#SEO Based Content Writing In Illinois

[writingperfect]

From Keywords to Content: Mastering SEO Writing in 2024

Mastering SEO writing has become a much-needed element for businesses and those seeking to grow their online presence in a changing digital landscape. In line with the evolution of search algorithms, demand for outstanding and SEO-friendly content has correspondingly risen. This is an in-depth look into SEO writing, covering services available within Chicago and throughout Illinois, matched with some valuable tips on how one could generate high SERP ranking content in 2024.

Understanding SEO Writing

On the other hand, SEO writing entails developing content specifically to rank very well in search engines. This requires quality writing, intelligent keyword implementation, and an understanding of various search engines' algorithms. The idea is to develop something that will be informative and interesting to read but with relevant keywords that are search targets by your target audience.

The Importance of SEO Writing

Increased Visibility: High-ranking content is more likely to be seen by potential customers.

Credibility and Trust: Quality content that ranks well can establish your brand as an authority in your field.

Better User Experience: Well-optimized content provides valuable information and is easier to read and navigate.

SEO Writing Services in Chicago

Well, Chicago is a potent business place with its varied industries, and it has also emerged as a leading hub of high-quality SEO writing services eventually catering to the needs of companies or any other individual in Chicago.

Benefits of SEO Writing Services in Chicago

Local Expertise: Writers who understand the local market and can create relevant content.

Customized Strategies: Services that tailor SEO strategies to your unique business goals.

High-Quality Content: Professional writers who ensure your content is engaging and well-optimized.

SEO Content Writing Services in Illinois

Writing Perfect offers an all-around set of SEO content writing services cutting across several industries and various sizes of businesses to make visibility possible for a company on the internet and drive organic traffic.

Key Features of SEO Content Writing Services in Illinois

Comprehensive Research: In-depth keyword research to identify the most relevant and high-traffic keywords for your content.

Content Optimization: Writing and structuring content to include keywords naturally and effectively.

Performance Tracking: Monitoring content performance and making adjustments to improve rankings over time.

SEO Article Writing Service in USA

Across the USA, SEO article writing services are becoming increasingly important for businesses aiming to improve their digital footprint. These services focus on creating high-quality articles that are optimized for search engines and provide valuable information to readers.

Advantages of SEO Article Writing Service in USA

Expert Writers: Access to writers with expertise in SEO and various industries.

High-Quality Articles: Content that is informative, engaging, and optimized for relevant keywords.

SEO Best Practices: Adherence to the latest SEO guidelines and techniques to ensure optimal performance.

SEO Blog Writing Service in Chicago

Blogs are a powerful tool for driving traffic and engaging with your audience. An effective SEO blog writing service in Chicago can help you maintain a consistent and high-quality blog that ranks well on search engines.

Benefits of SEO Blog Writing Services

Consistent Posting: Regularly updated content to keep your audience engaged and improve your search rankings.

Targeted Keywords: Blog posts optimized for specific keywords relevant to your business.

Engaging Content: High-quality writing that resonates with your audience and encourages interaction.

SEO Friendly Content Writing Services in Chicago

Creating SEO-friendly content involves more than just inserting keywords into your text. It requires a strategic approach to writing that ensures your content is valuable, readable, and optimized for search engines.

Features of SEO Friendly Content Writing Services in Chicago

User-Focused Writing: Content that prioritizes the reader’s experience while incorporating SEO best practices.

Keyword Integration: Seamless integration of keywords to avoid keyword stuffing and ensure natural flow.

Technical SEO: Attention to technical details like meta descriptions, alt text, and internal linking to enhance SEO performance.

SEO Based Content Writing in Illinois

Illinois is home to numerous SEO writing companies that specialize in creating content designed to rank well on search engines. These companies offer a range of services to help businesses improve their online visibility and drive more traffic to their websites.

Key Services Offered by SEO Writing Companies in Illinois

Keyword Research: Identifying the best keywords to target for maximum impact.

Content Creation: Writing high-quality content that is optimized for those keywords.

Performance Analysis: Regularly monitoring and analyzing content performance to make data-driven adjustments.

SEO Copywriting Agency in USA

An SEO copywriting agency in the USA can provide comprehensive services that go beyond content writing. These agencies offer strategic planning, content creation, and ongoing optimization to ensure your content consistently performs well.

Advantages of Hiring an SEO Copywriting Agency

Expertise: Access to a team of professionals with extensive experience in SEO and copywriting.

Comprehensive Services: From keyword research to content creation and performance monitoring, agencies provide end-to-end solutions.

Scalability: Ability to scale services according to your business needs, ensuring consistent growth.

SEO Copywriting Service in Chicago

Chicago-based businesses can benefit significantly from local SEO copywriting services. These services combine the art of persuasive writing with the science of SEO to create content that not only ranks well but also converts visitors into customers.

Benefits of SEO Copywriting Services in Chicago

Localized Content: Content that resonates with the local audience and reflects local trends and interests.

Conversion Focus: Writing that aims to convert readers into customers while maintaining SEO best practices.

Performance Optimization: Continuous optimization based on performance data to improve results over time.

SEO Writing Company in Illinois

An SEO writing company in Illinois offers specialized services to help businesses improve their online presence through high-quality, optimized content. These companies employ skilled writers and SEO experts who work together to create content that ranks well and drives traffic.

Features of a Good SEO Writing Company

Skilled Writers: Professional writers who understand SEO and can create engaging, optimized content.

Comprehensive Services: A range of services including keyword research, content creation, and performance analysis.

Proven Results: A track record of success in improving clients’ search engine rankings and online visibility.

Content Writing Services SEO

Combining content writing with SEO expertise, content writing services SEO provide a holistic approach to content creation. These services ensure that every piece of content is crafted with SEO in mind, from keyword research to final edits.

Benefits of Content Writing Services SEO

SEO Integration: Seamless integration of SEO best practices into the content creation process.

High-Quality Content: Engaging and informative content that provides value to readers.

Improved Rankings: Content designed to rank well on search engines, driving more organic traffic to your site.

Conclusion

Write like a professional, ensuring the proper compilation, keyword strategy, and knowledge of the works of search engine algorithms in 2024. From SEO writing services in Chicago to SEO content writing services in Illinois, independent professional services are at one's disposal to give businesses and people a better online presence.

With a USA SEO article writing service, one has a greater chance of improving one's search engine rankings, increasing traffic to the website, and achieving further digital marketing goals. Be it a small business from Chicago or even a large corporation from Illinois, putting resources into professional SEO writing services is going to be one strategic move that will grant a series of long-term benefits to the said company.

[usamarketerss]

Effective Law Firm Marketing in NYC, Chicago, and for Small Firms

In today's ever-changing legal environment, making an impression is vital for law firms irrespective of where they are based or their size. If you are a big law corporation based in NYC or a small law office based in Chicago, effective marketing strategies will always come in handy.

Law Firm Marketing in New York City

There are plenty of resources for law firms in New York City due to its big population and the need for legal services. But, in this city, there’s a lot of competition and therefore creative marketing strategies are needed. One cannot underestimate the role of the Internet in today’s marketing strategies: an effective, attractive, and easy-to-navigate site containing information about the firm, its services, clients’ successful cases, and experts’ opinions in particular areas is a must. Search engine optimization (SEO) is crucial in growing a law company and ensuring that the firm’s name pops up when individuals looking for legal services in New York seek for information. Furthermore, local SEO techniques including the use of Google Business and Manhattan or Brooklyn-specific keywords also serve to attract potential clients looking for such services within the city. Other effective methods in enhancing a law firm’s image include attending local seminars and conferences, writing articles for well-read legal magazines, and being active within the legal circles of the state.

Law Firm Marketing in Chicago

The city of Chicago, often regarded as a ‘legal hub,’ has many merits and demerits for the law firms operating within its region. The first place clients look for law firms, the brand of the firm plays an important role, as the clients seek trust, professionalism, and thorough knowledge of the area. Chicago is a quite competitive legal marketplace that requires law firms to implement several strategies whenever they engage in marketing activities. Content marketing where a law firm advertises itself in the form of a blog, podcast, or webinar is another form of marketing that should be done by every Chicago law firm. This can be for instance, by addressing certain Illinois laws or the recent prominent cases that have taken place in the city of Chicago to make the firm sound like an authority on the issue. Advertising, in particular, Last edited by marketing law firms in Chicago contributing to increasing….

Marketing for Smaller Law Offices

Small law offices, in particular, would have their marketing issues especially as they do not budget even a fraction of what bigger law firms do. Nonetheless, they can manage to compete wisely if directed. Small firms need to focus on creating and accessing a smaller market. They may be known for different types of legal services such as family law or even estate planning. Websites, Branding, and Reputation are essential in trusting and assuring the clients of the given services. Furthermore, small law firms should embrace content marketing such as free legal guides or Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), where it is both helpful for building reputation and optimizing search results ranking. Social connecting sites and attending local activities assist in marketing strategies by assisting to get the target population and potential clients.

[1123annu]

BEST MARKETING COURESE

Unlock Your Potential with the Best Marketing Courses of 2024 In the ever-evolving world of digital marketing, staying ahead of the curve is crucial. Whether you're a seasoned professional or just starting, continuous learning is essential. With countless marketing courses available, finding the right one can be daunting. To help you navigate this sea of options, we've compiled a list of the best marketing courses in 2024. These courses offer comprehensive, up-to-date content that can help you master the art of marketing.

Digital Marketing Specialization by University of Illinois (Coursera) This comprehensive program covers all aspects of digital marketing, from SEO and social media marketing to 3D printing and machine learning. It's designed for beginners and advanced learners alike. The course is led by experienced instructors from the University of Illinois and provides real-world projects to ensure practical learning.

Key Features: Comprehensive coverage of digital marketing concepts Hands-on projects and real-world applications Access to a global community of learners Certification from a renowned university

Google Digital Garage: Fundamentals of Digital Marketing Offered by Google, this free course is perfect for beginners. It covers all the basics of digital marketing, including search engine optimization (SEO), social media, email marketing, and more. With 26 modules to explore, you’ll get a solid foundation in the essentials of digital marketing.

Key Features: Free and accessible to everyone Self-paced with 40 hours of content Certification from Google Covers a wide range of topics

HubSpot Academy: Inbound Marketing Course HubSpot Academy offers a well-rounded course on inbound marketing, focusing on creating quality content that attracts people to your business. This course is ideal for marketers looking to enhance their content marketing, SEO, and social media strategies.

Key Features: Free and high-quality content Focus on practical inbound marketing strategies Certification from HubSpot Comprehensive coverage of content marketing, SEO, and social media

Facebook Blueprint: Facebook Certified Planning Professional If you're looking to specialize in social media marketing, the Facebook Blueprint certification is an excellent choice. This course covers everything from the basics of Facebook advertising to advanced strategies for driving business results. It's ideal for marketers looking to leverage Facebook's vast user base.

Key Features: Comprehensive coverage of Facebook advertising Certification recognized by employers Access to a community of professionals Practical insights and real-world examples

Copyblogger's Content Marketing Certification Content is king in the digital marketing world, and Copyblogger's certification program focuses on teaching you how to create compelling, high-quality content that drives traffic and conversions. This course is perfect for content creators and marketers looking to enhance their writing skills.

Key Features: Focus on high-quality content creation Practical tips and techniques from industry experts Certification that adds value to your resume Comprehensive resources and tools

Hootsuite Academy: Social Media Marketing Certification Hootsuite Academy's Social Media Marketing Certification is perfect for those looking to master social media marketing. The course covers all major social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, providing you with the skills to create effective social media strategies.

Key Features: Certification from a reputable social media management platform Comprehensive coverage of all major social media platforms Practical insights and strategies Access to a community of social media professionals

Arvian Business Solutions: Amazon Marketing Course For those interested in mastering the art of selling on Amazon, Arvian Business Solutions offers an in-depth course that covers everything from product listing optimization to advanced advertising strategies. This course is perfect for entrepreneurs and businesses looking to increase their sales on Amazon.

Key Features: Focused on Amazon-specific marketing strategies Practical, real-world applications Comprehensive coverage of product listing optimization and advertising Access to a community of Amazon sellers Why Invest in a Marketing Course? Investing in a marketing course can provide numerous benefits:

Stay Updated: The digital marketing landscape is constantly changing. A good course will keep you up-to-date with the latest trends and technologies. Enhance Skills: Whether you're a beginner or an experienced marketer, there's always something new to learn. A marketing course can help you develop new skills and improve existing ones. Career Advancement: Certifications from reputable courses can boost your resume and make you more attractive to employers. Networking Opportunities: Many courses offer access to a community of professionals, providing valuable networking opportunities. Conclusion Choosing the right marketing course can be a game-changer for your career. Whether you're looking to specialize in a particular area or gain a comprehensive understanding of digital marketing, there's a course out there for you. The courses listed above are some of the best in 2024, offering high-quality content, practical insights, and valuable certifications. Invest in your future and take your marketing skills to the next level!

[ads4servicepro]

How Can Online Classified Ads Enhance Your Brand Recognition?

A majority of business owners, today, opt for online classifieds ads. Owners of both small and mid-sized businesses book online ads in newspapers, to get their message across faster and to wider customer base. This also enables thing in increasing their customer base, by reaching out to potential customers from different corners of the world.

There was a time when print classified ads in newspaper had helped buyers and sellers to connect with each other. This was one of the most popular ways of transferring information, be it about a service or about a product. Not just that. It also helped people seeking for jobs, homes, and more. Apart from that, the classified ads in newspapers was also used to share information like name updates, property loss, etc.

However, today the world is becoming digitalized, and everything and every information is being transferred online. Research states that with the rapidly growing web world, print classifieds are being upgraded to online classifieds. Online advertisements, in itself, has been one of the prime options of advertising for businesses of all sizes. The medium is faster, easier and more effective, as compared to print.

However, choosing the right website and right online advertising agency is very crucial in order to publish the business ads efficiently. Assigning a professional and experienced agency can be of great help, as they understand that different types of online classifieds have different criterions. From spaces to sizes, from texts to graphics, having the right content is very important to have a result orient online newspaper classified.

Through online classified advertising, businesses can reach out far and wide and can also opt to cater to the niche clientele - the options are ceaseless. You will come across wide array of websites and agencies offering to publish your classified ad online. Hence, it is very important for you to know what you are looking for and what you are expecting out of it. You can choose from different platforms, according to your requirements.

A well structured online newspaper classified has the potential to attract readers. A well planned content can help people relate. Many ads have backlinks that lead the readers to the brand's webpage. With ample information, readers now can know everything they want from the classified itself. Irrelevant and ill-planned classified ad may not even be visible in any search engine. This is where SEO boosted content makes the magic. Therefore, it is very important to assign the work to the professionals, as they have thorough market knowledge and knows how to present your classified ad to your targeted market.

By making your online classified ad Search Engines friendly, your potential customers will get every message you convey and will help you reach wider range of customer base. This will make your brand or business a recognized name in the web world.

Online advertisement also enables a brand or a business to enhance. Every business wants its name to be 'the name of choice' by the customers. This advertising medium aids in popularizing the business amongst its potential customers and spreads brand awareness. And the best part about this avenue is that businesses can augment their reputation without spending much time, energy or money.

There are ample possibilities and opportunities with online classified ads for every business. The prime focus is to create an impactful strategy and pass the message. Get in touch with experts in the field and let them help you to book classified ads for your business. Boost your business and let the web know your name, by choosing the right way to publish your online classified ads.

Author Bio:

With 9 years of experience as a professional content and copy writer, Niyorkona Saikia has explored diverse platforms in both print and online writing. From Real Estate to FMCG, from lifestyle to health and wellness, her calibre lies in informative writing blended with creative twists. She understands the modern-day readers psyche and knows what they want to read. Creating content that's makes an impact, has always been the prime objective.

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[global102]

Global Matrix solution company provides SEO service in Meerut for your website.

Acquired media and off-page SEO are important services to get your site in front of your target audience and to do business with websites. Global Matrix Solution Company provides this service.

Website Promotion / SEO Services in Meerut

As a Global Matrix Solution Company strategy considers how search engines work, the computer-programmed algorithms that determine search engine behavior, what people search for, the actual search terms or search engines. Global Matrix Solution Company provides SEO services in Meerut by taking into account the keywords typed in, and which search engines are preferred by their target audience. SEO is done because a website will get more visitors from search engines when the website ranks higher on the search engine result page (SERP). These visitors can potentially be converted into customers on behalf of Global Matrix Solutions Company.

SEO is the world of digital marketing and the internet. One of the fastest-growing companies that have been providing web and any service we need. Today if some part of your business is not on the Internet, you are potentially missing out on a huge opportunity. Most of the businesses are rushing to reach a worldwide audience via the Internet (www). It is a full-service website design firm that provides high-quality offshore website design services in Meerut at an affordable price. Global Matrix ( SEO Services in Meerut )is ​​a leading full-service website design firm providing a full range of web design services to clients. Our company executives cover your entire website. If you take our company and SEO service in Meerut, then your website works faster, the speed of opening increases. Our mission is to provide quality solutions and services for SEO efficiently. We strive to focus on long-term relationships with our customers.

If you are considering using an SEO firm to undertake your website promotion, you may have been disappointed with what’s on offer. Typically, most web design or website marketing guys simply do not have the detailed SEO expertise and many SEO firms are too simplistic in their approach.

The company will not give you the advice you don’t need but will focus to give advice on the top areas of website promotion opportunities for your business. The company won’t even hit a punch! If a complete redesign of your site is necessary to improve your search engine rankings, the company will not hesitate to offer this advice and offer some suggestions. The company may assist (through affiliates) with web design and e-commerce services and may also undertake work and provide ongoing advice if necessary.

Large Company in Meerut or Small Business SEO in Meerut

The company has done website promotion for some of the biggest companies and small businesses or single restaurants in the world. The company gets a buzz from both equally and has put in place efficient review processes that allow the company to afford the prices as well as build a large company’s SEO service for even the smallest of clients. For a brief introduction to SEO, visit our website Global Matrix Solution to see Free SEO Services in Meerut.

Worldwide Website Marketing

The Internet has made a big difference in the world. Why should you limit yourself to the best SEO consultant in New York, Los Angeles, or Illinois? Wherever you are in the world, the company can provide remote, affordable SEO services in Meerut with a detailed report, or the company can also provide benefits for you if you need to maintain training or consulting services.

Contact company in Meerut for SEO proposal

Why not contact the company today with a short message describing your website, Android app development, content writing services in Meerut, and your website promotion objectives? In return, the company will provide you with a free SEO expert offer based on the size of your site and your objectives. Use the form in the panel on the right.

[s4g2world]

Choosing a Web Designer That's SEO-Friendly

With Internet marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) now essential components to owning a business website, most web designers are adding SEO to their arsenal of capabilities.

The concern is that most of these self-proclaimed SEO/web designers fail to fully understand the complete picture of organic SEO. The techniques to effectively optimize a website are drastically evolving. And although anyone can do keyword research and write meta tags and page copy, many website designers miss the mark with SEO via a site's back-end.

Whether you're thinking of hiring a solo designer or full-service web design company, it is imperative that your provider knows what he or she is doing if SEO is involved. In essence, respecting the SEO-friendly elements of a website is a must during the web design process.

In this article, we cover a few specific areas that web designers (or companies hiring a web designer) need to be conscious of when building a well-optimized website.

Search Friendly CMS

Many website providers design their sites around a CMS platform or content management system like WordPress or Drupal. CMS software usually includes 'plug-ins' for SEO which enable users to write custom URLs, page titles, and meta descriptions. Although these SEO elements are important to have keyword optimized per page, a search friendly CMS goes well beyond what a SEO plug-in can provide.

The real difference maker in having a SEO-friendly CMS centers on the coding structure of the website. Some web designers, although creative, will utilize very graphic intensive concepts that can diminish a site's SEO potential. Others are effective at balancing aesthetics with minimal, search-friendly coding.

Below are some considerations while utilizing a CMS for your optimized website:

Look for content management systems that use CSS style sheets (as opposed to nestled tables). This allow search engine spiders to crawl and index your site's content more efficiently.

Choose a CMS that allows you to place internal links and navigation on the site in specific areas, such as the footer or column. Some platforms and web design templates may limit where you can place links, which is huge consideration for SEO.

Stray away from CMS platforms that automatically created static URLs for each page. Always choose a CMS that allows users to write dynamic, keyword optimized URLs for each page (which is often times achievable through a plug-in).

See if the content management system allows for automatic XML sitemap creation. If it doesn't, ask you web designer if he or she will be creating and submitting the XML sitemap manually. These points you may want to consider as potential questions for your future web design team, especially if you intend on using a content management system to operate your site.

Back-End Code Structure

The process of designing a well-optimized site should focus on the back-end structure of the website's code, or HTML. This includes website elements that are visible on the page (such as the content or page copy) as well as elements that off the page (such as meta data). The way in which the code is structured, in addition to the types of code being used, can ultimately impact SEO performance.

The two primary off-page elements that hold the greatest weight for SEO is the page title and meta description. The page title and meta description should be scripted as early as possible in HTML of each page. The title in particular (which defines a page and always include a keyword reference for SEO) is most important. A website designer or developer will want to ensure that the search engine spiders hit the page title as one of the first bits of code in which it crawls.

Similarly, the on-page content of a webpage should also be presented as early as possible in the code. The body copy is the pages' bread and butter for SEO, and if this content is at the bottom of the page's back-end, the spider crawls it last (which is not the best for SEO). Skilled web designers and developers are able to use 'div' tags to show the content early in the HTML, even though a bunch of navigation links may be above the content as it's shown on the page.

These coding variables may also depend on the content management system that is being used. For this reason, it is important to have a good understanding of just how SEO-friendly your CMS is, as well as your web designer's coding capabilities.

Choose a Web Design Company Wisely

If you are seeking a web design company for both the design and SEO of your site, do not be bashful. That is, don't hesitate to ask your prospects a lot of questions. Some areas you might want to address are the provider's technical skills, such as his or her HTML coding capabilities, as well as their graphic design skills. Ask to see if they have any references and examples of well-ranking websites that they have designed and optimized in the past.

In summary, there are a number of website companies that promote SEO, and yet failed execute search engine optimization effectively. Just be sure that you come prepared when seeking these dueling services in one package.

I am an Internet marketing manager at OIC Group, Inc., a SEO friendly web design company based in Peoria, Illinois. At OIC Group, we have over ten years of experience in search engine optimization, Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, custom website and CMS development, web presence optimization and management, and SEO-friendly website design. Our team would be happy address any of your questions or website needs.

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[duiillinois]

How to Build Your Brand as a Mental Health Professional

Building a brand and a positive professional reputation for yourself or your business is no longer restricted to mega corporations today. Instead, developing a brand is optimal for almost any professional, entrepreneur, or company owner looking to increase their reach, visibility, and marketability. If you are working in the mental healthfield with your own private practice, you likely already know that branding can be extremely important in a highly competitive industry. Implementing a few tips and tricks can help your private practice while you grow business opportunities and the impact you are able to have online.

What Do You Offer?

Before you begin branding to grow business for your private practice, it is important to determine what it is you have to offer professionally to those who visit your website or read the content you share. In order to successfully go about branding to grow your business, it is imperative to have a clear idea of the image you want to have for yourself both online and off.

Once you have a niche in mind, branding becomes much easier in a sea of millions of mental health-based websites and blogs. Having certain topics to dive into deeper helps to avoid promoting generic content that is skimmed over by your followers and potential clients or patients. With the right niche, branding is possible in less time allowing you to gain more exposure without investing in a marketing budget and to help with the promotion and distribution of your content and the information you wish to share with your online fans and followers.

Focus on Specific Niches to Appeal to Online audience

Focusing on specific niches to appeal to an audience online is ideal to grow business for your private practice while making a professional name for yourself. When you focus on specific niches in your industry and the type of work you do each day, branding becomes much easier.

When you have a few niches in mind while working on your building your brand consider the overall demand and popularity of each individually. Research keywords and phrases using tools such as Google trends for more insight into the areas in your field that are most talked about and require additional content. Comparing keywords and phrases throughout different months of the year is also beneficial when you are new to maintaining a professional reputation online and with the use of social media as a professional mental health counselor.

Get Creative with a Unique Name

Branding requires more than simply sharing top-notch quality and information with your followers. Instead, choosing a creative and unique name to represent yourself and your brand professionally online is highly advisable if you want to grow business and attract new potential clients to your own private practice.

Launch a Modern and Professional Website and Blog

Even if you run a successful private practice locally, it is possible to grow business and increase opportunities using an online presence using a modern and professional website or blog. A modern website or blog is ideal when building your brand, especially if you are interested in connecting with other professionals in your field while gaining the trust of your followers, readers, patients, and customers. Using a website or blog while working on your brand is possible by covering specific topics you research or work with each day while also sharing your own opinions, advice, and input in each unique and individual piece you publish.

Create Professional Social Media Pages

Social media is an absolute must for branding in the online world. Because of the rising popularity of health-conscious pages available today, standing out from the crowd of competition is necessary in order to truly have an impact as a professional mental health counselor when reaching others online. When you use social media to help with branding, you are able to do so by developing professional pages to represent your work, website, or the blog you want to grow online. Using social media helps to also boost the SEO, or search engine optimization of your website, so it appears higher up in search engine result rankings.

Consistent Updating is Key

Consistency is key to managing a brand and professional image of any kind, regardless of the market or industry you work in or represent. When you are building your brand, updating consistently with a schedule in place helps to keep followers from becoming disinterested or desponded when reading your updates and the content you share.

It is always important to avoid posting too much when updating any of your online platforms. When you are posting too frequently for your followers, you may notice a quick decline in the overall engagement or the number of followers you have. Posting too often is a way to quickly become labeled as “spammy” or “annoying” by users who prefer to have a variety within all of their news feeds each day. Keep your updates short, informative, and engaging to keep your users interested in what you have to say without feeling overwhelmed or bombarded by the brand or image you are creating for yourself.

Use Relevant and Trending Keywords

Use relevant and top trending keywords when developing your brand using social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Always stay updated with the latest trending keywords and phrases that are most relevant to the sector of mental health you work in or write about when sharing content online. When boosting your brand image, selecting the optimal keywords that are relevant to the topics you cover or the areas of expertise in is extremely helpful to receive only visitors who have a genuine interest in reading what you have to say. In order to effectively and efficiently go about building your brand, your keyword and phrase targeting are extremely valuable to keep in mind at all times.

Communicate Directly with Followers and Customers

Grow business with ease by directly communicating with your followers and loyal customers using your website, email support, and your social media pages. Attract new potential clients and leads to your private practice by getting to know your followers and customers more personally and on an intimate level. Inquire about their opinions, wants, and needs that are relevant to the services you provide or the topics you cover when sharing updates on your website, blog, and social media platforms. Having a strong connection to your followers and customers ensures longevity in your private practice while allowing you grow the business.

Also consider the type of tone, style, and voice you use anytime you are publishing a new piece of content or updating all of your fans and followers on social media. Set yourself apart by avoiding the “corporate” or “robotic” update voice, and instead remain authentic and communicate directly to the individuals who follow you. The more open, honest, and relatable you are as a mental health professional, the easier it becomes for strangers and digital followers to gain trust in you and the content or services you have to offer.

Learning how to develop your personal brand is essential for mental health counselors and any professionals working in the mental health field. While it may seem overwhelming at times, implementing the right tips and branding strategies help to boost your brand and the overall success of your private practice.

from Counseling Center of Illinois https://www.duiillinois.com/how-to-build-your-brand-as-a-mental-health-professional/

[meetpositivesblog]

Chicago Website Design SEO Company has announced that they are offering sales lead generation services for small businesses. The company develops lead generation systems from the bottom up including but not restricted to website design, content writing, lead funnels, search engine optimization, email sequence writing, pay per click set up and management, and reputation building. These are designed to provide warm/hot sales leads by attracting people who are actively searching for products or services like the ones provided by the client company. Jack Lombardi, CEO of Chicago Website Design SEO Company, explains, “Let’s face it, you know the internet will increase your sales but you just don’t know who to trust, so you went online and your due diligence lead you here. Here at Chicago Website Design SEO Company, we practice what we preach. We are found under many profitable keywords for our industry like: lead generation company, lead generation services, lead generation services, SEO company and more. Through hard work and strategy, we are actually on page one of Google for more than 200 keywords and found in 1000’s of towns and cities throughout the US; not only Google, but Yahoo, Bing and Yelp.com.” The lead generation system that will be developed by the company for each client will have a number of components, such as lead funnels, website design, reputation building, search engine optimization, email sequence writing, and pay per click set up and management. There are many possible strategies for sales lead generation but they will focus on their expertise, which is web marketing. Their services include search engine optimization, website design, Google My Business listing optimization, and search engine marketing. They will focus on looking for those keywords that the small business’ prospective clients are using to search for their particular product or service. The process will consist of determining the appropriate and profitable keywords; building or updating the website to reflect those keywords for expectation management; building or repairing the small business’ online reputation; search engine optimization for the website; and off-page SEO efforts for the keywords. Meanwhile, Yelp reviews for Chicago Website Design SEO Company have been highly positive. In fact, they have a perfect overall rating of five stars based on the reviews they have received so far. For example, Rudy B. from Chicago, Illinois, said, “Jack and his staff have been great from the beginning. Results I was told to expect were right on track. I highly recommend using Chicago Website Design SEO Company for all of your SEO needs. I love their approach taken to maximize results. Jack took the time to explain things to me as I didn't have the best knowledge of how things worked. Great company and great honest/fair people to work with!” Also, Maureen B. from Mundelein, Illinois, said, “In my search to find the right company to work with, I contacted half a dozen companies for information on pricing and to learn more about their process. Of all the people I spoke with, only one completely blew me away, and that was Jack Lombardi with Chicago Website Design SEO Company. [...] I highly recommend them. The team is extremely skilled, and working with Jack Lombardi means you'll have access to a leading expert whose goal isn't just to have his team create a website and provide other services you'll be happy with, but to help you make your business as successful as his...” Chicago Website Design SEO Company is a full service digital marketing service provider. Jack Lombardi, who has expertise and experience in SEO, established the firm in 2008 and is currently its CEO. Their main office is located in Chicago, Illinois, but they have other offices in seven other major cities. Those who want to learn more about the various small business website services of Chicago Website Design SEO Company can go to their website or contact them on the phone or by email. They can also request for a free website analysis that will provide them with an overview of the status of their website’s local SEO performance, such as local listings, search rankings, social media, reviews, and on-site SEO. from Press Releases http://bit.ly/2G91R1R via IFTTT

http://hsvfacts.blogspot.com/2019/04/chicago-website-design-seo-company.html

[topicprinter]

Hey folks, here's another cool growth hacking study for my blog. Sharing it here and hope it will help other founders 🤓---When in 2004 Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons released the first version of Yelp they came into the market already established. By that time, other review sites had been around for years. The that-time leader, CitySearch, had a giant, recognizable name behind them called Yahoo Local, but Stoppelman and Simmons didn’t see a problem with that. They were able to benefit from that market situation by implementing the "80/20 MPF" (Market/Product Fit) growth hack into the Yelp product to get the first traction ASAP and with minimal risk. That first growth hack ("80/20 MPF") implies coping another product that is already at Product/Market Fit stage; in so doing, you keep the fundamentals the same (80%) while substantially reinventing 20% of the product.The early site was started for all intents and purposes, as "another site where people review restaurants and other local businesses" where users submit reviews of restaurants, cafes, shops, and more. However, Yelp began to reinvent 20% of the product utilizing packs of following growth hacks soon after launching. Those marketing hacks molded these differences that fostered user engagement and helped Yelp gain initial traction.Their second growth hack was in making Yelp social. While other review sites passively waited for anonymous reviews to come in, Yelp focused on building a network of reviewers with public profiles, friends, and accolades.This hack was vital to Yelp’s growth because users are more likely to trust reviews from real people than anonymous internet strangers. Yelp enabled and encouraged reviewers to establish a social image and reputation. Yelp members could evaluate each other’s reviews, chat online, become friends, and meet with each other at offline social events. Each Yelp member had a public profile page that recorded her activities, including reviews written, the number of votes received for cool and funny reviews, the number of Yelp friends made, and compliment letters displayed.Using the third growth hack, the guys made Yelp community-based, both online and offline. The company had Community Managers in a variety of locations in San Francisco whose job was to promote Yelp and grow the Yelp community in their hometown.The PDCA (Plan–Do–Check–Adjust) approach embedded in the startup’s processes bore its fruits several months after the initial website launched. The guys were consistently performing many experiments and analyzing user feedback. So, when their specific vision did not match users’ behavior, they pivoted. The PDCA pivoting based on users’ feedback was the Yelp’s fourth growth hack put in the play.The first version of the site came out in October 2004, encouraging users to ask friends for recommendations. Though people seemed to like the idea of recommendations and reviews from actual people, the mechanism for requesting recommendations came off as painful, noisy, and spammy. Moreover, users who needed the advice didn’t always get it. While solicitations were unwelcome, the "Write a Review" feature (which was quite hard to find via than UI) became popular with users. User Flow analytics clearly showed that people wanted to write their unique reviews. So the guys pivoted the site toward sharing reviews and relaunched in February 2005.Another area experiment Yelp has tried, failed, and pivoted from was in offering material incentives for content. Early on, the company experimented with paying for reviews to help encourage activity in cities other than San Francisco, emulating competitors like InsiderPages and Judysbook by offering small compensation like $5 Starbucks or gas cards. This resulted in relatively low-quality participation from people that did not care all that much about Yelp. The guys learned their lesson and the company no longer pays for reviews.The result of that experiment affected the following strategy of the company by getting them focused on review quality over quantity, and letting only the built-in social perks serve as an incentive. I feel like this is their fifth growth hack. Particularly given the fact that they did not even allow users to post reviews via the Yelp mobile app. The guys did not believe the quality would be adequate if reviewers were writing advice on-the-go. Yelp demanded its users take the time to craft something that should be intelligent and offer more value than a simple star rating.To leverage the retention that reflected their quality metric, Yelp turned to the sixth growth hack: making users feel essential. The guys incentivized "good" behavior and prolonged engagement by offering special recognition to users who were first to review a business and letting other users give kudos for reviews that are useful, funny, or cool. The most engaged Yelp users have "Elite" status. The badge is a way of recognizing and rewarding yelpers who are active evangelists and role models, both on and off the site.Elite-worthiness is based on many things, including well-written reviews, great tips on the mobile app, a fleshed-out personal profile, an active record of voting and complimenting, and playing nice with others. Members of the Elite Squad have a shiny Elite badge on their account profile and sometimes get early RSVP privileges at regular Yelp Events. There are even specific events just for the Yelp Elite that offer free food, drinks and swag.Another extremely useful growth hack Yelp used to get the traction and organize subsequent growth is they grew locally.Yelp took advantage of that sixth growth hack (the city-by-city approach), launching in San Francisco in 2005 and making the city its sole focus for that first year. They concentrated on marketing and building the site using just the Golden Gate City.The guys reckoned that this pattern of expansion might be the right one just by looking at Craigslist, a user-generated site that started in the Bay Area and then expanded exponentially from there. Once Yelp had thoroughly exploded in the Bay Area, they would take on the mega-cities of Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York. By 2008, Yelp had isolated a series of metrics that helped them determine which cities had grown enough to warrant a Community Manager, which, as I mentioned, only served to increase growth in those areas by fostering loyalty among the local Yelp community.The seventh growth hack is about using SEO to get other participants of the platform aboard. Yelp has consistently made Search Engine Optimization a priority. For starters, Yelp has a ton of high-quality reviews and in-depth profiles, all of which generate an endless supply of fresh, indexable content for Google. Yelp’s business pages were intentionally structured best for SEO.Yelp augmented this core content with their own, launching local blogs, city pages, user-generated lists and other content all aimed at reaching more users through search. Businesses added the widgets feature to show off their Yelp ratings, and Yelp got a ton of links and excellent anchor text in return.It was a double win for Yelp, as their efforts ranked many business Yelp pages well above even the business’s own page. The relationship was further reinforced as enterprises learned that their Yelp pages were ranking above their actual business sites, which was a fantastic selling point for Yelp’s sales team.Finally, I must mention that Jeremy and Russell had one unique superpower to act that really helped them to get funding, PR attention and sales. That superpower is the connections. The guys were a part of the famed "PayPal Mafia," a group of former PayPal employees and founders who have since founded and developed colossal technology companies such as Tesla Motors, LinkedIn, Palantir Technologies, SpaceX, YouTube, Yelp, and Yammer. Most of the members attended Stanford University or the University of Illinois at Urbana at some point in their studies.

[susanhmcdade2]

30 jobs in the PR and marketing world

We're taking the pitch this week (not that pitch).

Soccer season is in full swing in the United States right now. The National Women's Soccer League (NWSL) and Major League Soccer (MLS) are around the halfway point of their respective seasons.

The top MLS players are gearing up to take on Spanish powerhouse Real Madrid, which features international superstar Christiano Ronaldo, in the MLS All-Star Game on Aug. 2 at Soldier Field in Chicago.

The popularity of soccer in America is on the rise.

The U.S. Women's National Team is currently ranked No. 1 in the world, while last year's MLS season overall attendance numbersreached more than 14.7 million fans-more than double the total for the 2009 season, which totaled 7.2 million in overall attendance.

Both national teams are also hosting important tournaments this summer.

The Men's National Team's youthful roster advanced past the opening stage of the CONCACAF Gold Cup. They will now bring on six National Team veterans for the quarterfinalagainst El Salvador.

The Women's National Team will host the inaugural Tournament of Nations, starting July 27. Along with the United States, this four-team tournament also features Japan, Brazil and Australia-four of the top 10 teams in the world.

Though the MLS has enjoyed a growing fan base, its attendance numbers still have quite a way to go if it wants to hit the 27.2 million markthat England's top league, the Barclay's Premier League, reached last year.

Want to help grow the loyal soccer following in the United States? MLS is looking for a senior communications managerin New York.

Interested candidates would manage the placement of MLS-related lifestyle and philanthropic stories in pop culture and entertainment media outlets.

The position also requires managing publicity for major MLS events and assisting in the communications strategy for international events.

Not the job for you? See what else we have in our weekly professional pickings:

[RELATED: Join us in Chicago for the PR Writing Conference, and learn how to compose content that sizzles.]

Public relations specialist-Subaru (Canada)

SEO team manager-Workshop Digital (Virginia)

PR assistant-Caster Communications (Rhode Island)

Copywriter-Weber Shandwick (Illinois)

Social media manager-Porter Novelli (United Kingdom)

Senior public relations coordinator-The Recording Agency (California)

Director of digital marketing-Walmart Global eCommerce (Nebraska)

Marketing coordinator-Public Broadcasting Atlanta (Georgia)

Digital and social media coordinator-Nature's Variety (Missouri)

Social media marketing lead-Squarespace (New York)

Digital marketing strategist-Tito's Handmade Vodka (Texas)

Social media editor-Amazon(Washington)

Creative strategist-Royal Caribbean Cruises (Florida)

Director, global public affairs-SC Johnson(Wisconsin)

PR and media manager-Universal Music(Australia)

Senior marketing communications analyst-Bridgestone(Tennessee)

Digital marketing leader-Philips(Pennsylvania)

Manager, content and social media marketing-General Mills (Minnesota)

Global social media manager-Movember Foundation (Canada)

Media relations supervisor-McDonald's (Illinois)

Director, executive communicationsand events-Disney Parks & Resorts(California)

Communications manager-World Trade Center Association (New York)

Branding and marketing specialist-GE Capital (Tennessee)

Associate social media manager-Dunkin'Brands (Massachusetts)

Manager, PR and communications-Volkswagen of America (Virginia)

Marketing coordinator-The Better Bean Company (Oregon)

Manager, corporate communications-Justice (Ohio)

Communications coordinator-Indiana University Bloomington (Indiana)

Senior public relations specialist-Duke University Health System (North Carolina)

If you have a position you'd like to see highlighted in PR Daily's weekly jobs post, please email me a link to the listing.

(Image via)

[tainghekhongdaycomvn]

Fighting Review Spam: The Complete Guide for the Local Enterprise

Fighting Review Spam: The Complete Guide for the Local Enterprise

Posted by MiriamEllis

It’s 105 degrees outside my office right now, and the only thing hotter in this summer of 2017 is the local SEO industry’s discussion of review spam. It’s become increasingly clear that major review sites represent an irresistible temptation to spammers, highlighting systemic platform weaknesses and the critical need for review monitoring that scales.

Just as every local brand, large and small, has had to adjust to the reality of reviews’ substantial impact on modern consumer behavior, competitive businesses must now prepare themselves to manage the facts of fraudulent sentiment. Equip your team and clients with this article, which will cover every aspect of review spam and includes a handy list for reporting fake reviews to major platforms.

What is review spam?

A false review is one that misrepresents either the relationship of the reviewer to the business, misrepresents the nature of the interaction the reviewer had with the business, or breaks a guideline. Examples:

The reviewer is actually a competitor of the business he is reviewing; he’s writing the review to hurt a competitor and help himself

The reviewer is actually the owner, an employee, or a marketer of the business he is reviewing; he’s falsifying a review to manipulate public opinion via fictitious positive sentiment

The reviewer never had a transaction with the business he is reviewing; he’s pretending he’s a customer in order to help/hurt the business

The reviewer had a transaction, but is lying about the details of it; he’s trying to hurt the company by misrepresenting facts for some gain of his own

The reviewer received an incentive to write the review, monetary or otherwise; his sentiment stems from a form of reward and is therefore biased

The reviewer violates any of the guidelines on the platform on which he’s writing his review; this could include personal attacks, hate speech or advertising

All of the above practices are forbidden by the major review platforms and should result in the review being reported and removed.

What isn’t review spam?

A review is not spam if:

It’s left directly by a genuine customer who experienced a transaction

It represents the facts of a transaction with reasonable, though subjective, accuracy

It adheres to the policies of the platform on which it’s published

Reviews that contain negative (but accurate) consumer sentiment shouldn’t be viewed as spam. For example, it may be embarrassing to a brand to see a consumer complain that an order was filled incorrectly, that an item was cold, that a tab was miscalculated or that a table was dirty, but if the customer is correctly cataloging his negative experience, then his review isn’t a misrepresentation.

There’s some inherent complexity here, as the brand and the consumer can differ widely in their beliefs about how satisfying a transaction may have been. A restaurant franchise may believe that its meals are priced fairly, but a consumer can label them as too expensive. Negative sentiment can be subjective, so unless the reviewer is deliberately misrepresenting facts and the business can prove it, it’s not useful to report this type of review as spam as it’s unlikely to be removed.

Why do individuals and businesses write spam reviews?

Unfortunately, the motives can be as unpleasant as they are multitudinous:

Blackmail/extortion

There’s the case of the diner who was filmed putting her own hair in her food in hopes of extorting a free meal under threat of negative reviews as a form of blackmail. And then there’s blackmail as a business model, as this unfortunate business reported to the GMB forum after being bulk-spammed with 1-star reviews and then contacted by the spammer with a demand for money to raise the ratings to 5-stars.

Revenge

The classic case is the former employee of a business venting his frustrations by posing as a customer to leave a highly negative review. There are also numerous instances of unhappy personal relationships leading to fake negative reviews of businesses.

Protest or punishment

Consumer sentiment may sometimes appear en masse as a form of protest against an individual or institution, as the US recently witnessed following the election of President Trump and the ensuing avalanche of spam reviews his various businesses received.

It should be noted here that attempting to shame a business with fake negative reviews can have the (likely undesirable) effect of rewarding it with high local rankings, based on the sheer number of reviews it receives. We saw this outcome in the infamous case of the dentist who made national news and received an onslaught of shaming reviews for killing a lion.

Finally, there is the toxic reviewer, a form of Internet troll who may be an actual customer but whose personality leads them to write abusive or libelous reviews as a matter of course. While these reviews should definitely be reported and removed if they fail to meet guidelines, discussion is open and ongoing in the local SEO industry as to how to manage the reality of consumers of this type.

Ranking manipulation

The total review count of a business (regardless of the sentiment the reviews contain) can positively impact Google’s local pack rankings or the internal rankings of certain review platforms. For the sake of boosting rankings, some businesses owners review themselves, tell their employees to review their employer, offer incentives to others in exchange for reviews, or even engage marketers to hook them up to a network of review spammers.

Public perception manipulation

This is a two-sided coin. A business can either positively review itself or negatively review its competitors in an effort to sway consumer perception. The latter is a particularly prevalent form of review spam, with the GMB forum overflowing with at least 10,000 discussions of this topic. Given that respected surveys indicate that 91% of consumers now read online reviews, 84% trust them as much as personal recommendations and 86% will hesitate to patronize a business with negative reviews, the motives for gaming online sentiment, either positively or negatively, are exceedingly strong.

Wages

Expert local SEO, Mike Blumenthal, is currently doing groundbreaking work uncovering a global review spam network that’s responsible for tens or hundreds of thousands of fake reviews. In this scenario, spammers are apparently employed to write reviews of businesses around the world depicting sets of transactions that not even the most jet-setting globetrotter could possibly have experienced. As Mike describes one such reviewer:

“She will, of course, be educated at the mortuary school in Illinois and will have visited a dentist in Austin after having reviewed four other dentists ... Oh, and then she will have bought her engagement ring in Israel, and then searched out a private investigator in Kuru, Philippines eight months later to find her missing husband. And all of this has taken place in the period of a year, right?”

The scale of this network makes it clear that review spam has become big business.

Lack of awareness

Not all review spammers are dastardly characters. Some small-timers are only guilty of a lack of awareness of guidelines or a lack of foresight about the potential negative outcomes of fake reviews to their brand. I’ve sometimes heard small local business owners state they had their family review their newly-opened business to “get the ball rolling,” not realizing that they were breaking a guideline and not considering how embarrassing and costly it could prove if consumers or the platform catch on. In this scenario, I try to teach that faking success is not a viable business model — you have to earn it.

Lack of consequences

Unfortunately, some of the most visible and powerful review platforms have become enablers of the review spam industry due to a lack of guideline enforcement. When a platform fails to identify and remove fake reviews, either because of algorithmic weaknesses or insufficient support staffing, spammers are encouraged to run amok in an environment devoid of consequences. For unethical parties, no further justification for manipulating online sentiment is needed than that they can “get away with it.” Ironically, there are consequences to bear for lack of adequate policing, and until they fall on the spammer, they will fall on any platform whose content becomes labeled as untrustworthy in the eyes of consumers.

What is the scope of review spam?

No one knows for sure, but as we’ve seen, the playing field ranges from the single business owner having his family write a couple of reviews on Yelp to the global network employing staff to inundate Google with hundreds of thousands of fake reviews. And, we’ve see two sides to the review spam environment:

People who write reviews to help themselves (in terms of positive rankings, perception, and earnings for themselves either directly from increased visibility or indirectly via extortion, and/or in terms of negative outcomes for competitors).

People who write reviews to hurt others (for the sake of revenge with little or no consequence).

The unifying motive of all forms of review spam is manipulation, creating an unfair and untrustworthy playing field for consumers, enterprises and platforms alike. One Harvard study suggests that 20% of Yelp reviews are fake, but it would be up to the major review platforms to transparently publicize the total number of spam reviews they receive. Just the segment I’ve seen as an individual local SEO has convinced me that review spam has now become an industry, just like “black hat” SEO once did.

How to spot spam reviews

Here are some basic tips:

Strange patterns:

A reviewer’s profile indicates that they’ve been in too many geographic locations at once. Or, they have a habit of giving 1-star reviews to one business and 5-star reviews to its direct competitor. While neither is proof positive of spam, think of these as possible red flags.

Strange language:

Numerous 5-star reviews that fawn on the business owner by name (e.g. “Bill is the greatest man ever to walk the earth”) may be fishy. If adulation seems to be going overboard, pay attention.

Strange timing:

Over the course of a few weeks, a business skyrockets from zero reviews to 30, 50, or 100 of them. Unless an onslaught of sentiment stems from something major happening in the national news, chances are good the company has launched some kind of program. If you suspect spam, you’ll need to research whether the reviews seem natural or could be stemming from some form of compensation.

Strange numbers:

The sheer number of reviews a business has earned seems inconsistent with its geography or industry. Some business models (restaurants) legitimately earn hundreds of reviews each year on a given platform, but others (mortuaries) are unlikely to have the same pattern. If a competitor of yours has 5x as many reviews as seems normal for your geo-industry, it could be a first indicator of spam.

Strange "facts":

None of your staff can recall that a transaction matching the description in a negative review ever took place, or a transaction can be remembered but the way the reviewer is presenting it is demonstrably false. Example: a guest claims you rudely refused to seat him, but your in-store cam proves that he simply chose not to wait in line like other patrons.

Obvious threats:

If any individual or entity threatens your company with a negative review to extort freebies or money from you, take it seriously and document everything you can.

Obvious guideline violations:

Virtually every major review platform prohibits profane, obscene, and hateful content. If your brand is victimized by this type of attack, definitely report it.

In a nutshell, the first step to spotting review spam is review monitoring. You’ll want to manually check direct competitors for peculiar patterns, and, more importantly, all local businesses must have a schedule for regularly checking their own incoming sentiment. For larger enterprises and multi-location business models, this process must be scaled to minimize manual workloads and cover all bases.

Scaling review management

On an average day, one Moz Local customer with 100 retail locations in the U.S. receives 20 reviews across the various platforms we track. Some are just ratings, but many feature text. Many are very positive. A few contain concerns or complaints that must be quickly addressed to protect reputation/budget by taking action to satisfy and retain an existing customer while proving responsiveness to the general consumer public. Some could turn out to be spam.

Over the course of an average week for this national brand, 100–120 such reviews will come in, totaling up to more than 400 pieces of customer feedback in a month that must be assessed for signs of success at specific locations or emerging quality control issues at others. Parse this out to a year’s time, and this company must be prepared to receive and manage close to 5,000 consumer inputs in the form of reviews and ratings, not just for positive and negative sentiment, but for the purposes of detecting spam.

Spam detection starts with awareness, which can only come from the ability to track and audit a large volume of reviews to identify some of the suspicious hallmarks we’ve covered above. At the multi-location or enterprise level, the solution to this lies in acquiring review monitoring software and putting it in the hands of a designated department or staffer. Using a product like Moz Local, monitoring and detection of questionable reviews can be scaled to meet the needs of even the largest brands.

What should your business do if it has been victimized by review spam?

Once you’ve become reasonably certain that a review or a body of reviews violates the guidelines of a specific platform, it’s time to act. The following list contains links to the policies of 7 dominant review platforms that are applicable to all industries, and also contains tips and links outlining reporting options:

Google

Policy: http://ift.tt/1sNDqed

Review reporting tips

Flag the review by mousing over it, clicking the flag symbol that appears and then entering your email address and choosing a radio button. If you’re the owner, use the owner response function to mention that you’ve reported the review to Google for guideline violations. Then, contact GMB support via their Twitter account and/or post your case in the GMB forum to ask for additional help. Cross your fingers!

Yelp

Policy: http://ift.tt/1TnZ1a3

Review reporting tips

Yelp offers these guidelines for reporting reviews and also advises owners to respond to reviews that violate guidelines. Yelp takes review quality seriously and has set high standards other platforms might do well to follow, in terms of catching spammers and warning the public against bad actors.

Facebook

Policy: http://ift.tt/wGaJfn

Review reporting tips

Here are Facebook’s instructions for reporting reviews that fail to meet community standards. Note that you can only report reviews with text — you can’t report solo ratings. Interestingly, you can turn off reviews on Facebook, but to do so out of fear would be to forego the considerable benefits they can provide.

Yellow Pages

Policy: http://ift.tt/2vwZrlg

Review reporting tips

In 2016, YP.com began showing TripAdvisor reviews alongside internal reviews. If review spam stems from a YP review, click the “Flag” link in the lower right corner of the review and fill out the form to report your reasons for flagging. If the review spam stems from TripAdvisor, you’ll need to deal with them directly and read their extensive guidelines, TripAdvisor states that they screen reviews for quality purposes, but that fake reviews can slip through. If you’re the owner, you can report fraudulent reviews from the Management Center of your TripAdvisor dashboard. Click the “concerned about a review” link and fill out the form. If you’re simply a member of the public, you’ll need to sign into TripAdvisor and click the flag link next to the review to report a concern.

SuperPages

Policy: http://ift.tt/2vwK24L

Review reporting tips

The policy I’ve linked to (from Dex Media, which owns SuperPages) is the best I can find. It’s reasonably thorough but somewhat broken. To report a fake review to SuperPages, you’ll need either a SuperPages or Facebook account. Then, click the “flag abuse” link associated with the review and fill out a short form.

CitySearch

Policy: http://ift.tt/1a9h4K2

Review reporting tips

If you receive a fake review on CitySearch, email customerservice@citygrid.com. In your email, link to the business that has received the spam review, include the date of the review and the name of the reviewer and then cite the guidelines you feel the review violates.

FourSquare

Policy: http://ift.tt/zhBv66

Review reporting tips

The “Rules and Conduct” section I’ve linked to in Foursquare’s TOS outlines their content policy. Foursquare is a bit different in the language they use to describe tips/reviews. They offer these suggestions for reporting abusive tips.

*If you need to find the guidelines and reporting options for an industry-specific review platform like FindLaw or HealthGrades, Phil Rozek’s definitive list will be a good starting point for further research.

Review spam can feel like being stuck between a rock and a hard place

I feel a lot of empathy in this regard. Google, Facebook, Yelp, and other major review platforms have the visibility to drive massive traffic and revenue to your enterprise. That’s the positive side of this equation. But there’s another side — the uneasy side that I believe has its roots in entities like Google originating their local business index via aggregation from third party sources, rather than as a print YellowPages-style, opt-in program, and subsequently failing to adequately support the millions of brands it was then representing to the Internet public.

To this day, there are companies that are stunned to discover that their business is listed on 35 different websites, and being actively reviewed on 5 or 10 of them when the company took no action to initiate this. There’s an understandable feeling of a loss of control that can be particularly difficult for large brands, with their carefully planned quality structures, to adjust to.

This sense of powerlessness is further compounded when the business isn’t just being listed and discussed on platforms it doesn’t control, but is being spammed. I’ve seen business owners on Facebook declaring they’ve decided to disable reviews because they feel so victimized and unsupported after being inundated with suspicious 1-star ratings which Facebook won’t investigate or remove. By doing so, these companies are choosing to forego the considerable benefits reviews drive because meaningful processes for protecting the business aren’t yet available.

These troubling aspects of the highly visible world of reviews can leave owners feeling like they’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. Their companies will be listed, will be reviewed, and may be spammed whether the brand actively participates or not, and they may or may not be able to get spam removed.

It’s not a reality from which any competitive enterprise can opt-out, so my best advice is to realize that it’s better to opt-in fully, with the understanding that some control is better than none. There are avenues for getting many spam reviews taken down, with the right information and a healthy dose of perseverance. Know, too, that every one of your competitors is in the same boat, riding a rising tide that will hopefully grow to the point of offering real-world support for managing consumer sentiment that impacts bottom-line revenue in such a very real way.

There ought to be a law

While legitimate negative reviews have legal protection under the Consumer Review Fairness Act of 2016, fraudulent reviews are another matter.

Section 5(a) of the Federal Trade Communication Act states:

“Unfair methods of competition in or affecting commerce, and unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce, are hereby declared unlawful.”

Provisions like these are what allowed the FTC to successfully sue Sage Automotive Group for $3.6 million dollars for deceptive advertising practices and deceptive online reviews, but it’s important to note that this appears to be the first instance in which the FTC has involved themselves in bringing charges on the basis of fraudulent reviews. At this point, it’s simply not reasonable to expect the FTC to step in if your enterprise receives some suspicious reviews, unless your research should uncover a truly major case.

Lawsuits amongst platforms, brands, and consumers, however, are proliferating. Yelp has sued agencies and local businesses over the publication of fake reviews. Companies have sued their competitors over malicious, false sentiment, and they’ve sued their customers with allegations of the same.

Should your enterprise be targeted with spam reviews, some cases may be egregious enough to warrant legal action. In such instances, definitely don’t attempt to have the spam reviews removed by the host platform, as they could provide important evidence. Contact a lawyer before you take a step in any direction, and avoid using the owner response function to take verbal revenge on the person you believe has spammed you, as we now have a precedent in Dietz v. Perez for such cases being declared a draw.

In many scenarios, however, the business may not wish to become involved in a noisy court battle, and seeking removal can be a quieter way to address the problem.

Local enterprises, consumers, and marketers must advocate for themselves

According to one survey, 90% of consumers read less than 10 reviews before forming an opinion about a business. If some of those 10 reviews are the result of negative spam, the cost to the business is simply too high to ignore, and it’s imperative that owners hold not just spammers, but review platforms, accountable.

Local businesses, consumers, and marketers don’t own review sites, but they do have the power to advocate. A single business could persistently blog about spam it has documented. Multiple businesses could partner up to request a meeting with a specific platform to present pain points. Legitimate consumers could email or call their favorite platforms to explain that they don’t want their volunteer hours writing reviews to be wasted on a website that is failing to police its content. Marketers can thoughtfully raise these issues repeatedly at conferences attended by review platform reps. There is no cause to take an adversarial tone in this, but there is every need for squeaky wheels to highlight the costliness of spam to all parties, advocating for platforms to devote all possible resources to:

Increasing the sophistication of algorithmic spam detection

Increasing staffing for manual detection

Providing real-time support to businesses so that spam can be reported, evaluated and removed as quickly as possible

All of the above could begin to better address the reality of review spam. In the meantime, if your business is being targeted right now, I would suggest using every possible avenue to go public with the problem. Blog, use social media, report the issue on the platform’s forum if it has one. Do anything you can to bring maximum attention to the attack on your brand. I can’t promise results from persistence and publicity, but I’ve seen this method work enough times to recommend it.

Why review platforms must act aggressively to minimize spam

I’ve mentioned the empathy I feel for owners when it comes to review platforms, and I also feel empathy for the platforms, themselves. I’ve gotten the sense, sometimes, that different entities jumped into the review game and have been struggling to handle its emerging complexities as they’ve rolled out in real time. What is a fair and just policy? How can you best automate spam detection? How deeply should a platform be expected to wade into disputes between customers and brands?

With sincere respect for the big job review sites have on their hands, I think it’s important to state:

If brands and consumers didn’t exist, neither would review platforms. Businesses and reviewers should be viewed and treated as MVPs.

Platforms which fail to offer meaningful support options to business owners are not earning goodwill or a good reputation.

The relationship between local businesses and review platforms isn’t an entirely comfortable one. Increasing comfort could turn wary brands into beneficial advocates.

Platforms that allow themselves to become inundated with spam will lose consumers’ trust, and then advertisers’ trust. They won’t survive.

Every review platform has a major stake in this game, but, to be perfectly honest, some of them don’t act like it.

Google My Business Forum Top Contributor and expert Local SEO, Joy Hawkins, recently wrote an open letter to Google offering them four actionable tips for improving their handling of their massive review spam problem. It’s a great example of a marketer advocating for her industry, and, of interest, some of Joy’s best advice to Google is taken from Yelp’s own playbook. Yelp may be doing the best of all platforms in combating spam, in that they have very strong filters and place public warnings on the profiles of suspicious reviewers and brands.

What Joy Hawkins, Mike Blumenthal, other industry experts, and local business owners seem to be saying to review platforms could be summed up like this:

“We recognize the power of reviews and appreciate the benefits they provide, but a responsibility comes with setting your platform up as a hub of reputation for millions of businesses. Don’t see spammed reputations as acceptable losses — they represent the livelihoods of real people. If you’re going to trade responsibly in representing us, you’ve got to back your product up with adequate quality controls and adequate support. A fair and trustworthy environment is better for us, better for consumers and better for you.”

Key takeaways for taking control of review spam

All local enterprises need to know that review spam is a real problem

Its scope ranges from individual spammers to global networks

Enterprises must monitor all incoming reviews, and scale this with software where necessary

Designated staff must be on the lookout for suspicious patterns

All major review platforms have some form of support for reporting spam reviews, but its not always adequate and may not lead to removal

Because of this, brands must advocate for better support from review platforms

Review platforms need to listen and act, because their stake in game is real

Being the subject of a review spam attack can be a stressful event that I wish no brand ever had to face, but it’s my hope that this article has empowered you to meet a possible challenge with complete information and a smart plan of action.

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[ormlacom]

Fighting Review Spam: The Complete Guide for the Local Enterprise

Something every woman should know - WHY MEN LIE!

Posted by MiriamEllis

It’s 105 degrees outside my office right now, and the only thing hotter in this summer of 2017 is the local SEO industry’s discussion of review spam. It’s become increasingly clear that major review sites represent an irresistible temptation to spammers, highlighting systemic platform weaknesses and the critical need for review monitoring that scales.

Just as every local brand, large and small, has had to adjust to the reality of reviews’ substantial impact on modern consumer behavior, competitive businesses must now prepare themselves to manage the facts of fraudulent sentiment. Equip your team and clients with this article, which will cover every aspect of review spam and includes a handy list for reporting fake reviews to major platforms.

What is review spam?

A false review is one that misrepresents either the relationship of the reviewer to the business, misrepresents the nature of the interaction the reviewer had with the business, or breaks a guideline. Examples:

The reviewer is actually a competitor of the business he is reviewing; he’s writing the review to hurt a competitor and help himself

The reviewer is actually the owner, an employee, or a marketer of the business he is reviewing; he’s falsifying a review to manipulate public opinion via fictitious positive sentiment

The reviewer never had a transaction with the business he is reviewing; he’s pretending he’s a customer in order to help/hurt the business

The reviewer had a transaction, but is lying about the details of it; he’s trying to hurt the company by misrepresenting facts for some gain of his own

The reviewer received an incentive to write the review, monetary or otherwise; his sentiment stems from a form of reward and is therefore biased

The reviewer violates any of the guidelines on the platform on which he’s writing his review; this could include personal attacks, hate speech or advertising

All of the above practices are forbidden by the major review platforms and should result in the review being reported and removed.

What isn’t review spam?

A review is not spam if:

It’s left directly by a genuine customer who experienced a transaction

It represents the facts of a transaction with reasonable, though subjective, accuracy

It adheres to the policies of the platform on which it’s published

Reviews that contain negative (but accurate) consumer sentiment shouldn’t be viewed as spam. For example, it may be embarrassing to a brand to see a consumer complain that an order was filled incorrectly, that an item was cold, that a tab was miscalculated or that a table was dirty, but if the customer is correctly cataloging his negative experience, then his review isn’t a misrepresentation.

There’s some inherent complexity here, as the brand and the consumer can differ widely in their beliefs about how satisfying a transaction may have been. A restaurant franchise may believe that its meals are priced fairly, but a consumer can label them as too expensive. Negative sentiment can be subjective, so unless the reviewer is deliberately misrepresenting facts and the business can prove it, it’s not useful to report this type of review as spam as it’s unlikely to be removed.

Why do individuals and businesses write spam reviews?

Unfortunately, the motives can be as unpleasant as they are multitudinous:

Blackmail/extortion

There’s the case of the diner who was filmed putting her own hair in her food in hopes of extorting a free meal under threat of negative reviews as a form of blackmail. And then there’s blackmail as a business model, as this unfortunate business reported to the GMB forum after being bulk-spammed with 1-star reviews and then contacted by the spammer with a demand for money to raise the ratings to 5-stars.

Revenge

The classic case is the former employee of a business venting his frustrations by posing as a customer to leave a highly negative review. There are also numerous instances of unhappy personal relationships leading to fake negative reviews of businesses.

Protest or punishment

Consumer sentiment may sometimes appear en masse as a form of protest against an individual or institution, as the US recently witnessed following the election of President Trump and the ensuing avalanche of spam reviews his various businesses received.

It should be noted here that attempting to shame a business with fake negative reviews can have the (likely undesirable) effect of rewarding it with high local rankings, based on the sheer number of reviews it receives. We saw this outcome in the infamous case of the dentist who made national news and received an onslaught of shaming reviews for killing a lion.

Finally, there is the toxic reviewer, a form of Internet troll who may be an actual customer but whose personality leads them to write abusive or libelous reviews as a matter of course. While these reviews should definitely be reported and removed if they fail to meet guidelines, discussion is open and ongoing in the local SEO industry as to how to manage the reality of consumers of this type.

Ranking manipulation

The total review count of a business (regardless of the sentiment the reviews contain) can positively impact Google’s local pack rankings or the internal rankings of certain review platforms. For the sake of boosting rankings, some businesses owners review themselves, tell their employees to review their employer, offer incentives to others in exchange for reviews, or even engage marketers to hook them up to a network of review spammers.

Public perception manipulation

This is a two-sided coin. A business can either positively review itself or negatively review its competitors in an effort to sway consumer perception. The latter is a particularly prevalent form of review spam, with the GMB forum overflowing with at least 10,000 discussions of this topic. Given that respected surveys indicate that 91% of consumers now read online reviews, 84% trust them as much as personal recommendations and 86% will hesitate to patronize a business with negative reviews, the motives for gaming online sentiment, either positively or negatively, are exceedingly strong.

Wages

Expert local SEO, Mike Blumenthal, is currently doing groundbreaking work uncovering a global review spam network that’s responsible for tens or hundreds of thousands of fake reviews. In this scenario, spammers are apparently employed to write reviews of businesses around the world depicting sets of transactions that not even the most jet-setting globetrotter could possibly have experienced. As Mike describes one such reviewer:

“She will, of course, be educated at the mortuary school in Illinois and will have visited a dentist in Austin after having reviewed four other dentists ... Oh, and then she will have bought her engagement ring in Israel, and then searched out a private investigator in Kuru, Philippines eight months later to find her missing husband. And all of this has taken place in the period of a year, right?”

The scale of this network makes it clear that review spam has become big business.

Lack of awareness

Not all review spammers are dastardly characters. Some small-timers are only guilty of a lack of awareness of guidelines or a lack of foresight about the potential negative outcomes of fake reviews to their brand. I’ve sometimes heard small local business owners state they had their family review their newly-opened business to “get the ball rolling,” not realizing that they were breaking a guideline and not considering how embarrassing and costly it could prove if consumers or the platform catch on. In this scenario, I try to teach that faking success is not a viable business model — you have to earn it.

Lack of consequences

Unfortunately, some of the most visible and powerful review platforms have become enablers of the review spam industry due to a lack of guideline enforcement. When a platform fails to identify and remove fake reviews, either because of algorithmic weaknesses or insufficient support staffing, spammers are encouraged to run amok in an environment devoid of consequences. For unethical parties, no further justification for manipulating online sentiment is needed than that they can “get away with it.” Ironically, there are consequences to bear for lack of adequate policing, and until they fall on the spammer, they will fall on any platform whose content becomes labeled as untrustworthy in the eyes of consumers.

What is the scope of review spam?

No one knows for sure, but as we’ve seen, the playing field ranges from the single business owner having his family write a couple of reviews on Yelp to the global network employing staff to inundate Google with hundreds of thousands of fake reviews. And, we’ve see two sides to the review spam environment:

People who write reviews to help themselves (in terms of positive rankings, perception, and earnings for themselves either directly from increased visibility or indirectly via extortion, and/or in terms of negative outcomes for competitors).

People who write reviews to hurt others (for the sake of revenge with little or no consequence).

The unifying motive of all forms of review spam is manipulation, creating an unfair and untrustworthy playing field for consumers, enterprises and platforms alike. One Harvard study suggests that 20% of Yelp reviews are fake, but it would be up to the major review platforms to transparently publicize the total number of spam reviews they receive. Just the segment I’ve seen as an individual local SEO has convinced me that review spam has now become an industry, just like “black hat” SEO once did.

How to spot spam reviews

Here are some basic tips:

Strange patterns:

A reviewer’s profile indicates that they’ve been in too many geographic locations at once. Or, they have a habit of giving 1-star reviews to one business and 5-star reviews to its direct competitor. While neither is proof positive of spam, think of these as possible red flags.

Strange language:

Numerous 5-star reviews that fawn on the business owner by name (e.g. “Bill is the greatest man ever to walk the earth”) may be fishy. If adulation seems to be going overboard, pay attention.

Strange timing:

Over the course of a few weeks, a business skyrockets from zero reviews to 30, 50, or 100 of them. Unless an onslaught of sentiment stems from something major happening in the national news, chances are good the company has launched some kind of program. If you suspect spam, you’ll need to research whether the reviews seem natural or could be stemming from some form of compensation.

Strange numbers:

The sheer number of reviews a business has earned seems inconsistent with its geography or industry. Some business models (restaurants) legitimately earn hundreds of reviews each year on a given platform, but others (mortuaries) are unlikely to have the same pattern. If a competitor of yours has 5x as many reviews as seems normal for your geo-industry, it could be a first indicator of spam.

Strange "facts":

None of your staff can recall that a transaction matching the description in a negative review ever took place, or a transaction can be remembered but the way the reviewer is presenting it is demonstrably false. Example: a guest claims you rudely refused to seat him, but your in-store cam proves that he simply chose not to wait in line like other patrons.

Obvious threats:

If any individual or entity threatens your company with a negative review to extort freebies or money from you, take it seriously and document everything you can.

Obvious guideline violations:

Virtually every major review platform prohibits profane, obscene, and hateful content. If your brand is victimized by this type of attack, definitely report it.

In a nutshell, the first step to spotting review spam is review monitoring. You’ll want to manually check direct competitors for peculiar patterns, and, more importantly, all local businesses must have a schedule for regularly checking their own incoming sentiment. For larger enterprises and multi-location business models, this process must be scaled to minimize manual workloads and cover all bases.

Scaling review management

On an average day, one Moz Local customer with 100 retail locations in the U.S. receives 20 reviews across the various platforms we track. Some are just ratings, but many feature text. Many are very positive. A few contain concerns or complaints that must be quickly addressed to protect reputation/budget by taking action to satisfy and retain an existing customer while proving responsiveness to the general consumer public. Some could turn out to be spam.

Over the course of an average week for this national brand, 100–120 such reviews will come in, totaling up to more than 400 pieces of customer feedback in a month that must be assessed for signs of success at specific locations or emerging quality control issues at others. Parse this out to a year’s time, and this company must be prepared to receive and manage close to 5,000 consumer inputs in the form of reviews and ratings, not just for positive and negative sentiment, but for the purposes of detecting spam.

Spam detection starts with awareness, which can only come from the ability to track and audit a large volume of reviews to identify some of the suspicious hallmarks we’ve covered above. At the multi-location or enterprise level, the solution to this lies in acquiring review monitoring software and putting it in the hands of a designated department or staffer. Using a product like Moz Local, monitoring and detection of questionable reviews can be scaled to meet the needs of even the largest brands.

What should your business do if it has been victimized by review spam?

Once you’ve become reasonably certain that a review or a body of reviews violates the guidelines of a specific platform, it’s time to act. The following list contains links to the policies of 7 dominant review platforms that are applicable to all industries, and also contains tips and links outlining reporting options:

Google

Policy: http://ift.tt/1sNDqed

Review reporting tips

Flag the review by mousing over it, clicking the flag symbol that appears and then entering your email address and choosing a radio button. If you’re the owner, use the owner response function to mention that you’ve reported the review to Google for guideline violations. Then, contact GMB support via their Twitter account and/or post your case in the GMB forum to ask for additional help. Cross your fingers!

Yelp

Policy: http://ift.tt/1TnZ1a3

Review reporting tips

Yelp offers these guidelines for reporting reviews and also advises owners to respond to reviews that violate guidelines. Yelp takes review quality seriously and has set high standards other platforms might do well to follow, in terms of catching spammers and warning the public against bad actors.

Facebook

Policy: http://ift.tt/wGaJfn

Review reporting tips

Here are Facebook’s instructions for reporting reviews that fail to meet community standards. Note that you can only report reviews with text — you can’t report solo ratings. Interestingly, you can turn off reviews on Facebook, but to do so out of fear would be to forego the considerable benefits they can provide.

Yellow Pages

Policy: http://ift.tt/2vwZrlg

Review reporting tips

In 2016, YP.com began showing TripAdvisor reviews alongside internal reviews. If review spam stems from a YP review, click the “Flag” link in the lower right corner of the review and fill out the form to report your reasons for flagging. If the review spam stems from TripAdvisor, you’ll need to deal with them directly and read their extensive guidelines, TripAdvisor states that they screen reviews for quality purposes, but that fake reviews can slip through. If you’re the owner, you can report fraudulent reviews from the Management Center of your TripAdvisor dashboard. Click the “concerned about a review” link and fill out the form. If you’re simply a member of the public, you’ll need to sign into TripAdvisor and click the flag link next to the review to report a concern.

SuperPages

Policy: http://ift.tt/2vwK24L

Review reporting tips

The policy I’ve linked to (from Dex Media, which owns SuperPages) is the best I can find. It’s reasonably thorough but somewhat broken. To report a fake review to SuperPages, you’ll need either a SuperPages or Facebook account. Then, click the “flag abuse” link associated with the review and fill out a short form.

CitySearch

Policy: http://ift.tt/1a9h4K2

Review reporting tips

If you receive a fake review on CitySearch, email customerservice@citygrid.com. In your email, link to the business that has received the spam review, include the date of the review and the name of the reviewer and then cite the guidelines you feel the review violates.

FourSquare

Policy: http://ift.tt/zhBv66

Review reporting tips

The “Rules and Conduct” section I’ve linked to in Foursquare’s TOS outlines their content policy. Foursquare is a bit different in the language they use to describe tips/reviews. They offer these suggestions for reporting abusive tips.

*If you need to find the guidelines and reporting options for an industry-specific review platform like FindLaw or HealthGrades, Phil Rozek’s definitive list will be a good starting point for further research.

Review spam can feel like being stuck between a rock and a hard place

I feel a lot of empathy in this regard. Google, Facebook, Yelp, and other major review platforms have the visibility to drive massive traffic and revenue to your enterprise. That’s the positive side of this equation. But there’s another side — the uneasy side that I believe has its roots in entities like Google originating their local business index via aggregation from third party sources, rather than as a print YellowPages-style, opt-in program, and subsequently failing to adequately support the millions of brands it was then representing to the Internet public.

To this day, there are companies that are stunned to discover that their business is listed on 35 different websites, and being actively reviewed on 5 or 10 of them when the company took no action to initiate this. There’s an understandable feeling of a loss of control that can be particularly difficult for large brands, with their carefully planned quality structures, to adjust to.

This sense of powerlessness is further compounded when the business isn’t just being listed and discussed on platforms it doesn’t control, but is being spammed. I’ve seen business owners on Facebook declaring they’ve decided to disable reviews because they feel so victimized and unsupported after being inundated with suspicious 1-star ratings which Facebook won’t investigate or remove. By doing so, these companies are choosing to forego the considerable benefits reviews drive because meaningful processes for protecting the business aren’t yet available.

These troubling aspects of the highly visible world of reviews can leave owners feeling like they’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. Their companies will be listed, will be reviewed, and may be spammed whether the brand actively participates or not, and they may or may not be able to get spam removed.

It’s not a reality from which any competitive enterprise can opt-out, so my best advice is to realize that it’s better to opt-in fully, with the understanding that some control is better than none. There are avenues for getting many spam reviews taken down, with the right information and a healthy dose of perseverance. Know, too, that every one of your competitors is in the same boat, riding a rising tide that will hopefully grow to the point of offering real-world support for managing consumer sentiment that impacts bottom-line revenue in such a very real way.

There ought to be a law

While legitimate negative reviews have legal protection under the Consumer Review Fairness Act of 2016, fraudulent reviews are another matter.

Section 5(a) of the Federal Trade Communication Act states:

“Unfair methods of competition in or affecting commerce, and unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce, are hereby declared unlawful.”

Provisions like these are what allowed the FTC to successfully sue Sage Automotive Group for $3.6 million dollars for deceptive advertising practices and deceptive online reviews, but it’s important to note that this appears to be the first instance in which the FTC has involved themselves in bringing charges on the basis of fraudulent reviews. At this point, it’s simply not reasonable to expect the FTC to step in if your enterprise receives some suspicious reviews, unless your research should uncover a truly major case.

Lawsuits amongst platforms, brands, and consumers, however, are proliferating. Yelp has sued agencies and local businesses over the publication of fake reviews. Companies have sued their competitors over malicious, false sentiment, and they’ve sued their customers with allegations of the same.

Should your enterprise be targeted with spam reviews, some cases may be egregious enough to warrant legal action. In such instances, definitely don’t attempt to have the spam reviews removed by the host platform, as they could provide important evidence. Contact a lawyer before you take a step in any direction, and avoid using the owner response function to take verbal revenge on the person you believe has spammed you, as we now have a precedent in Dietz v. Perez for such cases being declared a draw.

In many scenarios, however, the business may not wish to become involved in a noisy court battle, and seeking removal can be a quieter way to address the problem.

Local enterprises, consumers, and marketers must advocate for themselves

According to one survey, 90% of consumers read less than 10 reviews before forming an opinion about a business. If some of those 10 reviews are the result of negative spam, the cost to the business is simply too high to ignore, and it’s imperative that owners hold not just spammers, but review platforms, accountable.

Local businesses, consumers, and marketers don’t own review sites, but they do have the power to advocate. A single business could persistently blog about spam it has documented. Multiple businesses could partner up to request a meeting with a specific platform to present pain points. Legitimate consumers could email or call their favorite platforms to explain that they don’t want their volunteer hours writing reviews to be wasted on a website that is failing to police its content. Marketers can thoughtfully raise these issues repeatedly at conferences attended by review platform reps. There is no cause to take an adversarial tone in this, but there is every need for squeaky wheels to highlight the costliness of spam to all parties, advocating for platforms to devote all possible resources to:

Increasing the sophistication of algorithmic spam detection

Increasing staffing for manual detection

Providing real-time support to businesses so that spam can be reported, evaluated and removed as quickly as possible

All of the above could begin to better address the reality of review spam. In the meantime, if your business is being targeted right now, I would suggest using every possible avenue to go public with the problem. Blog, use social media, report the issue on the platform’s forum if it has one. Do anything you can to bring maximum attention to the attack on your brand. I can’t promise results from persistence and publicity, but I’ve seen this method work enough times to recommend it.

Why review platforms must act aggressively to minimize spam

I’ve mentioned the empathy I feel for owners when it comes to review platforms, and I also feel empathy for the platforms, themselves. I’ve gotten the sense, sometimes, that different entities jumped into the review game and have been struggling to handle its emerging complexities as they’ve rolled out in real time. What is a fair and just policy? How can you best automate spam detection? How deeply should a platform be expected to wade into disputes between customers and brands?

With sincere respect for the big job review sites have on their hands, I think it’s important to state:

If brands and consumers didn’t exist, neither would review platforms. Businesses and reviewers should be viewed and treated as MVPs.

Platforms which fail to offer meaningful support options to business owners are not earning goodwill or a good reputation.

The relationship between local businesses and review platforms isn’t an entirely comfortable one. Increasing comfort could turn wary brands into beneficial advocates.

Platforms that allow themselves to become inundated with spam will lose consumers’ trust, and then advertisers’ trust. They won’t survive.

Every review platform has a major stake in this game, but, to be perfectly honest, some of them don’t act like it.

Google My Business Forum Top Contributor and expert Local SEO, Joy Hawkins, recently wrote an open letter to Google offering them four actionable tips for improving their handling of their massive review spam problem. It’s a great example of a marketer advocating for her industry, and, of interest, some of Joy’s best advice to Google is taken from Yelp’s own playbook. Yelp may be doing the best of all platforms in combating spam, in that they have very strong filters and place public warnings on the profiles of suspicious reviewers and brands.

What Joy Hawkins, Mike Blumenthal, other industry experts, and local business owners seem to be saying to review platforms could be summed up like this:

“We recognize the power of reviews and appreciate the benefits they provide, but a responsibility comes with setting your platform up as a hub of reputation for millions of businesses. Don’t see spammed reputations as acceptable losses — they represent the livelihoods of real people. If you’re going to trade responsibly in representing us, you’ve got to back your product up with adequate quality controls and adequate support. A fair and trustworthy environment is better for us, better for consumers and better for you.”

Key takeaways for taking control of review spam

All local enterprises need to know that review spam is a real problem

Its scope ranges from individual spammers to global networks

Enterprises must monitor all incoming reviews, and scale this with software where necessary

Designated staff must be on the lookout for suspicious patterns

All major review platforms have some form of support for reporting spam reviews, but its not always adequate and may not lead to removal

Because of this, brands must advocate for better support from review platforms

Review platforms need to listen and act, because their stake in game is real

Being the subject of a review spam attack can be a stressful event that I wish no brand ever had to face, but it’s my hope that this article has empowered you to meet a possible challenge with complete information and a smart plan of action.

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[swunlimitednj]

Fighting Review Spam: The Complete Guide for the Local Enterprise

Posted by MiriamEllis

It’s 105 degrees outside my office right now, and the only thing hotter in this summer of 2017 is the local SEO industry’s discussion of review spam. It’s become increasingly clear that major review sites represent an irresistible temptation to spammers, highlighting systemic platform weaknesses and the critical need for review monitoring that scales.

Just as every local brand, large and small, has had to adjust to the reality of reviews’ substantial impact on modern consumer behavior, competitive businesses must now prepare themselves to manage the facts of fraudulent sentiment. Equip your team and clients with this article, which will cover every aspect of review spam and includes a handy list for reporting fake reviews to major platforms.

What is review spam?

A false review is one that misrepresents either the relationship of the reviewer to the business, misrepresents the nature of the interaction the reviewer had with the business, or breaks a guideline. Examples:

The reviewer is actually a competitor of the business he is reviewing; he’s writing the review to hurt a competitor and help himself

The reviewer is actually the owner, an employee, or a marketer of the business he is reviewing; he’s falsifying a review to manipulate public opinion via fictitious positive sentiment

The reviewer never had a transaction with the business he is reviewing; he’s pretending he’s a customer in order to help/hurt the business

The reviewer had a transaction, but is lying about the details of it; he’s trying to hurt the company by misrepresenting facts for some gain of his own

The reviewer received an incentive to write the review, monetary or otherwise; his sentiment stems from a form of reward and is therefore biased

The reviewer violates any of the guidelines on the platform on which he’s writing his review; this could include personal attacks, hate speech or advertising

All of the above practices are forbidden by the major review platforms and should result in the review being reported and removed.

What isn’t review spam?

A review is not spam if:

It’s left directly by a genuine customer who experienced a transaction

It represents the facts of a transaction with reasonable, though subjective, accuracy

It adheres to the policies of the platform on which it’s published

Reviews that contain negative (but accurate) consumer sentiment shouldn’t be viewed as spam. For example, it may be embarrassing to a brand to see a consumer complain that an order was filled incorrectly, that an item was cold, that a tab was miscalculated or that a table was dirty, but if the customer is correctly cataloging his negative experience, then his review isn’t a misrepresentation.

There’s some inherent complexity here, as the brand and the consumer can differ widely in their beliefs about how satisfying a transaction may have been. A restaurant franchise may believe that its meals are priced fairly, but a consumer can label them as too expensive. Negative sentiment can be subjective, so unless the reviewer is deliberately misrepresenting facts and the business can prove it, it’s not useful to report this type of review as spam as it’s unlikely to be removed.

Why do individuals and businesses write spam reviews?

Unfortunately, the motives can be as unpleasant as they are multitudinous:

Blackmail/extortion

There’s the case of the diner who was filmed putting her own hair in her food in hopes of extorting a free meal under threat of negative reviews as a form of blackmail. And then there’s blackmail as a business model, as this unfortunate business reported to the GMB forum after being bulk-spammed with 1-star reviews and then contacted by the spammer with a demand for money to raise the ratings to 5-stars.

Revenge

The classic case is the former employee of a business venting his frustrations by posing as a customer to leave a highly negative review. There are also numerous instances of unhappy personal relationships leading to fake negative reviews of businesses.

Protest or punishment

Consumer sentiment may sometimes appear en masse as a form of protest against an individual or institution, as the US recently witnessed following the election of President Trump and the ensuing avalanche of spam reviews his various businesses received.

It should be noted here that attempting to shame a business with fake negative reviews can have the (likely undesirable) effect of rewarding it with high local rankings, based on the sheer number of reviews it receives. We saw this outcome in the infamous case of the dentist who made national news and received an onslaught of shaming reviews for killing a lion.

Finally, there is the toxic reviewer, a form of Internet troll who may be an actual customer but whose personality leads them to write abusive or libelous reviews as a matter of course. While these reviews should definitely be reported and removed if they fail to meet guidelines, discussion is open and ongoing in the local SEO industry as to how to manage the reality of consumers of this type.

Ranking manipulation

The total review count of a business (regardless of the sentiment the reviews contain) can positively impact Google’s local pack rankings or the internal rankings of certain review platforms. For the sake of boosting rankings, some businesses owners review themselves, tell their employees to review their employer, offer incentives to others in exchange for reviews, or even engage marketers to hook them up to a network of review spammers.

Public perception manipulation

This is a two-sided coin. A business can either positively review itself or negatively review its competitors in an effort to sway consumer perception. The latter is a particularly prevalent form of review spam, with the GMB forum overflowing with at least 10,000 discussions of this topic. Given that respected surveys indicate that 91% of consumers now read online reviews, 84% trust them as much as personal recommendations and 86% will hesitate to patronize a business with negative reviews, the motives for gaming online sentiment, either positively or negatively, are exceedingly strong.

Wages

Expert local SEO, Mike Blumenthal, is currently doing groundbreaking work uncovering a global review spam network that’s responsible for tens or hundreds of thousands of fake reviews. In this scenario, spammers are apparently employed to write reviews of businesses around the world depicting sets of transactions that not even the most jet-setting globetrotter could possibly have experienced. As Mike describes one such reviewer:

“She will, of course, be educated at the mortuary school in Illinois and will have visited a dentist in Austin after having reviewed four other dentists ... Oh, and then she will have bought her engagement ring in Israel, and then searched out a private investigator in Kuru, Philippines eight months later to find her missing husband. And all of this has taken place in the period of a year, right?”

The scale of this network makes it clear that review spam has become big business.

Lack of awareness

Not all review spammers are dastardly characters. Some small-timers are only guilty of a lack of awareness of guidelines or a lack of foresight about the potential negative outcomes of fake reviews to their brand. I’ve sometimes heard small local business owners state they had their family review their newly-opened business to “get the ball rolling,” not realizing that they were breaking a guideline and not considering how embarrassing and costly it could prove if consumers or the platform catch on. In this scenario, I try to teach that faking success is not a viable business model — you have to earn it.

Lack of consequences

Unfortunately, some of the most visible and powerful review platforms have become enablers of the review spam industry due to a lack of guideline enforcement. When a platform fails to identify and remove fake reviews, either because of algorithmic weaknesses or insufficient support staffing, spammers are encouraged to run amok in an environment devoid of consequences. For unethical parties, no further justification for manipulating online sentiment is needed than that they can “get away with it.” Ironically, there are consequences to bear for lack of adequate policing, and until they fall on the spammer, they will fall on any platform whose content becomes labeled as untrustworthy in the eyes of consumers.

What is the scope of review spam?

No one knows for sure, but as we’ve seen, the playing field ranges from the single business owner having his family write a couple of reviews on Yelp to the global network employing staff to inundate Google with hundreds of thousands of fake reviews. And, we’ve see two sides to the review spam environment:

People who write reviews to help themselves (in terms of positive rankings, perception, and earnings for themselves either directly from increased visibility or indirectly via extortion, and/or in terms of negative outcomes for competitors).

People who write reviews to hurt others (for the sake of revenge with little or no consequence).

The unifying motive of all forms of review spam is manipulation, creating an unfair and untrustworthy playing field for consumers, enterprises and platforms alike. One Harvard study suggests that 20% of Yelp reviews are fake, but it would be up to the major review platforms to transparently publicize the total number of spam reviews they receive. Just the segment I’ve seen as an individual local SEO has convinced me that review spam has now become an industry, just like “black hat” SEO once did.

How to spot spam reviews

Here are some basic tips:

Strange patterns:

A reviewer’s profile indicates that they’ve been in too many geographic locations at once. Or, they have a habit of giving 1-star reviews to one business and 5-star reviews to its direct competitor. While neither is proof positive of spam, think of these as possible red flags.

Strange language:

Numerous 5-star reviews that fawn on the business owner by name (e.g. “Bill is the greatest man ever to walk the earth”) may be fishy. If adulation seems to be going overboard, pay attention.

Strange timing:

Over the course of a few weeks, a business skyrockets from zero reviews to 30, 50, or 100 of them. Unless an onslaught of sentiment stems from something major happening in the national news, chances are good the company has launched some kind of program. If you suspect spam, you’ll need to research whether the reviews seem natural or could be stemming from some form of compensation.

Strange numbers:

The sheer number of reviews a business has earned seems inconsistent with its geography or industry. Some business models (restaurants) legitimately earn hundreds of reviews each year on a given platform, but others (mortuaries) are unlikely to have the same pattern. If a competitor of yours has 5x as many reviews as seems normal for your geo-industry, it could be a first indicator of spam.

Strange "facts":

None of your staff can recall that a transaction matching the description in a negative review ever took place, or a transaction can be remembered but the way the reviewer is presenting it is demonstrably false. Example: a guest claims you rudely refused to seat him, but your in-store cam proves that he simply chose not to wait in line like other patrons.

Obvious threats:

If any individual or entity threatens your company with a negative review to extort freebies or money from you, take it seriously and document everything you can.

Obvious guideline violations:

Virtually every major review platform prohibits profane, obscene, and hateful content. If your brand is victimized by this type of attack, definitely report it.

In a nutshell, the first step to spotting review spam is review monitoring. You’ll want to manually check direct competitors for peculiar patterns, and, more importantly, all local businesses must have a schedule for regularly checking their own incoming sentiment. For larger enterprises and multi-location business models, this process must be scaled to minimize manual workloads and cover all bases.

Scaling review management

On an average day, one Moz Local customer with 100 retail locations in the U.S. receives 20 reviews across the various platforms we track. Some are just ratings, but many feature text. Many are very positive. A few contain concerns or complaints that must be quickly addressed to protect reputation/budget by taking action to satisfy and retain an existing customer while proving responsiveness to the general consumer public. Some could turn out to be spam.

Over the course of an average week for this national brand, 100–120 such reviews will come in, totaling up to more than 400 pieces of customer feedback in a month that must be assessed for signs of success at specific locations or emerging quality control issues at others. Parse this out to a year’s time, and this company must be prepared to receive and manage close to 5,000 consumer inputs in the form of reviews and ratings, not just for positive and negative sentiment, but for the purposes of detecting spam.

Spam detection starts with awareness, which can only come from the ability to track and audit a large volume of reviews to identify some of the suspicious hallmarks we’ve covered above. At the multi-location or enterprise level, the solution to this lies in acquiring review monitoring software and putting it in the hands of a designated department or staffer. Using a product like Moz Local, monitoring and detection of questionable reviews can be scaled to meet the needs of even the largest brands.

What should your business do if it has been victimized by review spam?

Once you’ve become reasonably certain that a review or a body of reviews violates the guidelines of a specific platform, it’s time to act. The following list contains links to the policies of 7 dominant review platforms that are applicable to all industries, and also contains tips and links outlining reporting options:

Google

Policy: http://ift.tt/1sNDqed

Review reporting tips

Flag the review by mousing over it, clicking the flag symbol that appears and then entering your email address and choosing a radio button. If you’re the owner, use the owner response function to mention that you’ve reported the review to Google for guideline violations. Then, contact GMB support via their Twitter account and/or post your case in the GMB forum to ask for additional help. Cross your fingers!

Yelp

Policy: http://ift.tt/1TnZ1a3

Review reporting tips

Yelp offers these guidelines for reporting reviews and also advises owners to respond to reviews that violate guidelines. Yelp takes review quality seriously and has set high standards other platforms might do well to follow, in terms of catching spammers and warning the public against bad actors.

Facebook

Policy: http://ift.tt/wGaJfn

Review reporting tips

Here are Facebook’s instructions for reporting reviews that fail to meet community standards. Note that you can only report reviews with text — you can’t report solo ratings. Interestingly, you can turn off reviews on Facebook, but to do so out of fear would be to forego the considerable benefits they can provide.

Yellow Pages

Policy: http://ift.tt/2vwZrlg

Review reporting tips

In 2016, YP.com began showing TripAdvisor reviews alongside internal reviews. If review spam stems from a YP review, click the “Flag” link in the lower right corner of the review and fill out the form to report your reasons for flagging. If the review spam stems from TripAdvisor, you’ll need to deal with them directly and read their extensive guidelines, TripAdvisor states that they screen reviews for quality purposes, but that fake reviews can slip through. If you’re the owner, you can report fraudulent reviews from the Management Center of your TripAdvisor dashboard. Click the “concerned about a review” link and fill out the form. If you’re simply a member of the public, you’ll need to sign into TripAdvisor and click the flag link next to the review to report a concern.

SuperPages

Policy: http://ift.tt/2vwK24L

Review reporting tips

The policy I’ve linked to (from Dex Media, which owns SuperPages) is the best I can find. It’s reasonably thorough but somewhat broken. To report a fake review to SuperPages, you’ll need either a SuperPages or Facebook account. Then, click the “flag abuse” link associated with the review and fill out a short form.

CitySearch

Policy: http://ift.tt/1a9h4K2

Review reporting tips

If you receive a fake review on CitySearch, email customerservice@citygrid.com. In your email, link to the business that has received the spam review, include the date of the review and the name of the reviewer and then cite the guidelines you feel the review violates.

FourSquare

Policy: http://ift.tt/zhBv66

Review reporting tips

The “Rules and Conduct” section I’ve linked to in Foursquare’s TOS outlines their content policy. Foursquare is a bit different in the language they use to describe tips/reviews. They offer these suggestions for reporting abusive tips.

*If you need to find the guidelines and reporting options for an industry-specific review platform like FindLaw or HealthGrades, Phil Rozek’s definitive list will be a good starting point for further research.

Review spam can feel like being stuck between a rock and a hard place

I feel a lot of empathy in this regard. Google, Facebook, Yelp, and other major review platforms have the visibility to drive massive traffic and revenue to your enterprise. That’s the positive side of this equation. But there’s another side — the uneasy side that I believe has its roots in entities like Google originating their local business index via aggregation from third party sources, rather than as a print YellowPages-style, opt-in program, and subsequently failing to adequately support the millions of brands it was then representing to the Internet public.

To this day, there are companies that are stunned to discover that their business is listed on 35 different websites, and being actively reviewed on 5 or 10 of them when the company took no action to initiate this. There’s an understandable feeling of a loss of control that can be particularly difficult for large brands, with their carefully planned quality structures, to adjust to.

This sense of powerlessness is further compounded when the business isn’t just being listed and discussed on platforms it doesn’t control, but is being spammed. I’ve seen business owners on Facebook declaring they’ve decided to disable reviews because they feel so victimized and unsupported after being inundated with suspicious 1-star ratings which Facebook won’t investigate or remove. By doing so, these companies are choosing to forego the considerable benefits reviews drive because meaningful processes for protecting the business aren’t yet available.

These troubling aspects of the highly visible world of reviews can leave owners feeling like they’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. Their companies will be listed, will be reviewed, and may be spammed whether the brand actively participates or not, and they may or may not be able to get spam removed.

It’s not a reality from which any competitive enterprise can opt-out, so my best advice is to realize that it’s better to opt-in fully, with the understanding that some control is better than none. There are avenues for getting many spam reviews taken down, with the right information and a healthy dose of perseverance. Know, too, that every one of your competitors is in the same boat, riding a rising tide that will hopefully grow to the point of offering real-world support for managing consumer sentiment that impacts bottom-line revenue in such a very real way.

There ought to be a law

While legitimate negative reviews have legal protection under the Consumer Review Fairness Act of 2016, fraudulent reviews are another matter.

Section 5(a) of the Federal Trade Communication Act states:

“Unfair methods of competition in or affecting commerce, and unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce, are hereby declared unlawful.”

Provisions like these are what allowed the FTC to successfully sue Sage Automotive Group for $3.6 million dollars for deceptive advertising practices and deceptive online reviews, but it’s important to note that this appears to be the first instance in which the FTC has involved themselves in bringing charges on the basis of fraudulent reviews. At this point, it’s simply not reasonable to expect the FTC to step in if your enterprise receives some suspicious reviews, unless your research should uncover a truly major case.

Lawsuits amongst platforms, brands, and consumers, however, are proliferating. Yelp has sued agencies and local businesses over the publication of fake reviews. Companies have sued their competitors over malicious, false sentiment, and they’ve sued their customers with allegations of the same.

Should your enterprise be targeted with spam reviews, some cases may be egregious enough to warrant legal action. In such instances, definitely don’t attempt to have the spam reviews removed by the host platform, as they could provide important evidence. Contact a lawyer before you take a step in any direction, and avoid using the owner response function to take verbal revenge on the person you believe has spammed you, as we now have a precedent in Dietz v. Perez for such cases being declared a draw.

In many scenarios, however, the business may not wish to become involved in a noisy court battle, and seeking removal can be a quieter way to address the problem.

Local enterprises, consumers, and marketers must advocate for themselves

According to one survey, 90% of consumers read less than 10 reviews before forming an opinion about a business. If some of those 10 reviews are the result of negative spam, the cost to the business is simply too high to ignore, and it’s imperative that owners hold not just spammers, but review platforms, accountable.

Local businesses, consumers, and marketers don’t own review sites, but they do have the power to advocate. A single business could persistently blog about spam it has documented. Multiple businesses could partner up to request a meeting with a specific platform to present pain points. Legitimate consumers could email or call their favorite platforms to explain that they don’t want their volunteer hours writing reviews to be wasted on a website that is failing to police its content. Marketers can thoughtfully raise these issues repeatedly at conferences attended by review platform reps. There is no cause to take an adversarial tone in this, but there is every need for squeaky wheels to highlight the costliness of spam to all parties, advocating for platforms to devote all possible resources to:

Increasing the sophistication of algorithmic spam detection

Increasing staffing for manual detection

Providing real-time support to businesses so that spam can be reported, evaluated and removed as quickly as possible

All of the above could begin to better address the reality of review spam. In the meantime, if your business is being targeted right now, I would suggest using every possible avenue to go public with the problem. Blog, use social media, report the issue on the platform’s forum if it has one. Do anything you can to bring maximum attention to the attack on your brand. I can’t promise results from persistence and publicity, but I’ve seen this method work enough times to recommend it.

Why review platforms must act aggressively to minimize spam

I’ve mentioned the empathy I feel for owners when it comes to review platforms, and I also feel empathy for the platforms, themselves. I’ve gotten the sense, sometimes, that different entities jumped into the review game and have been struggling to handle its emerging complexities as they’ve rolled out in real time. What is a fair and just policy? How can you best automate spam detection? How deeply should a platform be expected to wade into disputes between customers and brands?

With sincere respect for the big job review sites have on their hands, I think it’s important to state:

If brands and consumers didn’t exist, neither would review platforms. Businesses and reviewers should be viewed and treated as MVPs.

Platforms which fail to offer meaningful support options to business owners are not earning goodwill or a good reputation.

The relationship between local businesses and review platforms isn’t an entirely comfortable one. Increasing comfort could turn wary brands into beneficial advocates.

Platforms that allow themselves to become inundated with spam will lose consumers’ trust, and then advertisers’ trust. They won’t survive.

Every review platform has a major stake in this game, but, to be perfectly honest, some of them don’t act like it.

Google My Business Forum Top Contributor and expert Local SEO, Joy Hawkins, recently wrote an open letter to Google offering them four actionable tips for improving their handling of their massive review spam problem. It’s a great example of a marketer advocating for her industry, and, of interest, some of Joy’s best advice to Google is taken from Yelp’s own playbook. Yelp may be doing the best of all platforms in combating spam, in that they have very strong filters and place public warnings on the profiles of suspicious reviewers and brands.

What Joy Hawkins, Mike Blumenthal, other industry experts, and local business owners seem to be saying to review platforms could be summed up like this:

“We recognize the power of reviews and appreciate the benefits they provide, but a responsibility comes with setting your platform up as a hub of reputation for millions of businesses. Don’t see spammed reputations as acceptable losses — they represent the livelihoods of real people. If you’re going to trade responsibly in representing us, you’ve got to back your product up with adequate quality controls and adequate support. A fair and trustworthy environment is better for us, better for consumers and better for you.”

Key takeaways for taking control of review spam

All local enterprises need to know that review spam is a real problem

Its scope ranges from individual spammers to global networks

Enterprises must monitor all incoming reviews, and scale this with software where necessary

Designated staff must be on the lookout for suspicious patterns

All major review platforms have some form of support for reporting spam reviews, but its not always adequate and may not lead to removal

Because of this, brands must advocate for better support from review platforms

Review platforms need to listen and act, because their stake in game is real

Being the subject of a review spam attack can be a stressful event that I wish no brand ever had to face, but it’s my hope that this article has empowered you to meet a possible challenge with complete information and a smart plan of action.

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Fighting Review Spam: The Complete Guide for the Local Enterprise

Posted by MiriamEllis

It’s 105 degrees outside my office right now, and the only thing hotter in this summer of 2017 is the local SEO industry’s discussion of review spam. It’s become increasingly clear that major review sites represent an irresistible temptation to spammers, highlighting systemic platform weaknesses and the critical need for review monitoring that scales.

Just as every local brand, large and small, has had to adjust to the reality of reviews’ substantial impact on modern consumer behavior, competitive businesses must now prepare themselves to manage the facts of fraudulent sentiment. Equip your team and clients with this article, which will cover every aspect of review spam and includes a handy list for reporting fake reviews to major platforms.

What is review spam?

A false review is one that misrepresents either the relationship of the reviewer to the business, misrepresents the nature of the interaction the reviewer had with the business, or breaks a guideline. Examples:

The reviewer is actually a competitor of the business he is reviewing; he’s writing the review to hurt a competitor and help himself

The reviewer is actually the owner, an employee, or a marketer of the business he is reviewing; he’s falsifying a review to manipulate public opinion via fictitious positive sentiment

The reviewer never had a transaction with the business he is reviewing; he’s pretending he’s a customer in order to help/hurt the business

The reviewer had a transaction, but is lying about the details of it; he’s trying to hurt the company by misrepresenting facts for some gain of his own

The reviewer received an incentive to write the review, monetary or otherwise; his sentiment stems from a form of reward and is therefore biased

The reviewer violates any of the guidelines on the platform on which he’s writing his review; this could include personal attacks, hate speech or advertising

All of the above practices are forbidden by the major review platforms and should result in the review being reported and removed.

What isn’t review spam?

A review is not spam if:

It’s left directly by a genuine customer who experienced a transaction

It represents the facts of a transaction with reasonable, though subjective, accuracy

It adheres to the policies of the platform on which it’s published

Reviews that contain negative (but accurate) consumer sentiment shouldn’t be viewed as spam. For example, it may be embarrassing to a brand to see a consumer complain that an order was filled incorrectly, that an item was cold, that a tab was miscalculated or that a table was dirty, but if the customer is correctly cataloging his negative experience, then his review isn’t a misrepresentation.

There’s some inherent complexity here, as the brand and the consumer can differ widely in their beliefs about how satisfying a transaction may have been. A restaurant franchise may believe that its meals are priced fairly, but a consumer can label them as too expensive. Negative sentiment can be subjective, so unless the reviewer is deliberately misrepresenting facts and the business can prove it, it’s not useful to report this type of review as spam as it’s unlikely to be removed.

Why do individuals and businesses write spam reviews?

Unfortunately, the motives can be as unpleasant as they are multitudinous:

Blackmail/extortion

There’s the case of the diner who was filmed putting her own hair in her food in hopes of extorting a free meal under threat of negative reviews as a form of blackmail. And then there’s blackmail as a business model, as this unfortunate business reported to the GMB forum after being bulk-spammed with 1-star reviews and then contacted by the spammer with a demand for money to raise the ratings to 5-stars.

Revenge

The classic case is the former employee of a business venting his frustrations by posing as a customer to leave a highly negative review. There are also numerous instances of unhappy personal relationships leading to fake negative reviews of businesses.

Protest or punishment

Consumer sentiment may sometimes appear en masse as a form of protest against an individual or institution, as the US recently witnessed following the election of President Trump and the ensuing avalanche of spam reviews his various businesses received.

It should be noted here that attempting to shame a business with fake negative reviews can have the (likely undesirable) effect of rewarding it with high local rankings, based on the sheer number of reviews it receives. We saw this outcome in the infamous case of the dentist who made national news and received an onslaught of shaming reviews for killing a lion.

Finally, there is the toxic reviewer, a form of Internet troll who may be an actual customer but whose personality leads them to write abusive or libelous reviews as a matter of course. While these reviews should definitely be reported and removed if they fail to meet guidelines, discussion is open and ongoing in the local SEO industry as to how to manage the reality of consumers of this type.

Ranking manipulation

The total review count of a business (regardless of the sentiment the reviews contain) can positively impact Google’s local pack rankings or the internal rankings of certain review platforms. For the sake of boosting rankings, some businesses owners review themselves, tell their employees to review their employer, offer incentives to others in exchange for reviews, or even engage marketers to hook them up to a network of review spammers.

Public perception manipulation

This is a two-sided coin. A business can either positively review itself or negatively review its competitors in an effort to sway consumer perception. The latter is a particularly prevalent form of review spam, with the GMB forum overflowing with at least 10,000 discussions of this topic. Given that respected surveys indicate that 91% of consumers now read online reviews, 84% trust them as much as personal recommendations and 86% will hesitate to patronize a business with negative reviews, the motives for gaming online sentiment, either positively or negatively, are exceedingly strong.

Wages

Expert local SEO, Mike Blumenthal, is currently doing groundbreaking work uncovering a global review spam network that’s responsible for tens or hundreds of thousands of fake reviews. In this scenario, spammers are apparently employed to write reviews of businesses around the world depicting sets of transactions that not even the most jet-setting globetrotter could possibly have experienced. As Mike describes one such reviewer:

“She will, of course, be educated at the mortuary school in Illinois and will have visited a dentist in Austin after having reviewed four other dentists ... Oh, and then she will have bought her engagement ring in Israel, and then searched out a private investigator in Kuru, Philippines eight months later to find her missing husband. And all of this has taken place in the period of a year, right?”

The scale of this network makes it clear that review spam has become big business.

Lack of awareness

Not all review spammers are dastardly characters. Some small-timers are only guilty of a lack of awareness of guidelines or a lack of foresight about the potential negative outcomes of fake reviews to their brand. I’ve sometimes heard small local business owners state they had their family review their newly-opened business to “get the ball rolling,” not realizing that they were breaking a guideline and not considering how embarrassing and costly it could prove if consumers or the platform catch on. In this scenario, I try to teach that faking success is not a viable business model — you have to earn it.

Lack of consequences

Unfortunately, some of the most visible and powerful review platforms have become enablers of the review spam industry due to a lack of guideline enforcement. When a platform fails to identify and remove fake reviews, either because of algorithmic weaknesses or insufficient support staffing, spammers are encouraged to run amok in an environment devoid of consequences. For unethical parties, no further justification for manipulating online sentiment is needed than that they can “get away with it.” Ironically, there are consequences to bear for lack of adequate policing, and until they fall on the spammer, they will fall on any platform whose content becomes labeled as untrustworthy in the eyes of consumers.

What is the scope of review spam?

No one knows for sure, but as we’ve seen, the playing field ranges from the single business owner having his family write a couple of reviews on Yelp to the global network employing staff to inundate Google with hundreds of thousands of fake reviews. And, we’ve see two sides to the review spam environment:

People who write reviews to help themselves (in terms of positive rankings, perception, and earnings for themselves either directly from increased visibility or indirectly via extortion, and/or in terms of negative outcomes for competitors).

People who write reviews to hurt others (for the sake of revenge with little or no consequence).

The unifying motive of all forms of review spam is manipulation, creating an unfair and untrustworthy playing field for consumers, enterprises and platforms alike. One Harvard study suggests that 20% of Yelp reviews are fake, but it would be up to the major review platforms to transparently publicize the total number of spam reviews they receive. Just the segment I’ve seen as an individual local SEO has convinced me that review spam has now become an industry, just like “black hat” SEO once did.

How to spot spam reviews

Here are some basic tips:

Strange patterns:

A reviewer’s profile indicates that they’ve been in too many geographic locations at once. Or, they have a habit of giving 1-star reviews to one business and 5-star reviews to its direct competitor. While neither is proof positive of spam, think of these as possible red flags.

Strange language:

Numerous 5-star reviews that fawn on the business owner by name (e.g. “Bill is the greatest man ever to walk the earth”) may be fishy. If adulation seems to be going overboard, pay attention.

Strange timing:

Over the course of a few weeks, a business skyrockets from zero reviews to 30, 50, or 100 of them. Unless an onslaught of sentiment stems from something major happening in the national news, chances are good the company has launched some kind of program. If you suspect spam, you’ll need to research whether the reviews seem natural or could be stemming from some form of compensation.

Strange numbers:

The sheer number of reviews a business has earned seems inconsistent with its geography or industry. Some business models (restaurants) legitimately earn hundreds of reviews each year on a given platform, but others (mortuaries) are unlikely to have the same pattern. If a competitor of yours has 5x as many reviews as seems normal for your geo-industry, it could be a first indicator of spam.

Strange "facts":

None of your staff can recall that a transaction matching the description in a negative review ever took place, or a transaction can be remembered but the way the reviewer is presenting it is demonstrably false. Example: a guest claims you rudely refused to seat him, but your in-store cam proves that he simply chose not to wait in line like other patrons.

Obvious threats:

If any individual or entity threatens your company with a negative review to extort freebies or money from you, take it seriously and document everything you can.

Obvious guideline violations:

Virtually every major review platform prohibits profane, obscene, and hateful content. If your brand is victimized by this type of attack, definitely report it.

In a nutshell, the first step to spotting review spam is review monitoring. You’ll want to manually check direct competitors for peculiar patterns, and, more importantly, all local businesses must have a schedule for regularly checking their own incoming sentiment. For larger enterprises and multi-location business models, this process must be scaled to minimize manual workloads and cover all bases.

Scaling review management

On an average day, one Moz Local customer with 100 retail locations in the U.S. receives 20 reviews across the various platforms we track. Some are just ratings, but many feature text. Many are very positive. A few contain concerns or complaints that must be quickly addressed to protect reputation/budget by taking action to satisfy and retain an existing customer while proving responsiveness to the general consumer public. Some could turn out to be spam.

Over the course of an average week for this national brand, 100–120 such reviews will come in, totaling up to more than 400 pieces of customer feedback in a month that must be assessed for signs of success at specific locations or emerging quality control issues at others. Parse this out to a year’s time, and this company must be prepared to receive and manage close to 5,000 consumer inputs in the form of reviews and ratings, not just for positive and negative sentiment, but for the purposes of detecting spam.

Spam detection starts with awareness, which can only come from the ability to track and audit a large volume of reviews to identify some of the suspicious hallmarks we’ve covered above. At the multi-location or enterprise level, the solution to this lies in acquiring review monitoring software and putting it in the hands of a designated department or staffer. Using a product like Moz Local, monitoring and detection of questionable reviews can be scaled to meet the needs of even the largest brands.

What should your business do if it has been victimized by review spam?

Once you’ve become reasonably certain that a review or a body of reviews violates the guidelines of a specific platform, it’s time to act. The following list contains links to the policies of 7 dominant review platforms that are applicable to all industries, and also contains tips and links outlining reporting options:

Google

Policy: http://ift.tt/1sNDqed

Review reporting tips

Flag the review by mousing over it, clicking the flag symbol that appears and then entering your email address and choosing a radio button. If you’re the owner, use the owner response function to mention that you’ve reported the review to Google for guideline violations. Then, contact GMB support via their Twitter account and/or post your case in the GMB forum to ask for additional help. Cross your fingers!

Yelp

Policy: http://ift.tt/1TnZ1a3

Review reporting tips

Yelp offers these guidelines for reporting reviews and also advises owners to respond to reviews that violate guidelines. Yelp takes review quality seriously and has set high standards other platforms might do well to follow, in terms of catching spammers and warning the public against bad actors.

Facebook

Policy: http://ift.tt/wGaJfn

Review reporting tips

Here are Facebook’s instructions for reporting reviews that fail to meet community standards. Note that you can only report reviews with text — you can’t report solo ratings. Interestingly, you can turn off reviews on Facebook, but to do so out of fear would be to forego the considerable benefits they can provide.

Yellow Pages

Policy: http://ift.tt/2vwZrlg

Review reporting tips

In 2016, YP.com began showing TripAdvisor reviews alongside internal reviews. If review spam stems from a YP review, click the “Flag” link in the lower right corner of the review and fill out the form to report your reasons for flagging. If the review spam stems from TripAdvisor, you’ll need to deal with them directly and read their extensive guidelines, TripAdvisor states that they screen reviews for quality purposes, but that fake reviews can slip through. If you’re the owner, you can report fraudulent reviews from the Management Center of your TripAdvisor dashboard. Click the “concerned about a review” link and fill out the form. If you’re simply a member of the public, you’ll need to sign into TripAdvisor and click the flag link next to the review to report a concern.

SuperPages

Policy: http://ift.tt/2vwK24L

Review reporting tips

The policy I’ve linked to (from Dex Media, which owns SuperPages) is the best I can find. It’s reasonably thorough but somewhat broken. To report a fake review to SuperPages, you’ll need either a SuperPages or Facebook account. Then, click the “flag abuse” link associated with the review and fill out a short form.

CitySearch

Policy: http://ift.tt/1a9h4K2

Review reporting tips

If you receive a fake review on CitySearch, email customerservice@citygrid.com. In your email, link to the business that has received the spam review, include the date of the review and the name of the reviewer and then cite the guidelines you feel the review violates.

FourSquare

Policy: http://ift.tt/zhBv66

Review reporting tips

The “Rules and Conduct” section I’ve linked to in Foursquare’s TOS outlines their content policy. Foursquare is a bit different in the language they use to describe tips/reviews. They offer these suggestions for reporting abusive tips.

*If you need to find the guidelines and reporting options for an industry-specific review platform like FindLaw or HealthGrades, Phil Rozek’s definitive list will be a good starting point for further research.

Review spam can feel like being stuck between a rock and a hard place

I feel a lot of empathy in this regard. Google, Facebook, Yelp, and other major review platforms have the visibility to drive massive traffic and revenue to your enterprise. That’s the positive side of this equation. But there’s another side — the uneasy side that I believe has its roots in entities like Google originating their local business index via aggregation from third party sources, rather than as a print YellowPages-style, opt-in program, and subsequently failing to adequately support the millions of brands it was then representing to the Internet public.

To this day, there are companies that are stunned to discover that their business is listed on 35 different websites, and being actively reviewed on 5 or 10 of them when the company took no action to initiate this. There’s an understandable feeling of a loss of control that can be particularly difficult for large brands, with their carefully planned quality structures, to adjust to.

This sense of powerlessness is further compounded when the business isn’t just being listed and discussed on platforms it doesn’t control, but is being spammed. I’ve seen business owners on Facebook declaring they’ve decided to disable reviews because they feel so victimized and unsupported after being inundated with suspicious 1-star ratings which Facebook won’t investigate or remove. By doing so, these companies are choosing to forego the considerable benefits reviews drive because meaningful processes for protecting the business aren’t yet available.

These troubling aspects of the highly visible world of reviews can leave owners feeling like they’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. Their companies will be listed, will be reviewed, and may be spammed whether the brand actively participates or not, and they may or may not be able to get spam removed.

It’s not a reality from which any competitive enterprise can opt-out, so my best advice is to realize that it’s better to opt-in fully, with the understanding that some control is better than none. There are avenues for getting many spam reviews taken down, with the right information and a healthy dose of perseverance. Know, too, that every one of your competitors is in the same boat, riding a rising tide that will hopefully grow to the point of offering real-world support for managing consumer sentiment that impacts bottom-line revenue in such a very real way.

There ought to be a law

While legitimate negative reviews have legal protection under the Consumer Review Fairness Act of 2016, fraudulent reviews are another matter.

Section 5(a) of the Federal Trade Communication Act states:

“Unfair methods of competition in or affecting commerce, and unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce, are hereby declared unlawful.”

Provisions like these are what allowed the FTC to successfully sue Sage Automotive Group for $3.6 million dollars for deceptive advertising..

http://ift.tt/2vwZH3O

[mariasolemarionqi]

Fighting Review Spam: The Complete Guide for the Local Enterprise

Posted by MiriamEllis

It’s 105 degrees outside my office right now, and the only thing hotter in this summer of 2017 is the local SEO industry’s discussion of review spam. It’s become increasingly clear that major review sites represent an irresistible temptation to spammers, highlighting systemic platform weaknesses and the critical need for review monitoring that scales.

Just as every local brand, large and small, has had to adjust to the reality of reviews’ substantial impact on modern consumer behavior, competitive businesses must now prepare themselves to manage the facts of fraudulent sentiment. Equip your team and clients with this article, which will cover every aspect of review spam and includes a handy list for reporting fake reviews to major platforms.

What is review spam?

A false review is one that misrepresents either the relationship of the reviewer to the business, misrepresents the nature of the interaction the reviewer had with the business, or breaks a guideline. Examples:

The reviewer is actually a competitor of the business he is reviewing; he’s writing the review to hurt a competitor and help himself

The reviewer is actually the owner, an employee, or a marketer of the business he is reviewing; he’s falsifying a review to manipulate public opinion via fictitious positive sentiment

The reviewer never had a transaction with the business he is reviewing; he’s pretending he’s a customer in order to help/hurt the business

The reviewer had a transaction, but is lying about the details of it; he’s trying to hurt the company by misrepresenting facts for some gain of his own

The reviewer received an incentive to write the review, monetary or otherwise; his sentiment stems from a form of reward and is therefore biased

The reviewer violates any of the guidelines on the platform on which he’s writing his review; this could include personal attacks, hate speech or advertising

All of the above practices are forbidden by the major review platforms and should result in the review being reported and removed.

What isn’t review spam?

A review is not spam if:

It’s left directly by a genuine customer who experienced a transaction

It represents the facts of a transaction with reasonable, though subjective, accuracy

It adheres to the policies of the platform on which it’s published

Reviews that contain negative (but accurate) consumer sentiment shouldn’t be viewed as spam. For example, it may be embarrassing to a brand to see a consumer complain that an order was filled incorrectly, that an item was cold, that a tab was miscalculated or that a table was dirty, but if the customer is correctly cataloging his negative experience, then his review isn’t a misrepresentation.

There’s some inherent complexity here, as the brand and the consumer can differ widely in their beliefs about how satisfying a transaction may have been. A restaurant franchise may believe that its meals are priced fairly, but a consumer can label them as too expensive. Negative sentiment can be subjective, so unless the reviewer is deliberately misrepresenting facts and the business can prove it, it’s not useful to report this type of review as spam as it’s unlikely to be removed.

Why do individuals and businesses write spam reviews?

Unfortunately, the motives can be as unpleasant as they are multitudinous:

Blackmail/extortion

There’s the case of the diner who was filmed putting her own hair in her food in hopes of extorting a free meal under threat of negative reviews as a form of blackmail. And then there’s blackmail as a business model, as this unfortunate business reported to the GMB forum after being bulk-spammed with 1-star reviews and then contacted by the spammer with a demand for money to raise the ratings to 5-stars.

Revenge

The classic case is the former employee of a business venting his frustrations by posing as a customer to leave a highly negative review. There are also numerous instances of unhappy personal relationships leading to fake negative reviews of businesses.

Protest or punishment

Consumer sentiment may sometimes appear en masse as a form of protest against an individual or institution, as the US recently witnessed following the election of President Trump and the ensuing avalanche of spam reviews his various businesses received.

It should be noted here that attempting to shame a business with fake negative reviews can have the (likely undesirable) effect of rewarding it with high local rankings, based on the sheer number of reviews it receives. We saw this outcome in the infamous case of the dentist who made national news and received an onslaught of shaming reviews for killing a lion.

Finally, there is the toxic reviewer, a form of Internet troll who may be an actual customer but whose personality leads them to write abusive or libelous reviews as a matter of course. While these reviews should definitely be reported and removed if they fail to meet guidelines, discussion is open and ongoing in the local SEO industry as to how to manage the reality of consumers of this type.

Ranking manipulation

The total review count of a business (regardless of the sentiment the reviews contain) can positively impact Google’s local pack rankings or the internal rankings of certain review platforms. For the sake of boosting rankings, some businesses owners review themselves, tell their employees to review their employer, offer incentives to others in exchange for reviews, or even engage marketers to hook them up to a network of review spammers.

Public perception manipulation

This is a two-sided coin. A business can either positively review itself or negatively review its competitors in an effort to sway consumer perception. The latter is a particularly prevalent form of review spam, with the GMB forum overflowing with at least 10,000 discussions of this topic. Given that respected surveys indicate that 91% of consumers now read online reviews, 84% trust them as much as personal recommendations and 86% will hesitate to patronize a business with negative reviews, the motives for gaming online sentiment, either positively or negatively, are exceedingly strong.

Wages

Expert local SEO, Mike Blumenthal, is currently doing groundbreaking work uncovering a global review spam network that’s responsible for tens or hundreds of thousands of fake reviews. In this scenario, spammers are apparently employed to write reviews of businesses around the world depicting sets of transactions that not even the most jet-setting globetrotter could possibly have experienced. As Mike describes one such reviewer:

“She will, of course, be educated at the mortuary school in Illinois and will have visited a dentist in Austin after having reviewed four other dentists ... Oh, and then she will have bought her engagement ring in Israel, and then searched out a private investigator in Kuru, Philippines eight months later to find her missing husband. And all of this has taken place in the period of a year, right?”

The scale of this network makes it clear that review spam has become big business.

Lack of awareness

Not all review spammers are dastardly characters. Some small-timers are only guilty of a lack of awareness of guidelines or a lack of foresight about the potential negative outcomes of fake reviews to their brand. I’ve sometimes heard small local business owners state they had their family review their newly-opened business to “get the ball rolling,” not realizing that they were breaking a guideline and not considering how embarrassing and costly it could prove if consumers or the platform catch on. In this scenario, I try to teach that faking success is not a viable business model — you have to earn it.

Lack of consequences

Unfortunately, some of the most visible and powerful review platforms have become enablers of the review spam industry due to a lack of guideline enforcement. When a platform fails to identify and remove fake reviews, either because of algorithmic weaknesses or insufficient support staffing, spammers are encouraged to run amok in an environment devoid of consequences. For unethical parties, no further justification for manipulating online sentiment is needed than that they can “get away with it.” Ironically, there are consequences to bear for lack of adequate policing, and until they fall on the spammer, they will fall on any platform whose content becomes labeled as untrustworthy in the eyes of consumers.

What is the scope of review spam?

No one knows for sure, but as we’ve seen, the playing field ranges from the single business owner having his family write a couple of reviews on Yelp to the global network employing staff to inundate Google with hundreds of thousands of fake reviews. And, we’ve see two sides to the review spam environment:

People who write reviews to help themselves (in terms of positive rankings, perception, and earnings for themselves either directly from increased visibility or indirectly via extortion, and/or in terms of negative outcomes for competitors).

People who write reviews to hurt others (for the sake of revenge with little or no consequence).

The unifying motive of all forms of review spam is manipulation, creating an unfair and untrustworthy playing field for consumers, enterprises and platforms alike. One Harvard study suggests that 20% of Yelp reviews are fake, but it would be up to the major review platforms to transparently publicize the total number of spam reviews they receive. Just the segment I’ve seen as an individual local SEO has convinced me that review spam has now become an industry, just like “black hat” SEO once did.

How to spot spam reviews

Here are some basic tips:

Strange patterns:

A reviewer’s profile indicates that they’ve been in too many geographic locations at once. Or, they have a habit of giving 1-star reviews to one business and 5-star reviews to its direct competitor. While neither is proof positive of spam, think of these as possible red flags.

Strange language:

Numerous 5-star reviews that fawn on the business owner by name (e.g. “Bill is the greatest man ever to walk the earth”) may be fishy. If adulation seems to be going overboard, pay attention.

Strange timing:

Over the course of a few weeks, a business skyrockets from zero reviews to 30, 50, or 100 of them. Unless an onslaught of sentiment stems from something major happening in the national news, chances are good the company has launched some kind of program. If you suspect spam, you’ll need to research whether the reviews seem natural or could be stemming from some form of compensation.

Strange numbers:

The sheer number of reviews a business has earned seems inconsistent with its geography or industry. Some business models (restaurants) legitimately earn hundreds of reviews each year on a given platform, but others (mortuaries) are unlikely to have the same pattern. If a competitor of yours has 5x as many reviews as seems normal for your geo-industry, it could be a first indicator of spam.

Strange "facts":

None of your staff can recall that a transaction matching the description in a negative review ever took place, or a transaction can be remembered but the way the reviewer is presenting it is demonstrably false. Example: a guest claims you rudely refused to seat him, but your in-store cam proves that he simply chose not to wait in line like other patrons.

Obvious threats:

If any individual or entity threatens your company with a negative review to extort freebies or money from you, take it seriously and document everything you can.

Obvious guideline violations:

Virtually every major review platform prohibits profane, obscene, and hateful content. If your brand is victimized by this type of attack, definitely report it.

In a nutshell, the first step to spotting review spam is review monitoring. You’ll want to manually check direct competitors for peculiar patterns, and, more importantly, all local businesses must have a schedule for regularly checking their own incoming sentiment. For larger enterprises and multi-location business models, this process must be scaled to minimize manual workloads and cover all bases.

Scaling review management

On an average day, one Moz Local customer with 100 retail locations in the U.S. receives 20 reviews across the various platforms we track. Some are just ratings, but many feature text. Many are very positive. A few contain concerns or complaints that must be quickly addressed to protect reputation/budget by taking action to satisfy and retain an existing customer while proving responsiveness to the general consumer public. Some could turn out to be spam.

Over the course of an average week for this national brand, 100–120 such reviews will come in, totaling up to more than 400 pieces of customer feedback in a month that must be assessed for signs of success at specific locations or emerging quality control issues at others. Parse this out to a year’s time, and this company must be prepared to receive and manage close to 5,000 consumer inputs in the form of reviews and ratings, not just for positive and negative sentiment, but for the purposes of detecting spam.

Spam detection starts with awareness, which can only come from the ability to track and audit a large volume of reviews to identify some of the suspicious hallmarks we’ve covered above. At the multi-location or enterprise level, the solution to this lies in acquiring review monitoring software and putting it in the hands of a designated department or staffer. Using a product like Moz Local, monitoring and detection of questionable reviews can be scaled to meet the needs of even the largest brands.

What should your business do if it has been victimized by review spam?

Once you’ve become reasonably certain that a review or a body of reviews violates the guidelines of a specific platform, it’s time to act. The following list contains links to the policies of 7 dominant review platforms that are applicable to all industries, and also contains tips and links outlining reporting options:

Google

Policy: http://ift.tt/1sNDqed

Review reporting tips

Flag the review by mousing over it, clicking the flag symbol that appears and then entering your email address and choosing a radio button. If you’re the owner, use the owner response function to mention that you’ve reported the review to Google for guideline violations. Then, contact GMB support via their Twitter account and/or post your case in the GMB forum to ask for additional help. Cross your fingers!

Yelp

Policy: http://ift.tt/1TnZ1a3

Review reporting tips

Yelp offers these guidelines for reporting reviews and also advises owners to respond to reviews that violate guidelines. Yelp takes review quality seriously and has set high standards other platforms might do well to follow, in terms of catching spammers and warning the public against bad actors.

Facebook

Policy: http://ift.tt/wGaJfn

Review reporting tips

Here are Facebook’s instructions for reporting reviews that fail to meet community standards. Note that you can only report reviews with text — you can’t report solo ratings. Interestingly, you can turn off reviews on Facebook, but to do so out of fear would be to forego the considerable benefits they can provide.

Yellow Pages

Policy: http://ift.tt/2vwZrlg

Review reporting tips

In 2016, YP.com began showing TripAdvisor reviews alongside internal reviews. If review spam stems from a YP review, click the “Flag” link in the lower right corner of the review and fill out the form to report your reasons for flagging. If the review spam stems from TripAdvisor, you’ll need to deal with them directly and read their extensive guidelines, TripAdvisor states that they screen reviews for quality purposes, but that fake reviews can slip through. If you’re the owner, you can report fraudulent reviews from the Management Center of your TripAdvisor dashboard. Click the “concerned about a review” link and fill out the form. If you’re simply a member of the public, you’ll need to sign into TripAdvisor and click the flag link next to the review to report a concern.

SuperPages

Policy: http://ift.tt/2vwK24L

Review reporting tips

The policy I’ve linked to (from Dex Media, which owns SuperPages) is the best I can find. It’s reasonably thorough but somewhat broken. To report a fake review to SuperPages, you’ll need either a SuperPages or Facebook account. Then, click the “flag abuse” link associated with the review and fill out a short form.

CitySearch

Policy: http://ift.tt/1a9h4K2

Review reporting tips

If you receive a fake review on CitySearch, email customerservice@citygrid.com. In your email, link to the business that has received the spam review, include the date of the review and the name of the reviewer and then cite the guidelines you feel the review violates.

FourSquare

Policy: http://ift.tt/zhBv66

Review reporting tips

The “Rules and Conduct” section I’ve linked to in Foursquare’s TOS outlines their content policy. Foursquare is a bit different in the language they use to describe tips/reviews. They offer these suggestions for reporting abusive tips.

*If you need to find the guidelines and reporting options for an industry-specific review platform like FindLaw or HealthGrades, Phil Rozek’s definitive list will be a good starting point for further research.

Review spam can feel like being stuck between a rock and a hard place

I feel a lot of empathy in this regard. Google, Facebook, Yelp, and other major review platforms have the visibility to drive massive traffic and revenue to your enterprise. That’s the positive side of this equation. But there’s another side — the uneasy side that I believe has its roots in entities like Google originating their local business index via aggregation from third party sources, rather than as a print YellowPages-style, opt-in program, and subsequently failing to adequately support the millions of brands it was then representing to the Internet public.

To this day, there are companies that are stunned to discover that their business is listed on 35 different websites, and being actively reviewed on 5 or 10 of them when the company took no action to initiate this. There’s an understandable feeling of a loss of control that can be particularly difficult for large brands, with their carefully planned quality structures, to adjust to.

This sense of powerlessness is further compounded when the business isn’t just being listed and discussed on platforms it doesn’t control, but is being spammed. I’ve seen business owners on Facebook declaring they’ve decided to disable reviews because they feel so victimized and unsupported after being inundated with suspicious 1-star ratings which Facebook won’t investigate or remove. By doing so, these companies are choosing to forego the considerable benefits reviews drive because meaningful processes for protecting the business aren’t yet available.

These troubling aspects of the highly visible world of reviews can leave owners feeling like they’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. Their companies will be listed, will be reviewed, and may be spammed whether the brand actively participates or not, and they may or may not be able to get spam removed.

It’s not a reality from which any competitive enterprise can opt-out, so my best advice is to realize that it’s better to opt-in fully, with the understanding that some control is better than none. There are avenues for getting many spam reviews taken down, with the right information and a healthy dose of perseverance. Know, too, that every one of your competitors is in the same boat, riding a rising tide that will hopefully grow to the point of offering real-world support for managing consumer sentiment that impacts bottom-line revenue in such a very real way.

There ought to be a law

While legitimate negative reviews have legal protection under the Consumer Review Fairness Act of 2016, fraudulent reviews are another matter.

Section 5(a) of the Federal Trade Communication Act states:

“Unfair methods of competition in or affecting commerce, and unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce, are hereby declared unlawful.”

Provisions like these are what allowed the FTC to successfully sue Sage Automotive Group for $3.6 million dollars for deceptive advertising..

http://ift.tt/2vwZH3O

[kraussoutene]

Fighting Review Spam: The Complete Guide for the Local Enterprise

Posted by MiriamEllis

It’s 105 degrees outside my office right now, and the only thing hotter in this summer of 2017 is the local SEO industry’s discussion of review spam. It’s become increasingly clear that major review sites represent an irresistible temptation to spammers, highlighting systemic platform weaknesses and the critical need for review monitoring that scales.

Just as every local brand, large and small, has had to adjust to the reality of reviews’ substantial impact on modern consumer behavior, competitive businesses must now prepare themselves to manage the facts of fraudulent sentiment. Equip your team and clients with this article, which will cover every aspect of review spam and includes a handy list for reporting fake reviews to major platforms.

What is review spam?

A false review is one that misrepresents either the relationship of the reviewer to the business, misrepresents the nature of the interaction the reviewer had with the business, or breaks a guideline. Examples:

The reviewer is actually a competitor of the business he is reviewing; he’s writing the review to hurt a competitor and help himself

The reviewer is actually the owner, an employee, or a marketer of the business he is reviewing; he’s falsifying a review to manipulate public opinion via fictitious positive sentiment

The reviewer never had a transaction with the business he is reviewing; he’s pretending he’s a customer in order to help/hurt the business

The reviewer had a transaction, but is lying about the details of it; he’s trying to hurt the company by misrepresenting facts for some gain of his own

The reviewer received an incentive to write the review, monetary or otherwise; his sentiment stems from a form of reward and is therefore biased

The reviewer violates any of the guidelines on the platform on which he’s writing his review; this could include personal attacks, hate speech or advertising

All of the above practices are forbidden by the major review platforms and should result in the review being reported and removed.

What isn’t review spam?

A review is not spam if:

It’s left directly by a genuine customer who experienced a transaction

It represents the facts of a transaction with reasonable, though subjective, accuracy

It adheres to the policies of the platform on which it’s published

Reviews that contain negative (but accurate) consumer sentiment shouldn’t be viewed as spam. For example, it may be embarrassing to a brand to see a consumer complain that an order was filled incorrectly, that an item was cold, that a tab was miscalculated or that a table was dirty, but if the customer is correctly cataloging his negative experience, then his review isn’t a misrepresentation.

There’s some inherent complexity here, as the brand and the consumer can differ widely in their beliefs about how satisfying a transaction may have been. A restaurant franchise may believe that its meals are priced fairly, but a consumer can label them as too expensive. Negative sentiment can be subjective, so unless the reviewer is deliberately misrepresenting facts and the business can prove it, it’s not useful to report this type of review as spam as it’s unlikely to be removed.

Why do individuals and businesses write spam reviews?

Unfortunately, the motives can be as unpleasant as they are multitudinous:

Blackmail/extortion

There’s the case of the diner who was filmed putting her own hair in her food in hopes of extorting a free meal under threat of negative reviews as a form of blackmail. And then there’s blackmail as a business model, as this unfortunate business reported to the GMB forum after being bulk-spammed with 1-star reviews and then contacted by the spammer with a demand for money to raise the ratings to 5-stars.

Revenge

The classic case is the former employee of a business venting his frustrations by posing as a customer to leave a highly negative review. There are also numerous instances of unhappy personal relationships leading to fake negative reviews of businesses.

Protest or punishment

Consumer sentiment may sometimes appear en masse as a form of protest against an individual or institution, as the US recently witnessed following the election of President Trump and the ensuing avalanche of spam reviews his various businesses received.

It should be noted here that attempting to shame a business with fake negative reviews can have the (likely undesirable) effect of rewarding it with high local rankings, based on the sheer number of reviews it receives. We saw this outcome in the infamous case of the dentist who made national news and received an onslaught of shaming reviews for killing a lion.

Finally, there is the toxic reviewer, a form of Internet troll who may be an actual customer but whose personality leads them to write abusive or libelous reviews as a matter of course. While these reviews should definitely be reported and removed if they fail to meet guidelines, discussion is open and ongoing in the local SEO industry as to how to manage the reality of consumers of this type.

Ranking manipulation

The total review count of a business (regardless of the sentiment the reviews contain) can positively impact Google’s local pack rankings or the internal rankings of certain review platforms. For the sake of boosting rankings, some businesses owners review themselves, tell their employees to review their employer, offer incentives to others in exchange for reviews, or even engage marketers to hook them up to a network of review spammers.

Public perception manipulation

This is a two-sided coin. A business can either positively review itself or negatively review its competitors in an effort to sway consumer perception. The latter is a particularly prevalent form of review spam, with the GMB forum overflowing with at least 10,000 discussions of this topic. Given that respected surveys indicate that 91% of consumers now read online reviews, 84% trust them as much as personal recommendations and 86% will hesitate to patronize a business with negative reviews, the motives for gaming online sentiment, either positively or negatively, are exceedingly strong.

Wages

Expert local SEO, Mike Blumenthal, is currently doing groundbreaking work uncovering a global review spam network that’s responsible for tens or hundreds of thousands of fake reviews. In this scenario, spammers are apparently employed to write reviews of businesses around the world depicting sets of transactions that not even the most jet-setting globetrotter could possibly have experienced. As Mike describes one such reviewer:

“She will, of course, be educated at the mortuary school in Illinois and will have visited a dentist in Austin after having reviewed four other dentists ... Oh, and then she will have bought her engagement ring in Israel, and then searched out a private investigator in Kuru, Philippines eight months later to find her missing husband. And all of this has taken place in the period of a year, right?”

The scale of this network makes it clear that review spam has become big business.

Lack of awareness

Not all review spammers are dastardly characters. Some small-timers are only guilty of a lack of awareness of guidelines or a lack of foresight about the potential negative outcomes of fake reviews to their brand. I’ve sometimes heard small local business owners state they had their family review their newly-opened business to “get the ball rolling,” not realizing that they were breaking a guideline and not considering how embarrassing and costly it could prove if consumers or the platform catch on. In this scenario, I try to teach that faking success is not a viable business model — you have to earn it.

Lack of consequences

Unfortunately, some of the most visible and powerful review platforms have become enablers of the review spam industry due to a lack of guideline enforcement. When a platform fails to identify and remove fake reviews, either because of algorithmic weaknesses or insufficient support staffing, spammers are encouraged to run amok in an environment devoid of consequences. For unethical parties, no further justification for manipulating online sentiment is needed than that they can “get away with it.” Ironically, there are consequences to bear for lack of adequate policing, and until they fall on the spammer, they will fall on any platform whose content becomes labeled as untrustworthy in the eyes of consumers.

What is the scope of review spam?

No one knows for sure, but as we’ve seen, the playing field ranges from the single business owner having his family write a couple of reviews on Yelp to the global network employing staff to inundate Google with hundreds of thousands of fake reviews. And, we’ve see two sides to the review spam environment:

People who write reviews to help themselves (in terms of positive rankings, perception, and earnings for themselves either directly from increased visibility or indirectly via extortion, and/or in terms of negative outcomes for competitors).

People who write reviews to hurt others (for the sake of revenge with little or no consequence).

The unifying motive of all forms of review spam is manipulation, creating an unfair and untrustworthy playing field for consumers, enterprises and platforms alike. One Harvard study suggests that 20% of Yelp reviews are fake, but it would be up to the major review platforms to transparently publicize the total number of spam reviews they receive. Just the segment I’ve seen as an individual local SEO has convinced me that review spam has now become an industry, just like “black hat” SEO once did.

How to spot spam reviews

Here are some basic tips:

Strange patterns:

A reviewer’s profile indicates that they’ve been in too many geographic locations at once. Or, they have a habit of giving 1-star reviews to one business and 5-star reviews to its direct competitor. While neither is proof positive of spam, think of these as possible red flags.

Strange language:

Numerous 5-star reviews that fawn on the business owner by name (e.g. “Bill is the greatest man ever to walk the earth”) may be fishy. If adulation seems to be going overboard, pay attention.

Strange timing:

Over the course of a few weeks, a business skyrockets from zero reviews to 30, 50, or 100 of them. Unless an onslaught of sentiment stems from something major happening in the national news, chances are good the company has launched some kind of program. If you suspect spam, you’ll need to research whether the reviews seem natural or could be stemming from some form of compensation.

Strange numbers:

The sheer number of reviews a business has earned seems inconsistent with its geography or industry. Some business models (restaurants) legitimately earn hundreds of reviews each year on a given platform, but others (mortuaries) are unlikely to have the same pattern. If a competitor of yours has 5x as many reviews as seems normal for your geo-industry, it could be a first indicator of spam.

Strange "facts":

None of your staff can recall that a transaction matching the description in a negative review ever took place, or a transaction can be remembered but the way the reviewer is presenting it is demonstrably false. Example: a guest claims you rudely refused to seat him, but your in-store cam proves that he simply chose not to wait in line like other patrons.

Obvious threats:

If any individual or entity threatens your company with a negative review to extort freebies or money from you, take it seriously and document everything you can.

Obvious guideline violations:

Virtually every major review platform prohibits profane, obscene, and hateful content. If your brand is victimized by this type of attack, definitely report it.

In a nutshell, the first step to spotting review spam is review monitoring. You’ll want to manually check direct competitors for peculiar patterns, and, more importantly, all local businesses must have a schedule for regularly checking their own incoming sentiment. For larger enterprises and multi-location business models, this process must be scaled to minimize manual workloads and cover all bases.

Scaling review management

On an average day, one Moz Local customer with 100 retail locations in the U.S. receives 20 reviews across the various platforms we track. Some are just ratings, but many feature text. Many are very positive. A few contain concerns or complaints that must be quickly addressed to protect reputation/budget by taking action to satisfy and retain an existing customer while proving responsiveness to the general consumer public. Some could turn out to be spam.

Over the course of an average week for this national brand, 100–120 such reviews will come in, totaling up to more than 400 pieces of customer feedback in a month that must be assessed for signs of success at specific locations or emerging quality control issues at others. Parse this out to a year’s time, and this company must be prepared to receive and manage close to 5,000 consumer inputs in the form of reviews and ratings, not just for positive and negative sentiment, but for the purposes of detecting spam.

Spam detection starts with awareness, which can only come from the ability to track and audit a large volume of reviews to identify some of the suspicious hallmarks we’ve covered above. At the multi-location or enterprise level, the solution to this lies in acquiring review monitoring software and putting it in the hands of a designated department or staffer. Using a product like Moz Local, monitoring and detection of questionable reviews can be scaled to meet the needs of even the largest brands.

What should your business do if it has been victimized by review spam?

Once you’ve become reasonably certain that a review or a body of reviews violates the guidelines of a specific platform, it’s time to act. The following list contains links to the policies of 7 dominant review platforms that are applicable to all industries, and also contains tips and links outlining reporting options:

Google

Policy: http://ift.tt/1sNDqed

Review reporting tips

Flag the review by mousing over it, clicking the flag symbol that appears and then entering your email address and choosing a radio button. If you’re the owner, use the owner response function to mention that you’ve reported the review to Google for guideline violations. Then, contact GMB support via their Twitter account and/or post your case in the GMB forum to ask for additional help. Cross your fingers!

Yelp

Policy: http://ift.tt/1TnZ1a3

Review reporting tips

Yelp offers these guidelines for reporting reviews and also advises owners to respond to reviews that violate guidelines. Yelp takes review quality seriously and has set high standards other platforms might do well to follow, in terms of catching spammers and warning the public against bad actors.

Facebook

Policy: http://ift.tt/wGaJfn

Review reporting tips

Here are Facebook’s instructions for reporting reviews that fail to meet community standards. Note that you can only report reviews with text — you can’t report solo ratings. Interestingly, you can turn off reviews on Facebook, but to do so out of fear would be to forego the considerable benefits they can provide.

Yellow Pages

Policy: http://ift.tt/2vwZrlg

Review reporting tips

In 2016, YP.com began showing TripAdvisor reviews alongside internal reviews. If review spam stems from a YP review, click the “Flag” link in the lower right corner of the review and fill out the form to report your reasons for flagging. If the review spam stems from TripAdvisor, you’ll need to deal with them directly and read their extensive guidelines, TripAdvisor states that they screen reviews for quality purposes, but that fake reviews can slip through. If you’re the owner, you can report fraudulent reviews from the Management Center of your TripAdvisor dashboard. Click the “concerned about a review” link and fill out the form. If you’re simply a member of the public, you’ll need to sign into TripAdvisor and click the flag link next to the review to report a concern.

SuperPages

Policy: http://ift.tt/2vwK24L

Review reporting tips

The policy I’ve linked to (from Dex Media, which owns SuperPages) is the best I can find. It’s reasonably thorough but somewhat broken. To report a fake review to SuperPages, you’ll need either a SuperPages or Facebook account. Then, click the “flag abuse” link associated with the review and fill out a short form.

CitySearch

Policy: http://ift.tt/1a9h4K2

Review reporting tips

If you receive a fake review on CitySearch, email customerservice@citygrid.com. In your email, link to the business that has received the spam review, include the date of the review and the name of the reviewer and then cite the guidelines you feel the review violates.

FourSquare

Policy: http://ift.tt/zhBv66

Review reporting tips

The “Rules and Conduct” section I’ve linked to in Foursquare’s TOS outlines their content policy. Foursquare is a bit different in the language they use to describe tips/reviews. They offer these suggestions for reporting abusive tips.

*If you need to find the guidelines and reporting options for an industry-specific review platform like FindLaw or HealthGrades, Phil Rozek’s definitive list will be a good starting point for further research.

Review spam can feel like being stuck between a rock and a hard place

I feel a lot of empathy in this regard. Google, Facebook, Yelp, and other major review platforms have the visibility to drive massive traffic and revenue to your enterprise. That’s the positive side of this equation. But there’s another side — the uneasy side that I believe has its roots in entities like Google originating their local business index via aggregation from third party sources, rather than as a print YellowPages-style, opt-in program, and subsequently failing to adequately support the millions of brands it was then representing to the Internet public.

To this day, there are companies that are stunned to discover that their business is listed on 35 different websites, and being actively reviewed on 5 or 10 of them when the company took no action to initiate this. There’s an understandable feeling of a loss of control that can be particularly difficult for large brands, with their carefully planned quality structures, to adjust to.

This sense of powerlessness is further compounded when the business isn’t just being listed and discussed on platforms it doesn’t control, but is being spammed. I’ve seen business owners on Facebook declaring they’ve decided to disable reviews because they feel so victimized and unsupported after being inundated with suspicious 1-star ratings which Facebook won’t investigate or remove. By doing so, these companies are choosing to forego the considerable benefits reviews drive because meaningful processes for protecting the business aren’t yet available.

These troubling aspects of the highly visible world of reviews can leave owners feeling like they’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. Their companies will be listed, will be reviewed, and may be spammed whether the brand actively participates or not, and they may or may not be able to get spam removed.

It’s not a reality from which any competitive enterprise can opt-out, so my best advice is to realize that it’s better to opt-in fully, with the understanding that some control is better than none. There are avenues for getting many spam reviews taken down, with the right information and a healthy dose of perseverance. Know, too, that every one of your competitors is in the same boat, riding a rising tide that will hopefully grow to the point of offering real-world support for managing consumer sentiment that impacts bottom-line revenue in such a very real way.

There ought to be a law

While legitimate negative reviews have legal protection under the Consumer Review Fairness Act of 2016, fraudulent reviews are another matter.

Section 5(a) of the Federal Trade Communication Act states:

“Unfair methods of competition in or affecting commerce, and unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce, are hereby declared unlawful.”

Provisions like these are what allowed the FTC to successfully sue Sage Automotive Group for $3.6 million dollars for deceptive advertising..

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