to respond to bad reviews and how to use Yelp to your advantage to get as many people as possible to post positive reviews.

Lastly, we’ll cover techniques for Angie’s List, Google Places, and Glass Door, which are three other review sites that rank well in Google’s search results. We’ll go over how to claim your business on each of these sites, and most importantly, how to generate more positive reviews on each of these sites.

Social Media

In the lesson on social media, we’ll talk about all the social channels of social marketing, including Facebook Groups, Facebook pages, Twitter, Squidoo lenses, and a number of Q&A sites, like LinkedIn, Yahoo Answers, and Quora. Each of these social media outlets has a different purpose in reputation management, so we’re going to go through the why’s and how’s of these tools thoroughly as they relate to reputation management.

Lastly, we’re going to talk about online asset creation through WordPress.com and Blogger, because these sites allow you to create quick and easy opportunities for external links that will boost your website in the short term. Finally, we will reveal the secrets behind using YouTube and Flickr to rank well on search engines for video and images.

Video and Images

In the section on video and images, we’ll talk about how to optimize images and video to rank well in search engines, particularly Google. We’ll get into the specifics of how to link to the title, how to add title descriptions, where to upload it, and what tags to add to each piece of content. This lesson will be very straight forward, but it’s important nonetheless.

Public Relations

In the lesson on public relations, we’ll talk about how to send and optimize press releases. Most importantly, we’ll talk about how to maximize the exposure of those press releases. We’re going to crack open the press release campaign so that your company gets picked up by online publications and gets the press and stories you need to create positive content online that will push down any and all negative content on Google. We’ll also talk about how to create captivating headers, videos, and blog posts, and where to put customer testimonials so that they get you more credibility with editors.

External Links

In the section on external links, we’ll talk about how to build external links to your site using guest blogging. Guest blogging is both challenging and rewarding, and we’ll show you how to leverage your company and personal brands to research, find, and land opportunities on the best blogs.

We’ll also talk about how to purchase links ethically in very specific situations. We don’t push hard on this concept, because we have a saying, “If it’s easy to do, then it’s probably not worth doing.” But there are a few situations where it might make sense, and we’ll go over these in this portion.

We’ll also talk about some advanced techniques to getting external links, including creating “click bait” content and using info-graphics to convince people to link to your site.

—

The most important thing to remember about search engine optimization is that you want to create content that is readable to both search engines and humans. This requires maintaining a balance between talking to people and talking to a computer, but you can do a respectable job if you just follow the best practices described in this lesson.

In the next lesson, we’re going to talk about SEO, keyword analysis and research, which should help you figure out the keywords you need to be tracking and optimizing for. Since we’re working on reputation management, these keywords might be different than your current SEO campaign.

https://greengabbard.com/reputation-management/ultimate-reputation-management-guide-pt-2/

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greengabbards · 7 years ago

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Ultimate Reputation Management Guide

Reputation Management

Reputation management (RM) is where a company protects the image of the organization, its staff, and its offerings. This form of marketing entails branding, image, and customer service strategies to control the way the public and its market perceives the organization. It can include marketing and public relation campaigns both on and off the Internet to monitor and maintain public perceptions. People often see reputation management campaigns in the terms of individuals. Whenever a scandal occurs, and a famous person holds a press conference to tell their side of the story they are practicing reputation management. Companies often do this as well when a major event impacts the opinion of people against a company. The Valdez oil spill and recent bank scandals are two examples of when the public felt negatively toward a specific company and the organization created a public relation’s campaign to sway public opinion.

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization is a technique that a business uses to make Internet content easier for search engine spiders and humans to find. These strategies are also important to use as a way of explaining what the content is about so that surfers know if it is pertinent to their search. Search engine spiders crawl over content to look for keywords to categorize and rank content. Originally, this lead to web builders filling content with popular keywords to place their information at the top of a search engine results pages. Changes to the way the algorithms analyze and interpret information on web pages has resulted in companies abandoning these techniques. Now they rely on HTML, meta tags, and other strategies in addition to keywords to affect the way spiders rank their content.

The Differences between SEO and RM

When considering SEO and RM companies need to understand how they work separately as well as equally to create a marketing strategy. For while many companies know about SEO and actively use key strategies to impact Internet Marketing, many organizations don’t create and implement a RM campaign. They believe that RM is only necessary when something bad has already happened, when in truth, a comprehensive management strategy helps to mitigate the effects of negative occurrences in the market. There are many different elements needed to create a marketing strategy. While these elements may intertwine they are dissimilar, and it is important for businesses to understand that there is a significant variance between SEO and reputation management. Once an organization understands these differences they will be able to utilize the benefits of these strategies to create a successful marketing campaign.

Finding You and What They See

The main difference between SEO and RM is that SEO is used to help a target market find a company’s Internet content and RM is used to determine how they interpret what they see when they look at information about the organization. If a person is looking for golf clubs for a birthday present, they may do research on the Internet before making a purchase. The search engines results will offer them with many different companies where they can buy golf clubs. If the person has already heard about a company, the information may impel them to either rule that company out or put that business above other ones they haven’t heard of.

RM is all about Perception

Reputation management is all about perception. It is how the public perceives a company, its staff and its products that matters, and facts aren’t always a part of this perception. This means that a company can work for years to create a positive image, but one negative campaign based only on innuendo can destroy everything in a matter of months. SEO, on the other hand is not about perception it is about information and utilizing the right strategies to impact results. And a company can use SEO to impact RM, while RM can’t be used to impact SEO. An organization can create all the TV ads it wants to create an image for a new product, but that project won’t appear at the top of Google results without an aggressive search engine campaign. Yet, if a company has a negative image, it can create content that will impact public opinion and use SEO to make sure this information ranks higher on a results page than negative information posted by competitors.

SEO Can Convert Contacts

Search engine optimization can be used to help convince potential contacts into customers whereas reputation management is the main reason why those in the market become and stay loyal customers. By utilizing branding, image and customer service strategies, a company can monitor how the market perceives the organization and its offerings to create a marketing campaign to overcome objections and inspire confidence. With most adults researching products and services on the Internet, it is important for reputation management to include content that educates people about the organization. This can be done on websites, blogs, social media sites, press releases and downloadable content. By informing individuals about the organization and its expertise, the company will help build trust. Trust is an important aspect of converting contacts into customers. Even if an organization has a superior product, if the market doesn’t trust the company they will not buy from it.

RM Can Prevent a Negative Reputation

Companies often believe that there is no way to prevent a negative reputation; they just have to react when it happens quickly to minimize the damage. This isn’t true. Reputation management doesn’t have to be about closing the barn door after the horse gets out, it can be about fixing the gate to the stall and checking on the horse to prevent escape. By monitoring specific keywords on the internet, a company can determine if there are negative conversations about the organization. These conversations can be from customers complaining about poor service, competitors creating negative campaigns and even spam campaigns created with the goal of ruining a company. Careful monitoring will also let a company know what people think about the company and its offerings. This will help create an understanding regarding public relation policies, improvements to offerings and future offerings the company may want to provide. If there are customers complaining on social media sites about a public or the way they were treated by employees, then the company can put a policy in action that will rectify these issues before their reputation is irrevocably damaged.

SEO can Make RM Strategies Visible

Once a strategy is designed, SEO is necessary to make it successful on the Internet. While RM can suggest keywords to target, keyword research will be necessary to determine which keywords will bring out the desired results. Tags and titles can be used to attract the attention of people who may be surfing for more information about a company. It can take time to achieve the desired ranking but combining SEO and RM strategies can help offset negative information on the Internet.

RM can lead the Conversation

People are always talking about companies on the Internet. Social media is one of the main resources people use to learn about an organization because they trust the opinion of friends and family over advertising. Even if a company doesn’t participate on social media a quick search will often reveal people talking about the good and bad points of a business. Social media strategies should be a part of reputation management and monitoring conversations about a company and its products should be a task for the marketing and customer service departments. Companies should have a strategy in place for how to handle complaints on social media sites. When handled correctly, a business can turn a potential problem into a positive. This shows the market that the company does care about the customer’s experience and when a problem is discovered they act to rectify the situation.

An Ounce of Cure

They say that an ounce of prevention is better than an ounce of cure. By making reputation management an essential element of a marketing strategy a company can control the market’s perception and take steps to make sure that public opinion stays positive. While SEO techniques can be used as a part of relationship management, RM entails much more than just SEO. It starts with a company deciding how it wants to be perceived by the market and how they can influence opinion. Once strategies are in place, monitoring is necessary to determine the current perception of the market and how the company can reverse negative opinion. RM also means putting customer satisfaction first and strengthens relationships within the market so that if something does go wrong the public will give the company the benefit of the doubt instead of assuming the worst. SEO can help with all phases of relationship management, but businesses need to understand that search engine optimization alone isn’t enough to affect the perception of the public.

Does Every Company Need Reputation Management?

In their own unique way, every individual and company need reputation management. The term “reputation management” is commonly used to describe a service provided to a company that has reputation problems online. Rehabilitation centers, lawyers, accountants, jewelers, and many other types of industries are plagued with bad reviews written by customers on RipoffReport.com. But if you don’t have any bad reviews online or any reputation problems, do you really need reputation management?

Personal Branding

When an individual manages his reputation online, it’s called personal branding. Gary Vaynerchuck is the king of personal branding and teaches young professionals how to successfully manage their online identity to position themselves to get the job that they want (Entrepreneurship), get a raise at work (Scale), to succeed in the startup world (Build another company??? What’s your success look like?). Crafting a strong personal brand can lead to thought-leadership online and inbound leads. Just look at what Gary has done in the realm of Entrepreneurship. Because he has positioned himself as a pioneer in the emerging gamification industry, he has closed deals with many clients on a consulting basis and been invited to speak at companies such as Keynote on the topic of Entrepreneurship. Similarly, James has built a brand around location independence. Whenever any of my friends want to know how to escape the financial burdens of everyday life and travel the jet-setter lifestyle, I immediately refer them to James because I know he has that expertise. Because of the brand he’s built, he has created the Freelance Writers School, which is a subscription-based business that teaches individuals how to live a location independent lifestyle in the online digital media solutions space.

Personal branding is a form or reputation management

Gary, and James don’t have any online reputation problems, but they still utilized online reputation techniques to build their status online as thought-leaders in their industry. As an individual, don’t wait until you have a negative post about you online to start taking control of your online reputation. Start early, start now, and build a solid brand online that will help you create inbound leads or position you to excel in the career of your choice.

Outbound vs Inbound Marketing

There are two ways to market your company: 1. Outbound marketing 2. Inbound marketing Outbound marketing is the traditional form of marketing that we’re all accustomed to. This includes cold calls, emails, networking events, trade-shows, conferences, and any other form where the company reaches out to customers. Inbound marketing is the opposite of outbound. Inbound marketing is the method of establishing thought leadership in an industry, thereby becoming the expert and getting customers to come to you. Instead of hunting customers down, customers come to you because you’re the expert and they want to learn/get service from the best.

Inbound Marketing is all about Reputation

To generate inbound leads as a company, then you need to establish thought-leadership in your industry. Thought leadership is all about building the right reputation online. Blogs, social media, and SEO are all methods to build a solid reputation online and generate leads for your business.

A Preemptive Strike

If you utilize your personal brand and establish a company brand, not only will you generate inbound leads and establish thought leadership, but you’ll also inherently set up reputation management for your company. As you guest blog for other sites and have people link to your social profiles, you’ll create an in-penetrable barrier that no bad press can get through. Therefore, reputation management is important for every person and every company — it’s all a part of the online marketing strategy that needs to be crafted. Despite what most companies and individuals believe about reputation management, it’s not just for businesses that are dealing with a reputation problem. With the advent of sites like Ripoff Report, Angie’s List, and Yelp, which all provide places for customers to leave reviews and feedback regarding the quality of product and service providers, companies and individuals need to be more careful than ever that their website—the place where their company lives online—doesn’t get outranked in Google by a slew of nasty reviews that could make or break the business.

Why Good Companies Get Bad Reputations

The internet has opened your business to new opportunities, but it’s also opened you up to several types of people, including customers and clients who can act crazy, bitter, or threatening to get their way. You see, customers know that these sites are a weakness for companies, because companies are already at a disadvantage in Google search. They know that companies have no way to take down reviews on Ripoff Report or Yelp, even if they are full of false accusations. Reputation management is not just for companies. All companies need reputation management, but it doesn’t stop there. Individuals need reputation management too. Some of the most successful businesses online today are those that provide a platform for others to build their businesses on top of. For example, shortly after the iPhone came out, Apple created the app store, which many companies who specialized in everything from gaming to productivity to fitness were able to build profitable businesses on top of. Likewise, when Twitter first came out, companies like TweetDeck, HootSuite, and Buffer emerged to augment the Twitter experience and provide additional tools for tweeters to use. Sites like WordPress.org emerged as the forefront blogging platform that allows companies and individuals to build websites without having much technical knowledge. In the same way, Google has become a platform for many other industries to emerge. Search engine optimization, click-through advertising, and reputation management came about solely because companies want to get the best Google search rankings possible, and were willing to spend a large amount of money to get either organic or paid placement at the top of the page.

Who is Reputation Management For?

Reputation management is for companies that want to create a strong brand online. Not only do you protect your brand by owning your Google search results, but you also funnel people to your landing pages, so you can close deals, land speaking engagements, attend conferences, and get more clients. Reputation management is also for companies that want to create a strong defense. As I mentioned in the beginning part of the guide, clients in the rehabilitation industry had problems with reputation management because even if they did an excellent job for their clients, sometimes their clients would get kicked out of the program or relapse (which is common when dealing with a lifelong disease like alcoholism or drug addiction). When these things happen, they go on sites like Ripoff Reports and write bad reviews about the company, which hurts the company’s brand. A good company has no way to remove fraudulent reviews from Angie’s List, Yelp, and Ripoff Report, so they need reputation management to help them get those bad search results off the front page of Google. Lastly, reputation management is for people who want to build thought leadership opportunities.

Does Every Company/Person Need Reputation Management?

Without question, YES! Reputation management is not just for companies who have bad reputations online.

Google Search: How Does It Work?

In this guide, we’ll dive deep into social and search engine optimization to understand why it’s important and how you can use it to improve your company’s online presence. For now, it’s important to know the basics. Google has technology that allows it to crawl your site (visit all your pages and anything you’ve linked to) looking for specific keywords. By picking out these keywords, Google can tell what your site is about, so it can use your site in relevant search results. They also give your website a ranking, based on several factors that we’ll cover in this guide. If you are a real estate agent in California, for example, Google will rank you for the keyword “real estate” and “Real estate agent California.” The more relevant content you have for those keywords, the higher your website will rank. A second major factor in Google’s ranking algorithm is who links to your website and what their ranking is. When you have high-quality external sites linking to you, you move up in the rankings very quickly. Every link back to your site is like a vote that your website is a credible source for Google to display. Wikipedia is a fitting example for this; you can Google just about any celebrity and their Wikipedia page will likely be among the first three results. The flipside of this is that every site your website links to is a vote for their website. That means you must be careful and only link to highly reputable websites. Google’s algorithm is very good at figuring out which sites are important and worthy of the elusive top spots in their search results, so it’s important to have a professional, reputable website that is not labeled as spammy in any way.

Reputation Management: How Does It Work?

Reputation management is a complicated topic that we’ll dive into deeper in the next section, but for this section we’ll talk about this in three general parts:

Positive Search Results

Reputation management depends on having positive search results in the first 10-30 spots of Google’s results for your company’s name. This ensures that even if someone writes something bad about you online, you and your company brand are protected because you still own the search results whenever someone searches for your name. Most people will never look past the second or third page in Google search results, and even if they do, you will have had the chance to make your case before a customer sees a disparaging review. By pushing down the negative content, you can avoid making a bad first impression.

Long-Term Defense Opportunities

Reputation management also helps companies build a brand with long-term defense capability. We go beyond teaching you to get a profile up on Facebook or Twitter. Instead, we land guest blogging opportunities or weekly and monthly contributor opportunities to influential blogs in your industry. These opportunities take time to land, but that’s because they are the most worthwhile. They ensure the long-term defense against people who want to damage your brand.

Response Opportunities

Finally, reputation management means that a company looks at bad reviews as an opportunity to respond online. There are right and wrong ways to do this. How do you respond to Ripoff Report? How do you respond to Yelp reviews? How do you respond to a blog post that speaks negatively about your company? We create the perfect strategy and messaging that helps your company respond in a way that doesn’t add to the controversy or fuel an angry debate online, while still allowing you to address specific points within the disparaging review.

How Long Does It Take to See Results?

We’ll be discussing this in depth in our analysis in the latter of this post, but we have found that there are two effective strategies: a quick fix strategy and a long-term defense-building strategy. We do both for our clients to get them the best results. The quick fix strategy is to create social media profiles and use video and images to quickly rank in search results. It also includes some public relations, which we’ll be discussing later in this guide. We execute the quick fix strategy over the course of 60 days and can show results very quickly with it. The long-term strategy is to build thought leadership and branding by owning those top Google search results. We spend at least six months executing this strategy because it requires lots of solid, thought-provoking content, which takes time to build. This guide is a suitable place to start with reputation management. So far, we’ve learned what reputation management is and how search engine optimization is used to build a solid brand. We talked about the three parts of reputation management to give a broad overview of what we do, and we shared how quickly we can get results. Next, we’ll go over the 8 core principles of reputation management—search engine optimization, blogging, reviews, social media, video and images, public relations, external links, and personal branding. This overview of the 8 core principles will be fantastic because the framework will help you analyze your company and the kind of reputation it has online. It will also set up the next section of the guide, which will dive even deeper into each core principle with a full lesson devoted to each. Throughout this training guide, I’m sure you’ll have a lot of questions, so be sure to ask them using the comment section of this post. You can also reach out to me at mgabbard0 [at] greengabbard.com to get your question answered. See you in the next section!

The post Ultimate Reputation Management Guide appeared first on Local SEO Specialist.

https://greengabbard.com/reputation-management/ultimate-reputation-management-guide/

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greengabbards · 7 years ago

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Things you will need for this build (ALL FREE):

Google Earth Pro: https://www.google.com/earth/download/gep/agree.html (optional to preview your output before importing to MyMaps)

https://freemaptools.com/

https://www.easymapmaker.com/ (No account needed unless you want to save Maps made)

Excel/CSV Editor

Business Info: I.E. Biz Description, Website, NAP, etc…

KW Research Done Prior to….(goes in the name column in spreadsheet)

Process Begins:

First create an Excel file with these headers: Name (KEYWORDS GO HERE), Zip Code, State, County, City, Url (Any URL you want), Phone, Description, Embed

Next go to https://www.freemaptools.com/find-zip-codes-inside-radius.htm

On the ZIP Code page below map fill out your information, then hit “Search Radius” Button

Scroll down to combined, select all info in box

In excel open a new sheet, paste info into spreadsheet

Click the data tab on top, then select “Data to Columns”

Select next (at bottom of dialog box), then tick the comma button

Then “Finish”

Now your data should be in seperate columns, delete the last 2

Now copy all the data return to first sheet and paste in the column starting with the ZIP Code column

Fill out the rest of csv file with info of choice

Once finished head over to https://www.easymapmaker.com/ and copy or paste or upload csv to the MakeMaps section *****(CAVEAT ONLY CREATES 250 @ TIME) so if you need or have more just make them into multiple layers of 250 increments

While your map renders head over to your drive of choice ad create a new custom map and fill out the Initial map info…i.e. title description etc..

Jump back over to easymapmaker and get your file by scrolling down to below the map view of data

Below map click “Launch Map Save” Button

If you play around you can make the URL to your map custom (hint use kw for URL slug)…find it not telling LOL

****BE SURE TO TICK THE MAKE KML BOX FOR GOOGLE EARTH AND EMAIL***** NO EMAIL = NO KML FILE “(

Save map

Check Email for file and click the kml link on bottom of email. BONUS you get an Iframe URL also if you like for web20

Download KML file and return to custom map

Now import your KML File into the layers accordingly.

Yes I know this was a bit lng winded but hey its free sorry. Enjoi

P.S. If you do not want the BLUE wording in the KML simply delete the first row headers (Name, Desc, Etc…) Also attached is example of Map Marker output

https://greengabbard.com/seo/sab-local-maps-ranking-technique/

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greengabbards · 7 years ago

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SEO Trends to Look for in 2018

Google has over 200 factors in its algorithm. Needless to say, SEO is a complex science and can be challenging to explain to non-SEO’s but it’s not how much you need to know that makes it a challenge it’s the ever-changing nature of the rules of the game.

As the search engines persistently strive to improve the quality of search, some ranking factors shift shape, others fall into the abyss and then out of nowhere, new ones will arise.

Today’s post will help you stay ahead of the curve, here’s a list of SEO trends that will dominate in 2018.

Increased Features for SERP Achieving and maintaining a high volume of traffic to a given website is every SEO professional’s goal but if you think the #1 ranking position is the best way to drive traffic you might want to think again! Now, when you look at a Search Engine Rating Page (SERP) it is cluttered with video, links, images, ads, article listing, and various widgets.

Keyword phrase optimization is still a very important part of SEO but now you have other elements to rank for and monitor.

Some Popular SERP’s features are

Shopping results Site Links Reviews Local Packs Tools like the Rank Tracker will track ranking and suggest keywords that might be holding potential traffic back.

Page Speed Google’s main objective is to provide the most relevant information as fast as possible. In today’s on-demand society there is nothing more irritating than clicking on a website that seems like it could have all the answers to your questions only to have to wait for the pages to load. Pagespeed is a large part of user experience and a feature that is expected of all websites. If a website takes more than 3 seconds to load its pages it is considered slow by Google Standards. You aren’t getting the most from your SEO efforts if page speed isn’t up to standard.

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Careful Structuring of Rich Snippets A snippet is a result shown to the user in the search results. There are rich snippets and regular snippets both of which include a clickable title in blue, URL in green and a meta description. The difference between regular snippet verses a rich snippet is that a rich snippet will show you extra information.

For insistence, if you searched for a good receipt for homemade apple pie Google will show you results list of both regular snippets and rich snippets. In the rich snippets, a picture of the apple pie is shown, a rating of the receipt, the time it takes to prepare and the number of calories.

Rich snippets instantly stand out more than regular snippets because you instantly receive more information which is why they have a higher click-through rate.

Greater Page Relevance To help provide the best user experience Google searches for sites that best match users search intent even if it differs from the actual query. This means that search engines will evaluate the relevance of Content on your website. Search engines use Latent Semantic Indexing to assess the relevance of content. Latent Semantic Indexing is a mathematical method used to determine the relationship between terms and concepts. It also helps search engines determine if the content on your site flows well and is comprehensive.

Mobile Will Have Greater Significance People are web browsing on their mobile phones now more than ever. As the new technology, apps, and resources become more on demand it is an expectation for all businesses large and small to have a site Optimized for Mobile. As matter of fact, people are five times more likely to leave a site if it isn’t Mobile-friendly. If you do not have a Mobile-Friendly website you are not only missing out on an enormous audience but you aren’t getting the most out of your SEO. Think about it, you have improved search-ability to drive traffic but if the traffic is leaving your site almost as soon they got there your SEO efforts are wasted.

Voice Search Increasing Momentum Voice search has re-invented SEO as we know it and the driving force behind the change is virtual assistants such as Siri, Alexa and Google Home.

Voice Search will become dominant for two reasons:

Search queries are natural and conversational People prefer direct answers as opposed to cold links How will voice search impact your SEO strategy? You will need to focus more on terms and phrases that people are going to say naturally. In other words, your SEO should include conversational sentences and terms because people type differently than they speak.

SERP Will Be Even More Personal Aside from the usual search ranking factors, such as Loading speed, Mobile-First/Responsive Website, Meta Description, page authority etc search engines are using information about the user, such as location, interested, browsing history to provide more personalized SERP’s.

Search Engine Results Pages SERP’s are search results that are not a traditional organic result.

Some common SERP’s are:

Rich Snippets – Adding a visual layer to the result such as review rating or product rating Paid Results (Google Adwords) Universal Results – Appear in addition to organic results (images results, traditional snippets) Knowledge Graph – Data that appears as panels or boxes i.e weather Every SEO’s goal is to make to the top of the search results and if that goal is met they will not only gain more traffic but when a user clicks to their page, that page will appear in future searches by that user. Hence, this will give you a bigger chance to dominate that user’s SERP in the long run.

Now, you might ask, is there anything an SEO can do to land on the top of a user’s personalized SERP? No, there is not. However, make sure your traffic data accurate by testing your page rankings in incognito mode for the best results.

“Linkless” Backlinks Since the early day’s Backlinks were used as part of SEO strategy to judge the relevance and reputation of web pages. A Backlink is an incoming hyperlink from one webpage to another. The more links you have from relevant and authoritative pages the more important Google would award in its search. In 2012 Google came out with the Penguin Algorithm to crack down on SEO’S that were doing everything they could to win and buy links in order to boost the rank. The Penguin Algorithm penalizes sites with a lot of spammy links which made building harder for SEO’S. While Backlinks are still the best way to gain domain authority Google search boots are becoming more sophisticated which is taking power away from Backlinks. Now, Search Engines can associate mentions of organization and brands without linking to their website. Moving forward, linking build will still be a great way to gain webpage authority. However, the content around the hyperlinked text is going is going to be very important as well.

Wrap Up What makes SEO such a science is understanding the nature of the rules of the game are always changing. In 2017 we saw the rise of HTTPS, “Dense” Content and Accelerated Mobile Pages to name a few. Moving forward, Google will still scan for relevant page content, Faster loading speed, using personalized search engine results and ensure website are Mobile-Friendly to enhance user experience.

However, we now have other elements to rank for and monitor such as Voice Search which is gaining traction fast due to the speed at which the user obtains the desired information and the natural and conversational way of searching. While some elements are still relevant, new ones are always emerging and some will and have fallen off completely. We hope this blog helped you gain an idea of what current trends are head. Please feel free to leave questions, we are glad to help.

Read Full Article Here: SEO Trends to Look for in 2018

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