Search Engine Branding

People are searching for what you have to offer in record numbers. Regardless of who you are or what you offer, someone is looking for it. As a complimentary service, we will evaluate how your website shows up and offer you a short consultation on the phone. You can ultimately generate all these numbers by yourself, using a wild variety of tools and services online- but we will tell you what the numbers mean to your business. This FREE consultation will be to you within 3 business days and include information on our educational and strategic services.

Our consultation will include information on:

• Positions
• Page Rank
• Pages being indexed by Google
• Search terms used in your industry
• Search terms being used by online competitors
• Pointers to educational articles (both here and elsewhere)

As social media consultants, our knowledge base is literally built upon the shoulders of giants. Our office is the world, which is a pretty big conversation. We believe that a fundamental aspect of our service is to share our knowledge. We will always be experts, and if you want to do some of the work yourself great! If not, we are always happy to take over the driving for your promotional campaign.

Contact us today- simply request a free consultation and we will be happy to educate you!

Your professional image, whether that of your personal information as a person or that of your company’s information- is critical to how your business will evolve in the future. Many companies and professionals have allowed themselves to fall prey to losing control of their own identity online. This can occur through simple things such as news coverage, online reviews of your performance, your own interaction within portals and communities, and many other situations.

Controlling your destiny is not an impossible task however. In fact, it is usually very straight-forward and should be considered an insurance policy for your future. Having a plan in action today will help protect you against future issues, and forward thinking now will keep an effective online presence affordable (if not free!)

If you wait for your online brand to fall prey to detrimental problems in the future, it is comparable to letting your house burn to the ground before you inquire about insurance to cover your loss. If a bad occurrence has happened already, waiting silently expecting the problem to go away will only ensure that it never does.

The truth is simple math. Regardless of how perfectly your business runs, it is only a matter of time before a disgruntled consumer, client, or past employee comes into existence. While you may have hundreds or even thousands of happy people dealing with you professionally, the one squeaky wheel may cause your finely tuned machine to come to a grinding halt.

“In the real world, one consumer with a bad experience may affect twenty prospects. In the online world, one bad experience may spread to fifty thousand.”

With the way the web works today, many community sites and consumer portals have extremely powerful presence and influence online. Sites like Facebook and Linkedin have millions of users, industry sites are filling into niche marketplaces, and they all have a combined footprint in search results that dwarfs your name on a thousand-fold scale.

If you do a search for “your name” or “company name” what comes up? Hopefully only good things. If something negative shows up in the first page of results you can painfully know that IT IS affecting your business. Depending on your industry and market, as high as 85% of the people doing business with you have looked at the search results for your information. (Example: In 2006, 77% of purchases for consumer electronics were first researched online.)

Things that may create negative search results:

• Hostile customers
• Disgruntled employees
• Competitors
• Idealistic rivals
• Court rulings
• Biased critics
• Negative publicity
• Inflammatory communities

Some of the more common problem sites:

• Wikipedia.org
• Amazon.com
• Yelp.com
• RipOffReport.com
• Complaints.com
• ConsumerAffairs.com
• TheSqueakyWheel.com
• ConsumerwWebWatch.org
• Bloggers- many bloggers have enough presence to cause significant impact.

The end result of this commentary can have a near instant result on your bottom line, or can linger into a decrease of your brand and reputation over months of exposure.

Most professionals and companies don’t have any strategies in place to protect or manage their “online brand”, and even worse is that a significant number do not realize they may (or may not) have a problem today.

The purpose of search engine and social media branding is to have a proactive strategy: creating positive information about your brand online and leveraging current information, to displace negative reviews and push results down in search engines or social communities.

It isn’t to say these things do not exist. In fact, they always will. A good strategy just needs to know when and where it occurs, and move the limelight and press coverage to more beneficial information.

EXAMPLES OF ONLINE BRANDING ISSUES FOR COMPANIES

Fisher-Price + Lead Paint = Bad Online PR

Silicon Valley Watcher - Wells Fargo Still Ignores the Conversation

Pacesetter Windows- As of early May, Ken and Latrice Innes, in Redding, Calif., had told some 318,082 visitors to their Web site, PacesetterSucks.com, about their less-than-satisfactory experience with the Omaha-based Pacesetter Corp.

EXAMPLES OF ONLINE BRANDING ISSUES FOR PROFESSIONALS

Wired Magazine - The See-Through CEO - Jason Goldberg (X-CEO of Jobster) and Glenn Kelman (CEO of Redfin) get the review from sharing themselves online.

123 Articles on the Subject

10 Steps of Online Branding and Reputation Control

If you read an interesting online reputation and branding situation, let us know by commenting below.

Professional communicators have many names for it: Brand Management, Brand Preservation, Reputation Control, Public Relations, Identity Messaging. It all comes down to having a unified presence for your professional image. When people search online, they begin with the initial step of reviewing information about the “who, what, where” of your company and staff. The decision to do business with you may come down to a brutal but simple “thumbs up, or thumbs down”

This situation can be boiled down to one or two very simple questions: Do you remember a professional situation where you found out through a friend of a friend that some nasty rumor was floating around? What about the time you found out six months afterwards - or the time it seemed like everyone but you knew the rumor?

While the online world is transforming business, it is also transforming the way potential customers, employers, employees, and mainstream media is finding out information about your business. The blogosphere has begun transforming search engines into conversations about your reputation.

Many businesses understand the value of showing up for a beneficial keyword such as “New York Real Estate,” but what happens when your business shows up for “Real Estate Fraud” because an unsatisfied client or unscrupulous competitor managed to get a story to show up under searches for your company name?

When such reputation nightmares happen, companies face the challenge of removing those negative results off the first few pages of the search engines or with getting information out there that provides a balanced dose of positive articles. Unfortunately it is often impossible to get a negative article removed from search engine results, but it is possible to make sure that it is hard to get information to show up instead.

Here are ten recommendations for establishing a healthy presence and reputation on the search engines.

1. Make sure your own Web site shows up.

This may sound like a no-brainer, but unfortunately I’ve seen several $25k sites that don’t even show up in the search engines for the proper name of the business or the executive team. Do not trust your Web designer when they say your Web site shows up. Check yourself. Try doing a search for your company name and brand, along with the personal names and brands of the people on your team.

2. Buy the domains that are important to your business.

When you created your site, www.yourbusiness.com sounded great. How about your personal name www.firstnamelastname.com? How about your streetaddress.com? Domains cost less than $10 a year each, so spending an extra $20 to $100 dollars a year could be a very worthwhile investment if you plan on having control of your brand. If properly setup all those extra domains provide a sure-fire way to have your main business site show up on a variety of names that are important to you.

3. Start a blog.

You have www.yourbusiness.com, but how about buying www.yourhometownrealestate.com as a blog? You can use popular blogging software such as www.wordpress.org to create an almost free blog attached to your current Web site. By providing fresh and weekly content to the blog, the articles in it will show up on various long-tail keyword phrases for your company name. After a few months you will have multiple results whenever someone searches for your company.

4. Use sub-domains.

If you really do not want to budget for buying individual domains, try sub-domains on your primary domain. Most hosting services allow you to have multiple free sub-domains such as www.careers.yourbusiness.com. Sub-domains are treated as individual sites in the eyes of the search engines and have almost as much power as the primary domain. By adding a few pages of information to sub-domains such as biography, careers, location, and team, you can add dozens of results for searches to find your information.

5. Use social media accounts on other sites.

There are literally dozens of social media sites out there that can be used to create free profiles that show up for your company name. Linkedin.com, RISMedia.com, and RealTownBlogs.com offer free profiles that show up in the search engines. When you are given the choice of creating a profile name or adding a title to the account, think carefully about the exact phrase you want to be found under and try to utilize your company’s most common name.

6. Grow a social media site.

Search engines love constantly growing and evolving information. By starting your own forum or social media community, you can provide the search engines with new pages of information under your company name every time one of your users creates a new page or comment on your social media system.

7. Check out pay-per-click ads.

While I almost never endorse paying for pay-per-click advertising, you may find someone has decided to spend the $1 a click to advertise why they hate you on your own name or for the terms that drive business to you. There are ways of requesting this advertising cease by contacting the search engine, and if you spot something on your own name make sure you click it once or twice… you’ll find some quick comfort knowing you just cost the person a few dollars.

8. Use free directory profiles.

There are literally hundreds of free directories online. Google, Yahoo, and Superpages are all examples of sites with free directory profiles. In addition to having the benefit of being found by the search engines, having profiles on these directories is a way of being found by fairly substantial user communities. After creating the profiles, be ready for the follow-up sales call looking to offer you a lot of fairly useless advertising enhancements.

9. Volunteer your information and expertise on other sites.

The blogging world is always looking for fresh information. If you have a recent article or viewpoint to share, contact a local blogger or newspaper. Good information is always newsworthy, and it is usually fairly easy to get information published about a local community event you are sponsoring.

10. Use video.

You may be saying “but I don’t have a $5k budget to waste on fancy video.” Don’t listen to your budget! It doesn’t take a huge budget to put on a business suit and find a decent backdrop to take a quick thirty second video of your office. Even a casual video on YouTube under your company name is a hundred times better than an aggressive attack from an opinionated critic.

There are hundreds of other ways that can be tied together into a solid foundation for your business reputation and brand. Depending on the goals of your business, the above points can be integrated into search engine marketing plans to drive SEO results, to aid specific business projects, coordinate affiliated business partners, or even to establish your own business community. Taking a few minutes to examine and detail your current situation and the goals of your brand is essential to safe-guarding a company’s future. Understanding what people find when they search for your company name and how they interact with that information is critical to making sure that searchers find the information you want them to.

Other sites and authors with useful articles on Reputation and Brand Articles

The Definitive Guide to Online Reputation Management
Future of Online PR and Reputation Management
10 Ways to “Own Yourself” Online

Some other pertinent 123 articles
Social Media Conquesting
Leveraging Conversations with Social Media

Our team spends a lot of time on the net looking for easy to use and self-explanatory tools for our readers. If you are working on search engine optimization, one of those FREE tools is LinkVendor.

LinkVendor offers a very robust series of different metrics about a site.

It checks for Wikipedia entires, DMOZ (large open web directory), Alexa, Google PageRank, Keyword Position, etc, etc, etc. It has roughly twenty tools presented on a nice clean page, which product fairly understandable results that you can take action on.

These tools are not just for your site. When you are expanding your online promotional efforts- keep a list of five to ten competitive or like-minded sites. Compare the numbers and information on those sites that can help you identify where relevant traffic and prospects are. You will usually find that competitors have spent thousands of dollars gathering competitive intelligence about your marketplace and that information is freely available on the web. When you become rich and successful with your own project, you can send them a thank you note for providing all that wonderful information.

There is a lot to be said about the power of branding your company online, but also understanding how that branding is perceived and accepted. Search engines are one of the key methods that you are found online, yet what kind of information can you find about a business with online search engine knowledge? continue