How negative keywords affect your clients

Negative Reviews & Complaints First of all, if you don’t already know it, that big fat yellow pages book is long gone. They may still make it and deliver it to all the houses on the block, but no one is using that book at all.

Nope, they are all using the internet these days my friends. From their mobile phones, iPads, laptops and desktops. When they want to contact a company or find someone to sell them a product or do a service for them, they search it out online. Taking it one step further, the internet has given them a new avenue they never had with the old yellow pages. Not only can they find a company to get the job done, they can also do research on that company to see if it’s a good company to do business with.

Now even if they don’t plan to research the company, often times negative material will stop them from doing business with you or your business. The reason for this is that complaints on sites like Ripoff Report rank in the search results extremely well. Often in the top five, which is what we call “above the fold”. What this means is that their listing is visible to the user without scrolling down the page. This is where it gets ugly. Because the potential client or customer may have only been looking for contact information for you, but what they see is a whole lot more. Continue reading

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Do you Need Reputation Repair?

Do you need online reputation repairNot really a tough question, but one that needs answered for clients from time to time.

Occasionally we talk with clients that have some negative press, possibly a Ripoff Report or Complaints Board article, maybe a vicious blog entry, etc. But those pieces of negative content are sitting on the third or fourth page of the search results. If this is your situation, then the answer we’re going to give you is a big fat “NO”. You do not need a reputation repair campaign if your negative content is sitting that far back in the search engine result pages.

The reason is simple. No one is seeing them and they are not affecting your business. If they are seeing them, the percentage of people that dig that deep into the search results is so small that it really is not impacting your bottom line. So there is no need to contract us to fix your online reputation, because there really isn’t a problem to fix. Continue reading

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Competitors using online reviews to ruin your business

When it comes to business, we all know that it’s a dog eat dog world out there. I would like to think that we could all play nice together and realize that in almost every industry there are plenty of clients to go around, but unfortunately that is just not the case.

The reason is simple. People are greedy.

What is bad about this is that we are seeing more and more of these types of reviews online damaging small and medium size businesses on a daily basis. How do we know that they are complaints and reviews written by competitors rather than angry or frustrated customers? The short answer is that we don’t for certain. But we have been doing this for quite a long time, and after a while we are able to spot them with some certainty, based on how they are written and what they actually say.

Let me explain a little further. Continue reading

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Rate my Teachers / Professors

Teacher or professor hard at workRating sites are the rage, there is no doubt about it. The fact that Google loves these sites and ranks their pages extremely well makes them a super enticing business option for many online entrepreneurs. So these sites are coming out of the woodwork in droves, becoming more and more niche specific, targeting a specific profession or profile type, but all with the same intention overall.

To attack or ruin someone’s personal or professional online reputation.

The latest and greatest trend we’ve seen has been sites like Rate my Teachers. While some students and parents rate the teachers and professors well, more often than not they are simply complaints designed to hurt the online image of the teacher or professor being written about. There are already several different copycat versions of this site, and I expect that more will follow shortly. Once again, these sites rely heavily on the CDA (Communications Decency Act) and are completely protected from any type of legal action by the teachers or professors that have pages written about them based on that federal law. Which by the way is now 16 years old. So it’s not going anywhere my friends. It’s been challenged and taken to task. All to no avail, because 16 years later it’s still running strong. If you know anything about the American legal system, the longer a law is in place, the harder it is to change. Continue reading

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Your Reputation in the New Year

fix-reputation-onlineWe deal with quite a few companies. Many of them new companies coming in with a need to repair their online reputation.

So here comes the pitch, because I know that there are still many of you out there. The new year is coming, and I hope you see how negative blogs, reviews and other web pages and material are hurting your business and it’s bottom line. Too many companies act like ostriches and stick their heads in the sand when it comes to their online reputation and what people are saying about them, but ultimately any negative material on the front page of the search results is costing you money. Sometimes serious money. Continue reading

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