Reputation Management for Small Businesses
At one point, the company website was the stopping point for consumers interested in a specific business. They would type in a business’ name or a specific product carried into a search engine, and it was the only platform that your company could be viewed. Read more
Top 4 Ways to SEO & Link Build with Your PR
As PR professionals, there are a number of activities which we have a heavy hand in that affect the SEO of a website OR the SEO of an organization (brand) via the content that is distributed online in their name.
If your content includes a link to your site and it gets syndicated or picked up by another publisher it will (hopefully) also contain your link which is a popular link building tactic. SEO is basically a set of methodologies that make it easier for search engines to find, categorize, index and ultimately rank web content. One popular SEO tactic is to build links to your site using the distribution of relevant content that links back to you site with the desired anchor text.
Many of your PR efforts can benefit from the integration of some simple search engine optimization tactics and a basic understanding of how search engines work. Most PR professionals create press releases, letters to the editor, corporate blog posts, white papers, compelling web copy, newsletters, and journalistic interviews for their clients: all of which are published online. It’s important to remember that to get the most bang out of these efforts you must look them over with SEO and link building principles in mind to make sure that search engines will find, index, categorize and RANK them well.
That beings said, let’s go over the top 4 simple things that you can do to your PR copy before it goes out the door which will help search engines find your content easier:
Keywords, keywords, keywords!
Remember that keyword phrases are the core of search engine optimization. Make sure you understand what keywords the client wants to focus on. It can often be as simple as asking the client what related keywords they use for PPC or SEO purposes and making sure that they are incorporated in the copy.
What Search Engines See
Keep in mind the search engine is just a robot and simply can’t “see” images, videos or slideshows. Don’t let this deter you from adding these things to your content. Instead, just keep it in mind and know that search engines CAN see alt tags and descriptions that you associated with your video, image or other supporting material.
Onsite SEO
Again, search engines are limited by the fact that they are just programs so understanding the basics of onsite SEO of a page can be really helpful in this process. The most important places to put keyword phrases are: title, summary/description, first paragraph, and last paragraph, no matter what type of content you are composing.
Hyperlinks and Anchor Text
This might seem very elementary, but don’t overlook the fact that search engines see hyperlinks and anchor text used within content as a sort of recommendation for the site they are directing the reader to. If you use a link in the copy, do your best to use an appropriate anchor text with the hyperlink instead of saying something like “click here” or just listing the website address.
Simple Changes – Big Results
Integrating these simple steps into your public relations writing practices can profoundly affect the results of your efforts. After all, the fundamental benefits of optimizing news content makes it easier for journalists researching stories to find yours, expands the organization’s brand and online footprint, contributes to a proactive search result reputation, as well as assists in fueling the sales pipeline.
After all, we consider the target audience first and foremost when we are writing. In this case, if your content will be distributed online take the time to consider the search engines. Search engines are one of the prominent audience members, so paying attention to link building and keeping this in mind will put you well on your way.
About the Author: Elise Redlin-Cook (AKA @redlincook) is the Content Strategist at Vertical Measures, an internet marketing company in sunny Arizona providing services ranging from link building services, to social media marketing, content development, and advanced SEO. She’s fully immersed herself into the world of content and is loving it!
Photo Credit: Mykl Roventine
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Do You Know How Your Customers Secretly Perceive You Online?
Managing your reputation is not always easy. You work really hard to build a respectable brand and then someone comes in and tries to tear it down. Luckily for you though, here are some great online reputation management tips and tools that can help you stay on top of the game.
Think Domain
The first thing you have to do is buy domain names. Yes, multiple ones. Buy .com, .org, .net, and almost every other domain extension associated with your brand so that no one else can use it against you. If you use an exact match keyword domain name, then it may be hard to get the .net and .org versions, which is fine. But if you are a VA mortgage lender, you best be sure that you own every exact match domain name for your brand. And thanks to Google suggest, things like ‘reviews’, ‘sucks’, and ‘scam’ along with your brand keyword are a lot more prevalent, so buying domains with these keywords in them (ex. brandsucks.com) can help manage your reputation.
Choose Your Tool and Start Monitoring
My favorite tool for monitoring your brand on the web and blogosphere by far is Google Alerts. It’s simple, free, and sent straight to your email. You can have it set up to send an email once-a-week, once-a-day, or whenever something comes up. And since most people use Google to find businesses online, knowing what Google is keeping track of is very important. Set up a Google alert for your brand name and you can even use it to keep track of other keywords (and competitors if you really want).
Content Builds Brands
The biggest thing you can do is be a content creator. The real-time web is now in the search engine results. And the pervasiveness of Facebook and Twitter mean that people will seek you out on these platforms for good or bad. You must participate in them. It would be foolish not to. Set up an account (personal and/or company) and start engaging and creating content. Also, make sure to have a blog that is consistently being updated. Use it to post news, industry trends or whatever fits for your company/brand. This will become valuable if you ever need to respond to a situation.
Manage Your Social Web
Use a program such as HootSuite that allows you to manage all three social networks with one easy to use interface. It allows you to schedule tweets, status updates, and even integrates with Ping.fm. Plus, by keeping your search column open, you can monitor your brand at all times allowing prompt response. And you can post to your WordPress blog through the application. Having an application like this can greatly increase your productivity regarding online reputation management. If you don’t like HootSuite, try CoTweet or something similar but managing a company’s social media platforms cannot be done on twitter.com itself.
Proactive Not Passive
By actively managing your reputation online now, it will make it a lot easier when something bad actually does happen and you need to do damage control, so it’s good to be proactive and not passive about this. If you have a voice, you’re much better positioned against attacks, and will gain credence with the online generation.
About the Author: Kevin Kaiser is a entrepreneur who deals with online marketing and reputation management for start-ups he’s involved in and can be found writing at Startup Biz Blog.
Photo Credit: nicasaurusrex
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Netbiz Case Study: The Importance of Online Reputation Management
It’s not often you find a business willing to admit to mistakes and candidly share what they learned from them – but that’s exactly what we have here today.
Cory Huff, of Netbiz, shares what Netbiz learned when it comes to online reputation management and listening to the online conversation.
Netbiz is also giving away $1000 to one lucky reader – see details at the end of the article.
The Internet provides an open forum for consumer opinions. The power of social network sharing combined with search engines makes it impossible to hide a company’s mistakes or customer dissatisfaction.
Listening is Crucial
This is what we experienced at Netbiz. While we are proud to say that we’ve been in business since 2002 and have over 12,000 small business clients, we came to realize that there was a storm brewing online and it caught us blindsided. We weren’t listening and it came back to bite us.
Netbiz was being talked about on blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social networks and we didn’t pay enough attention to know the full extent of the conversation. Even though a great deal of what was being said was distorted or wrong, there was also truth to what was being said.
Changes for the Better
We have made some major changes recently at Netbiz and as part of that we created a plan to become more open and engaged with the small business community. Incidentally, the plan we created is taken, in part, from the story of what happened to Dell Computers. They had a similar customer service problem and have undertaken a major effort to clean up their reputation online (see Ideastorm.com). Here’s what we’re doing in order to become engaged with our clients online.
Listening. We are using existing free tools as well as some paid ones to monitor the discussion of our company’s brand online.
- You can use Google Alerts and TweetBeep (Tweetbeep.com to find mentions of your brand for free.
- Trackur by Andy Beal is a good way to filter results if you find too much information related to your brand.
- We have created accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media sites to hear what’s being said.
Engaging. Every company has dissatisfied customers. When complaints happens on the Internet we can approach the customer and see if there’s anything we can do to make it right.
- In addition, we are partnering with high profile bloggers, like SmallBizBee.com, to see what our customers, present and future, are really looking for in a Search Engine Marketing Company focused on small business.
Building a Community. This is something that remains to be seen. We love our company and think that our people do a good job helping our clients. The true test of this, is creating an environment that will engage our satisfied and unsatisfied clients, as well as our potential clients who are wondering who we really are.
Building a blog. We’ve launched the Netbiz Blog and there we will provide tons of useful information to our clients on how to set up effective internet marketing campaigns. It will also be a forum for discussion of both our performance and our clients’ needs.
- Giving back. We’re getting ready to launch a new contest where small businesses can earn a huge package of free Search Engine Marketing services. Our hope is that by giving back to the small business community, they will see that we are sincere in our desire to help and be willing to use that as a starting point for an ongoing discussion about the market.
- We have been doing charitable work from the very beginning but have always been hesitant to talk about it publicly. We’ll be sharing openly some of the work that we are doing for groups like Open Arms International and other organizations.
Having fun. We certainly recognize that the day of the corporate wall of silence is past. We are slowly changing as an organization. We’re becoming more relaxed in our interactions with our clients. We’re trying a little more to let people in and see who we are. We’re not trying so much to force a message as to open up our organization and let people see who we are. We hope that they like what they see.
I’m really curious to read about all of your experiences in the SmallBizBee Community. Have any of you had to deal with this kind of situation? Let us know in the comments below.
Win $1000 From Netbiz!
From now until September 21st, you have an opportunity to win 2 months worth of free search engine placement on Google (valued at $1000)!
Here’s how you can enter to win:
* Follow @Ask_Netbiz on Twitter and ask us a question about small business internet marketing. We’ll answer your question and enter you in our drawing.
* Every time you Re-Tweet our contest, we’ll give you another entry in our drawing.
* Become a fan of Ask Netbiz on Facebook and ask us a small business internet marketing question there. We’ll answer your question and enter you in our drawing.
It’s that simple. Ask a question, get an answer, and as a bonus, we will give one lucky business owner two month’s worth of Search Engine Placement at no cost to you!
About the Author
Cory Huff is the Social Media Specialist at NetBiz.com, a search engine marketing firm based in Portland, Oregon. He has worked in Social Media since 2003. Cory is always looking for partners to collaborate with. If you are interested, you can email him at chuff [at] Netbiz.com.
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