79% Of People Surveyed Say They Trust Online Reviews As Much As Personal Recommendations

Yes, you read that right. And we all know in the small business world how important referrals are. Here’s the full survey from Bright Local.

If you are someone that is reading this right now, run a small business, are spending money advertising on Google or other places on the internet, it is essential that you don’t have any negative reviews floating around. Litterally, by the definition of the word, essential. The last thing you probably want is an increased amount of people looking your company name up on Google because they saw your ad and have an interest in what you do and then find the bad review.

The survey also shows that an increased number of people in 2013 are looking at online reviews, but they’re reading less reviews when forming their opinion on the business. In other words, every small business should be concentrating the vast majority of their time on the review websites that are on the top half of the first page of Google when you search your business name. Those reviews in that real estate will make or break you.

It’s one thing to advertise your business. Get people to your website. Get phone calls from those people. But after that point comes the most important part where the potential customer decides if they’re going to give you their money or not. For a lot of people online reviews can be something that will help decide that.

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Yelp Sales Reps Blackmail & Scam Small Businesses April 1, 2013

Yelp Sales Reps Blackmail & Scam Small Businesses

Since 2006, some of Yelp’s sales people have been blackmailing, extorting and committing fraud on small businesses. And still to this day, Yelp does nothing about it and pretends the problem doesn’t exist.

The following is a very typical story that I’m sure a lot of small business owners are familiar with. One of my clients had 3 negative reviews published on their Yelp page (which one was left by a competitor over the weekend). Then they have 8 positive reviews that are “filtered”, meaning they’re hidden. And on a pretty regular basis, my client will get calls from Yelp sales reps. Just today, he got a call from a Yelp sales person that said if my client pays for Yelp advertising he could “probably help with unhiding the positive reviews”.

Now, Yelp isn’t the only company that has sales reps that will say anything and do anything to make a sale. Unfortunately in this case, these Yelp employees have way more leverage than the typical sales person.

So can Yelp employees actually decide which reviews get filtered and hidden? The answer is no, they have no access whatsoever. They can’t control which reviews get filtered no more than you or me. So when they say that they can, they’re not being honest. All you’ll get is Yelp advertising. So the Yelp sales reps are blackmailing and scamming small businesses into paying for something they can’t deliver.

But it gets worse. I’ve seen other cases where some Yelp employees will actually submit negative reviews themselves onto a small business’ Yelp page. Then call them up saying if they pay for Yelp advertising, they can somehow get the positive review removed. And then they simply delete the negative review they created themselves after the small business puts their deposit in for Yelp advertising.

And of course Yelp’s management denies any knowledge that their sales people are doing any of this. And they can deny all they want. But it doesn’t change the fact that if you were hired on at Yelp to sell their advertising, it would be very easy to lie to small business owners saying you can remove their bad reviews if you sign up. And it would very easy to post negative reviews yourself and only remove them if the small business owner pays.

It’s inexcusable that Yelp has not done anything about this problem. These bad reviews damage businesses severely and can sometimes hurt word of mouth business and referrals. But they just bury their heads in the sand like the problem doesn’t exist. Yet, countless small business owners all across the country have almost identical stories of what people from Yelp say to them.

I normally don’t pitch our services at Customwave on my blog posts, but if you’re one of those small business owners that had bad reviews on Yelp and are interested in getting help, you can contact me at chris@customwave.net or call me at the Customwave office at (877) 638-0827.

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The True Impact Of What Reviews Can Do For Small Business

I just read a report from Nielsen saying that online reviews by both professional critics and consumers is more trusted than any other form of internet advertising.

For more evidence on why online reviews are important, I wrote a piece back in June of 2011 on Pew Research’s discovery that 58% of people who have never done business with you before will Google your company name to see if there’s any red flags out there before pulling the trigger and deciding to give you their money.

So what’s my main point? If you’re spending money marketing your business online, advertising your company name and phone # to people who have never heard about you before, they’re going to be very likely to go to Google and type in your company name. And if you have good reviews they’ll be more likely to do business. But if there are bad reviews out there, they’re going to be a lot, a lot, a lot less likely to do business.

For most small businesses nowadays, they don’t invest in reputation management and make an effort to get their customers to leave positive reviews because most of those companies don’t have any reviews out in circulation. 99% of the people that call me looking for help, it’s because they have a negative review, they feel pain, now they want to do something about it.

I know money is tight for everyone but if you’re already spending money online to advertise your business, it’s going to suck for you if you’re advertising to people that you’re a company that has bad reviews. That’s all I’m saying.

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Where Should Your Internet Marketing Dollars Go Right Now?

I wanted to make a quick summary on what internet marketing techniques are perfect to invest in right now. Which ones are too experimental and would be better to invest in the future. And which marketing techniques you’ve missed the boat on and you’re too late.

It’s Too Late

-SEO: People had gangbuster success with SEO in the 2000’s. If you got in early, you not only got loads of free website traffic that generated sales leads, but you also got very valuable real estate on the 1st page of Google. In 2013, the people that are currently on the 1st page of Google usually don’t go anywhere. So if you want to crack the 1st page for keywords that are very competitive, maybe after a lot of hard work, maybe you can reach the 1st page after a year or so. Maybe. No guarantees. To spend a bunch of money in SEO these days with the hope of getting 2005-like results is like spending money on going to California because you think the gold rush is still going on.

-Shopping Carts: For small businesses that have shopping carts, they live and die off organic, seo traffic. They can’t afford to pay what large companies pay per click because the large company will almost always have a higher conversion rate. Why? It will take a large company less clicks to produce a sale on average because consumers are already familiar and will be more likely to trust the big company than some small company they’ve never heard of before. And because brand new SEO campaigns are almost impossible to be successful, the ship has sailed on shopping carts. The only exception would be if you’ve found a niche market and there’s no competition. Then the possibility for seo success and shopping cart success is out there.

Maybe Later

-Social Media: The past 5 years have shown that Facebook doesn’t drive up referral and word of mouth business. People just don’t do it. They use Facebook and other social media sites to socialize. Paying for clicks on Facebook is no different than any other form of display advertising, it’s just more expensive. If you’re a small business, you’re way better off letting someone else figure out the social media puzzle.

-Display Advertising: It’s on the rise and looks more appealing, but affiliate networks like Google need to do a better job localizing and properly segmenting the traffic. The conversion rates from clicks to sales leads is still ridiculously low because the location net is too wide and the segmenting isn’t specific enough. But I think Google will eventually get to where they need to be and that display will be a viable form of internet marketing by maybe 2015.

Internet Radio Advertising: I almost put this in the do it now category, but here at Customwave, we’re probably going to wait another year before completely jumping in and recommending it to clients. Too experimental right now, but it definitely has a future. I wrote a separate blog on it here.

 

Do It Now

-Pay Per Click: This is our bread and butter at Customwave. If you know what you’re doing, it works like gangbusters! You should have to know how to make sure the clicks you’re paying for convert into calls.

-Reputation Management: Lots of demand, not enough competent supply. Business owners are starting to pick up on the importance of their reputation online and it’s very do-able to help people with it.

-Email Marketing: An old school approach that still works as long as the people that are receiving your emails are familiar with you and interested in what you’re selling.

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June 1, 2011

Your Leads Are Worthless Without Doing The Following

So, for local small businesses, it’s all about getting phone calls, right? Usually. Most of the time. But not always. Generating sales leads is phenomenal. It’s absolutely a good thing. But what happens if these calls don’t translate into the client increasing their sales? The answer: the calls are worthless. The client looks for other marketing options. So how can you make it likely your leads will be of good quality?

Your Online Reputation Is Most Important

Almost every client I talk to, I try and make them aware of the report put out by Pew Research last September. The big headline is that 58% of Americans say that before they purchase products or a service, they do online research. In other words, they go to Google and type in your client’s company name. And you better hope that what shows up on the first page reflects the client in a good or neutral way. What good is getting somebody phone calls, if the potential customer googles your client and gets scared off by negative comments?

This is why every company doing internet marketing needs to be doing reputation management. Removing negative stuff from the first page of Google when someone types in your client’s name takes just as much time to get them ranked for competitive keywords organically. Generally speaking, it’s nice when almost all the results that show up on the first page for the company name are websites where you can control the content. This insures the client won’t lose business if the website visitor does a little digging.

(Shameless plug: For anyone interested in help with their reputation management, check out www.customwave.net)

Why You Want To Be Seen As A Guru

I got to find time to write a blog post on how to really use Facebook for small businesses. It’s really misunderstood. But relating to this topic, it’s important to put out an image that you’re an authority in your industry. Especially locally. Similar to what i was mention with reputation management, people will do online research on your company. And if you post regularly on Facebook, or your blog, or other websites, most people will percieve you to be an expert. Obviously, if someone who calls you or is considering calling you is on the fence, this is the type of thing that can tip people in your favor. How many of your client’s competitors have an online image of being an authority? Not many.

This is, in my opinion, the #1 benefit of social networks and blogging. It’s not something you can track or quantify, but definitely something that’s important to focus on. If you can take a few calls a month from people who ordinarily wouldn’t have done business with you, but do because of your guru-ness, it absolutely rewards your effort.

Source Traffic and Targeting

Before the phone call happens, before the website visitor reaches the client’s website, the website visitors originates from some place. You need to make sure that that some place is a traffic source that converts. Google would be an obvious source of good quality, thus explaining why so many internet marketers use it.

But for you others who use affiliate networks, social networks, and other random sources, you need to be able to measure the conversion. In other words, if the client wants sales, you need to track whether or not source A’s traffic is converting into sales. Without that knowledge, you’ll keep spending money on traffic that could be worthless to your client for all you know. I know, this sounds obvious, but you’d be amazed by how many people don’t test and measure like this. It’s called laziness ; )

For people who are doing pay per click, your keyword targeting needs to be right on. It’s critical to test and figure out which keywords are generating the client’s goals and which aren’t. Without knowing this, you’re going to flushing perfectly good money down the toilet.

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April 26, 2011

The “Scam” Is Back

File this next topic under subjects that people don’t care too much about until it actually happens to them. But I’ll continue to say that online reputation management should be a company’s #1 priority when it comes to internet marketing. Offline reputation seems pretty important to people, and i would venture to say that online reputations are more important because they’re out there for everyone to see.

Now, that being said, here’s what i mean by the headline. Google, recently in the last year or so, has put out something called Google Suggest. You type in a keyword into Google and then there will be a drop down box with suggestions on how to finish your search.  It’s a feature that’s been received fairly well, but there’s also some unfortunate side effects. As you may or may not know, there are people out on the internet (unhappy customers, competitors, losers with no life) who will write negative stuff about some companies. For instance, calling an innocent small business a “scam”.

Sometimes these people write lots of negative stuff calling a small business a “scam”. Now, when  Google sees a lot of content on the internet calling a business a “scam”, the word “scam” will actually pop up in Google Suggest.

Thankfully a few weeks ago Google declared that the word “scam” has been blacklisted for the Google Suggest, but a few days ago i saw a story from Andrew Goodman reporting that a couple of his clients are suffering from the problem again. Hopefully Google is able to completely fix the problem.

One last thing to be on the look out for is a continuation of the old problem. Google might be taking care of the word “scam”, but what if there’s a whole bunch of negative content referring to your small business as “rude” or “con-artist” or worse.

I think the main solution is to always be on top of your online reputation. To be aware of any negative content that’s about your company name or website address. That way, you can do something about it.

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February 28, 2011

It’s Too Easy To Damage Reputations Online

It’s getting too easy to damage someone’s reputation online. For an example of what i’m talking about, check out this story of a woman scorned serving a cold dish of revenge to her ex.

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