Clients, whatever form they take, will become ever more powerful online and however much a company does to raise its online visibility, if there are unhappy customers then there will always be websites that put (often rightfully so) a spanner in the works.

As an example of this, if someone was interested in iphoneworldwide.com and had typed that into Google, they’d see several website links related to that website.  However, just below that they’d see a link to the url http://www.sitejabber.com/reviews/www.iphoneworldwide.com and then another one below saying ‘BEWARE of http://www.iphoneworldwide.com/’. 

The first site (Site Jabber) allows people to say positive and negative things about websites.  In the case of iphoneworldwide.com the feedback is heavily negative and would make someone think more than twice before using them.

Everyone knows that it’s possible to engineer such comments (it wouldn’t be hard for competitors to instigate the writing of negative things about any company, multiple times under different names – or indeed,  a company could engineer positive comments about themselves) but the point is that if the comments are believable then people will react accordingly.

The subject of online reputation management is huge and this isn’t the blog to go into detail about the best policy for companies to adopt.  No, the point of this blog is to provide a (perhaps obvious) beginners tip that applies to any company.

First of all, it’s worth answering the comment of “that wouldn’t happen to me!” …

Actually, it could happen to you – if not now, but in the future.  As people get more comfortable with making complaints online, more and more websites will spring up that enable them to do that, often anonymously.   So, let’s say you’re a company that’s messed a supplier around and hasn’t paid them, resulting in a breakdown in the relationship.   Within no time at all your company name could appear high up in Google as being a bad payer.  That’s just one example and the simple message is: “this could easily happen to you as the web evolves, so be prepared”.

There are plenty of software solutions that help with online reputation management but for many companies (particularly smaller businesses) the following simple process may be sufficient.  It’s a manual process and there are better ways to do things but this keeps it simple, albeit a bit more time-consuming and not instantly responsive to online changes …

1. Put a note in the diary to check at a regular interval (e.g. each month, fortnight, weekly).
2. Search Google (and optionally other search engines) for your company name.  Look through at least the first 20-30 search results.
3. Click through to any websites that you’re unfamiliar with.  They may contain content about your company that’s fine.  They may also contain something negative.  Quite often they make you think “actually, we could make better use of that site that we appear on”.
4. If using Google, don’t just use the main search results – go for the Blogs, Updates, and Discussions options from the ‘More’ button because you’ll get a different set of results.

Although basic and not making the best use of technologies available, it costs nothing more than a bit of effort diarised in at the time intervals you choose.   Then, IF anything negative appears about your company, you’ll be well prepared to act on that.  And then we’re into a totally different subject of how to react to negative publicity online.

There is plenty of info on Flipboard on the page http://www.websitemagazine.com/content/blogs/posts/archive/2010/07/23/flipboard-shows-us-the-future-of-content.aspx?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter but in a nutshell the app allows you to aggregate social media and other online content all into your own personal magazine.  That magazine is always updating and the real benefit is not having to plough through loads of junk to see the stuff that you’re particularly interested in.

So why should Google be scared?  There’s little doubt that Flipboard will be a significant influencer in people buying iPad – the chance to have totally customisable content on an easy-to-carry screen is a dream come true for many.   People could become locked into their own little communities and areas of interest and could become more receptive to advertising messages and input from those within their Flipboard than from the more traditional channels such as Google.   In short, there could become less reliance on going to Google to find answers when many of those answers could be available within Flipboard on the iPad.

Need something and would have previously gone to Google?   As Flipboard evolves it could allow much more interaction with those you’re connected with and the answers will come via those channels.  And if those answers come from people you trust/respect, then that takes revenue from the mouths of Google.   New advertising models will undoubtedly come out of Flipboard as well and because trust will have been built up (through the usefulness of the application), those advertising messages may have more impact than would normally be expected.

Perhaps it’s not just Google that should be scared.  Perhaps it should be businesses in general.  The majority of businesses have barely grasped the concept of having a strong website and effective online advertising – what’s going to happen to them as evolutions such as Flipboard start to move the goalposts again?   As always, we live in interesting times and the ability to respond to change will continue to be of paramount importance in business.

There are many analogies that can be drawn between business and the failure of England to beat Germany yesterday but the subject I’d like to focus on today is the 4 year gap before the next World Cup.   Whatever people may say about the coaching of the team, the players themselves, and whether the second England goal not counting was a pivotal point, the simple fact is that England are out, lessons may be learnt, and it’s time for business owners to turn their football passions to some practical use.

Looking back to the 2006 World Cup, it would be fascinating to see how well individual businesses have move forwards in that 4 year time period.   This means not just from a financial perspective but in other ways as well (e.g. improving efficiencies).  

Focusing purely on the financial perspective, all those ardent England supporters who run businesses would hopefully have progressed somewhat in the past 4 years.  It is perhaps worth putting a percentage figure on that – has business risen 10%, 20%, 30%, more%?   Perhaps it’s declined?   The Custwin business, for example, has seen an increase of over 300% (financially) since the last World Cup.

But it’s not just about financial improvement of course – businesses can advance in many other ways.  The key point here is that in a 4 year period, businesses should have advanced. 

In another 4 years time England should hopefully be at the next World Cup.  2014 seems a long way off and there’s so much potential for businesses in this country to advance within that time period.  In our day to day work we witness businesses failing from just one perspective (poor website and online marketing strategy, which is like a cancer eating away at the potential success of so many businesses), but there are many ways to create business efficiency and growth, the ‘web’ being just one (albeit an important one).

I’d encourage any business to look back to the last World Cup and assess how things have progressed (or not) since then.  If the view is that things should have been better then perhaps it’s worth focusing on what can be improved in order to put the business into a much stronger position in both the short term and the longer term – leading up to the next World Cup.  

Not every business initiative will work.  For example, many companies try to enhance the strength of their website but don’t gain the results they feel are deserved.  Much like Frank Lampard, the goal seemed to have been achieved but something just didn’t go right.  In the case of the England team, that negative experience probably had a detrimental impact on their performance in the rest of the game. 

But it would still have been a poor excuse. 

So what if the goal didn’t count?  Surely the efforts before that point should have been stronger, and surely the knock-back should have created more passion into turning that negative into positives (through more goals)?   Turning this to business,  the company that has spent time and money on strengthening their website may have felt they’ve reached their goal but if the strategy behind those website changes was flawed then the goal (gaining more business) wasn’t actually achieved.  The company then has the choice of thinking “well, that didn’t work – the web is rubbish” or thinking “we need to beat our competitors so let’s turn this around into a good result”.  Sadly, whatever business initiative hasn’t worked in the way desired (web or otherwise), it’s too easy to think that it just didn’t work and to take the focus off that subject when instead the failure should be analysed in more detail.

4 years is a long time in business and there is much opportunity to re-allocate the passion for England into a passion for business success in England.  So take a few minutes to see how successful your past 4 years have been and picture yourself sitting there, watching the first England match of the 2014 World Cup.   Will your business have progressed or not?  

When the time comes to take the England flags back down from the houses in 2014 you may or may not be pleased about how the team have performed.   But to be in the position where you can sit back and think “actually, it doesn’t matter – my business has advanced brilliantly while my competitors have fallen by the wayside”, is a pretty good consolation prize.

For some time, Google had been awkward about allowing advertisers to use the word ‘Botox’ in their adverts.  At that time advertisers could use keyword phrases that included the word ‘Botox’ but couldn’t actually use the word in their adverts (although some advertisers were allowed, for reasons that Google never explained).

But none of that matters now because the playing field is totally level – no advertisers at all are allowed to use the word ‘Botox’ in their campaigns.  The reasons for the ban on Botox appear to be related to the medical nature of the product, not helped much by legal cases related to its alleged misuse.

Historically, Google has always called the shots when it comes to what advertisers can and can’t do with the Adwords system and although Google is really annoying sometimes, it’s rare to see it completely ban a keyword phrase from being used by advertisers.

So where does this leave companies who are providing Botox-related services or products?  This depends on how much foresight they’ve had.  If they’ve got poor natural search engine positioning or are doing little else in the way of marketing, they’ll find themselves with a big hole in their enquiry levels.   A hole that could mean the end for some companies.

Let’s look at this from the viewpoint of the companies that provide Botox-related services and products.  Their options (online) are:

1. Go to the competition (principally Bing and Yahoo) and use their PPC systems to try and pull in traffic.  Unfortunately, the challenge here is that those systems have paltry levels of users compared to the mighty Google so although some clicks could be gained, they’re going to be minute in comparison to what was possible with Google Adwords.
2. Rapidly look at their organic SEO to see what can be done to enhance their Google positioning.  This will be extremely painful for those companies that have had their heads in the sand for so long, assuming that PPC will forever bring them business.  Those that had no concept of sales risk management will have a nasty wake-up call.
3. Get more into other forms of online visibility raising.  For example, banners on relevant websites, becoming more active in online forums, on Twitter, and email marketing directly to potential customers.

So, limping away from Google Adwords advertising, licking their wounds, what’s going to happen with these companies and how will that have a negative impact on Google?  Here are some thoughts:

1. Companies will get better at organic SEO and other online visibility activities, will get their levels of business back, and will tell all their contacts about how they don’t need to spend money on PPC advertising anymore.  That will raise the awareness of PPC alternatives with other companies/contacts, who may well decide that PPC represents too many eggs in one basket, they’ll start to look at other forms of online visibility, succeed at it, and that leads to less PPC revenues for the likes of Google.
2. Those companies that decide to use PPC on other systems such as Bing or Yahoo will become less loyal to Google, may even start using those search systems more, and so take eyeballs away from Google.
3. Some advertisers that have had their Google Adwords Botox visibility taken away by Google will fight against the system and may refuse to click on adverts themselves (on principle).
4. Those companies (such as Custwin) who use PPC as one of the methods to help clients gain more business, will start to advise clients to focus less on Google PPC (or PPC in general), which takes revenue away from people like Google.  Multiply that up by several companies similar to Custwin (that have had clients go through the same challenges), and you start to see dents appearing in the Google revenues.

At the end of it all, Google stopped the use of Botox in Adwords for reasons that they consider to be best.  What this proves though is that advertisers are very much at the mercy of Google decisions and so, as always, it’s vital for any company to have in place a good mix of marketing activities, online and offline, so that any such storms can be weathered.

The original phrase typed was ‘man and van Herne Bay’ but the search results were so poor that it was considered ‘man and van Canterbury’ (bigger area) would get better results.  How wrong can you be, and what a perfect way to demonstrate how backward many businesses are.

Having typed ‘man and van Canterbury’ into Google, there were many Sponsored Links results, plus the naturals.  As PPC experts, the first focus was on the Sponsored Links to see what was there and there wasn’t a single advert that referred to Canterbury – but several other more generic or ‘outside the area’ adverts displayed.   Lesson number 1 for all those advertisers: wake up – you’re wasting budget and probably haven’t a clue why!

Having seen how inept the average PPC advertiser is, it was the turn of the natural Google results to come up with the goods.  Top of the list was www.manandvankent.co.uk, which looked really promising until clicking on it brought up a message of ‘The site manandvankent.co.uk has been disabled. Please contact support’.   It’s always good to see that Google are providing a quality service allowing such rubbish to be top of the search results.

The next search result led to http://services.vivastreet.co.uk/removals+canterbury, which had a few small adverts so inadequate that they weren’t worth exploring further.

The following search result (http://www.helpiammoving.com/removal_companies/CT.php) didn’t have anything local enough, even though the page was supposed to be about Canterbury.

A few chuckles came from the site http://www.alternativetransportservices.co.uk/, which was a really cheesy, noisy website in geezer speak using phrases such as ‘Get cheap moving products & services for the geeza’s and the birds too..cheap cheap’.   OK for a laugh but utterly useless in the search for ‘man and van Canterbury’.

The search went on and on – poor result upon poor result ended up with the thought of “so how do all the genuine man and van companies in Canterbury actually get business?”.   This applies to many types of businesses in various areas.  It’s not hard to get good natural Google positioning for a business that’s geographically focused.   For a man and van business in the Canterbury area it would be a piece of cake to get plenty of enquiries purely on the basis of the surrounding search results being so poor and irrelevant – even if not in top Google position.  Equally, PPC adverts would also get great results because there’s no competition that refers to the Canterbury area.

This is just one example of why businesses fail and covers 3 areas of failure:

1. Those businesses that advertise with Google Adwords but do it inefficiently will find themselves with irrelevant clicks plus campaigns that gain impressions but few clicks.  That marketing investment will largely be down the drain.

2. Those businesses that appear in the natural Google results but aren’t switched on enough to realise that they could be cleaning up because of the poor competition around them.  How much effort does it take to type in the phrases that apply to your business and take a good look at what appears in the search results and then decide how to beat that?

3. Those businesses who aren’t at all focused on being visible within Google when people type phrases related to their type of business.  Those are the ones sitting around with time on their hands, accepting that the economy is down, or there’s too much competition out there, or whatever other excuse is convenient.

In all three cases above, businesses that fall into those categories deserve to wither and die.  While no-one expects companies to be experts in how to win business from their websites, it’s not rocket science to write down a few notes and work out where business isn’t coming from, and then to start investigating how to turn that round.

How many man and van services that cover the Canterbury area will be sitting around with no work in a weeks time?   There’ll be a few without a doubt but who knows who they are because they’re invisible to those of us who typically turn to the web to find such services when there’s no personal recommendation that comes up trumps.

One company emailed us saying that they were top of Google UK for the phrases ’search engine marketing’,  ’pay per click London’, and ’search engine optimisation London’.  That sounds good on the surface but such claims open companies up to closer scrutiny.

While we wouldn’t take it away that they are in fact top for those phrases, we would take issue with their claim of ‘Being number one for each in Google.co.uk demonstrates we are the best in search’.   So let’s look at this a bit deeper – two of the phrases include the word ‘London’ and the other is ’search engine marketing’ (which, although a good result to get, probably isn’t the first phrase that people think of when looking for search engine optimisation companies.  No, they’re more likely to be searching for something like ’search engine optimisation’.  If you type that phrase into Google UK a completely different company is top and the ‘best in search’ company doesn’t show up until page 2 of results.

So, top marks for being highest for ’search engine optimisation London’ but reduced marks for thinking that people wouldn’t think “so what about if we take ‘London’ off that phrase and see where you are?”.

Of course, there are so many phrases related to SEO that people may type into Google, and few companies would try and optimise for too many of them.  The point here though is that while it’s great to get top positioning in Google for certain types of phrases, to broadcast to people that you’re ‘best in search’ is quite daft when you’re not top for the most obvious phrase, which is ’search engine optimisation’.

In most business types companies/people can say they’re the best and sometimes it’s difficult to prove.  For those providing SEO and PPC services though, the evidence is there for all to see on page 1 of Google and it’s a brave company that makes claims about being the best if there are holes in their online visibility.

There are some things that never seem to go away.

Another thing that seems to have been lingering forever is the concept that Keywords Meta Tags are of any use at all in SEO.  So, just for the record, and for all those companies that have it in their heads that an important thing to do with SEO is to cram their code full of Keywords Meta Tags, there’s just one message …

The search engines take no notice of them at all.  None of those that are worth using anyway.  No, not even Google.   And if you don’t believe it, here it is from the horses mouth …

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jK7IPbnmvVU&feature=player_embedded

?????

We thought up this lottery analogy earlier this week when we visited a new client.  An established company, they went through a rough patch about 18 months ago which resulted in them needing to shed staff and since then their levels of business had declined further.  They are experts in what they do and had little concept of what could be gained through website enhancements and online advertising.

Their view was that the market was in a downturn (not a bad assumption) and that everyone was suffering the same.  They must have got to the end of each week thinking that their lucky numbers would never come up.  Subjects such as website strategy and online advertising were a mystery to them. 

Luckily (for them) we got involved and within just one short month they had the highest level of enquiries they’d had for at least the past couple of years.  The point of that sentence is not to blow our own trumpet but to note that the client company can now look forward to each Friday with the prospect of enquiry levels and orders being higher than each preceding week.  All from focusing on website strategy and online marketing.

While we’re always happy to see clients gaining plenty of business through what we’ve done, it never ceases to be surprising that so many companies are gradually declining and have nothing to look forward to at the end of each week.  Of course, it’s not necessarily just website strategy and promotion that can work for a company – it can be a multitude of other activities that make a difference.  But the point is that it’s easy to get into the ‘recession’ mentality and not dig deeper into the options available to create that Friday Jackpot feeling.

Or, to put that another way, it’s like knowing the lottery numbers for the upcoming draw but failing to go and buy a ticket.  Is British business suffering?  Certainly!  Is it avoidable?  In most cases, there is tons of business to be readily gained and the buyers are just waiting for potential suppliers to pop into their field of vision and impress them with their websites.

Let’s take two mythical companies – NoTime Ltd and Time2SEO Ltd.    Both companies sell widgets.   In the ‘real world’, where people have opinions about the quality of products and services provided, if the two companies went head-to-head, the company ‘NoTime Ltd’ would win every time.   They win because their widgets are better, their customer focus is superior, and people just generally love them.   However, they are still a small company that has no time to do anything except to focus on their core business.

On the other hand, Time2SEO Ltd provide a poor service, sub-standard products, and people don’t really like them much.  However, they either have the expertise, or money to spend on others with expertise, and the end result of that is plenty of quality backlinks to their website. 

So then Google comes along and although it will judge both websites in different ways, one of the factors it will consider will be the backlinks.  It sees minimal links into NoTime Ltd and several, seemingly quality, links into Time2SEO Ltd.  The end result:  Time2SEO Ltd getting stronger natural search engine positioning when people are searching online for a company that can supply widgets.

So, Time2SEO Ltd, as a sub-standard company, gain stronger search engine visiblity, pull in more enquiries and business, and continue to disappoint customers.  Meanwhile, NoTime Ltd have a poorer natural search engine visibility and don’t have the opportunity to provide a great service.   Let’s see the outcomes here:

1. NoTime Ltd doesn’t gain more business.
2. Time2SEO Ltd do gain more business.
3. The new clients of Time2SEO Ltd get a sub-standard level of product and service and so are disappointed.
4. In effect, search engines, through the way that they judge the popularity of websites, have contributed to client companies (of Time2SEO Ltd) becoming less efficient through finding Time2SEO Ltd in the search results (client companies buy widgets, the experience is negative, which makes the client companies less efficient than if they’d found a better supplier such as NoTime Ltd).

So what’s the answer here?  Is it for NoTime Ltd to themselves focus on getting quality backlinks to their website so that they can try and rise about Time2SEO Ltd?  No, because most companies in the real world don’t have the time or money to invest in sorting out backlinks, never mind all the other SEO stuff they need to do.   They also don’t believe that they should have to.

The answer, quite simply, is for the search engines to look at things afresh.  Allowing searchers to find companies in natural search results partially because of their backlinks strategy makes a mockery of search engines wanting to supply ‘quality’ results.  The quality is on the surface because many of those companies high in the natural search results aren’t actually the best companies to deal with – they’re just the best at raising their visibility.

It would take a brave search engine indeed to go down the route of introducing a true definition of ‘quality’ into their ranking criteria.   For there to be systems whereby the customers of companies grade the level of service or product they get, and that’s what counts as a factor in natural search engine positioning – now there’s something that would be beneficial to everyone (except the poor companies who need to up their game).   Such a system would have to incorporate ways to detect fraudulent gradings of companies of course but there are ways to achieve this.    Sadly, coming towards the end of 2009, there is still very little innovation coming out of the likes of Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft (when it comes to natural search engine positioning criteria), but the opportunities are there for the player who really wants to make natural search engine results genuinely of the best quality possible.