Las Vegas Web Design Blog | The Web Squad

Google recently released their new product, Google Buzz.  Buzz can be compared to other social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.  Here is a video that shows what Buzz is capable of doing.

So what does this mean from a search and marketing perspective for businesses?  Well, most will treat it similar to Facebook and Twitter where they will be sending out business information and updates to consumers.  They will be able to follow their customers and competitors alike, just like in other social media sites.

But it can open up other possibilities that those other sites might not be capable of doing.  The quickness of responses from other people in your network would be much higher than that of Facebook, even though they are both in real time.   Google Buzz is based on Gmail, and if people get involved with Buzz on the business side, they would never leave their email all day, considering that anything posted on Buzz would show up in your inbox if it is important.  Facebook is more of a check and leave type social media.  People there go on every once in a while to check updates, etc, and then leave.

On the search side of things, Buzz may offer more than what can be shown on other media sites.  Buzz updates could be integrated with social search, which can be very important for the business uses of social media.  When a customer does a Google search, and they are connected to a business that is part of their social circle, anything relevant from the business will be shown up near the top of their search results.

It would be interesting to see if this feature would extend outside the first degree of contacts in the customer’s social circle.  For example, if a customer’s friend did the same search, would they see the same results due to the business being two degrees of separation away?  This could open up many possibilities and would make connections in Buzz that much more important for businesses.

Online Reputation Management (ORM), is made up of three different disciplines; Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), and Reputation Management (RM). Each of these are separate in the fact that they can be done independently and can have different focus levels, but are equally important when you are trying to achieve maximum visibility on the web. Each is also very different in how they affect your ranking in Google, not Page Rank; physical rank in the search engine results.

SEO: The overrated discipline

Ask anybody in the industry how to rank high in Google, they will tell you SEO and give you their own theory of the best way to do it. Although these theories and strategies may be very viable and proven, most of them are actually talking about ORM to some extent. SEO is purely based on making it easier on Google to find your website by building backlinks from various places, also known as off-site optimization, and making your website eas

Search Engine Optimization

ier for Google to read and index, or on-site optimization. Implementing both on-site and off-site optimization mainly affects your PageRank with Google. Although PageRank is important when trying to rank high in the search engine results, it is not the only deciding factor of who ranks where. High PageRank has to do largely with the number of incoming and outgoing links as well as relevancy of content. There are also a number of heavily researched and proven theories that serve as a good guidebook.

PageRank is not the only deciding factor for the search engine rankings. Google, and other search engines, are relying heavily on relevancy to the specific keyword or topic as well, even more so than PageRank. Too many people are obsessing over PageRank and giving it too much priority. The real PageRank of a website is only released to the public only a few times a year via the Google toolbar, so unless it was updated that month, it is probably not accurate. More proof that PageRank is not that important is in the search engine results themselves. There are countless examples where a website with a PageRank of 2 will beat out a site with a PageRank of 5.

Learn more about Search Engine Optimization

RM: The underused discipline

RM is where the relevance part comes in. This can include everything from writing blogs and articles, to responding to bad reviews of disgruntled customers. The object of RM is to become the best source, or the go to business, for information and services for your niche. This is not only necessary for the search engines, but for potential customers as well. If people see that you have the best

Reputation Managment

ratings in your area for a specific service, they are more likely to go to you for that service. Also, if they see that you are very knowledgeable in your line of work based on the articles or blogs that your write, they will again come to you with questions and hopefully become a customer. There is a bit of SEO involved with RM in the aspect that it is ideal to include back links in your articles to your site, or other sites that link to you (i.e. article on third-party site links to blog or other article which links to your site).

As for responding to bad reviews, that is managing your rating on sites that allow customers to review various businesses. People are more likely to write a bad review out of anger or frustration than a good review if you do a good job. Also, bad reviews can stick around for a long time, even years, and be very detrimental. The object is to try to rectify the situation by responding to the bad review quickly by commenting on their review, and resolving the situation. After you correct the situation, ask the customer if they will retract the review, or at least update it saying that the problem was solved.

5 Star Review

Simultaneously, reach out to your existing customer base and request reviews. Ask for their testimonial input. At the least, ask how their products and or services are serving them. You may learn a few things in your conversation that can lead to a positive review.

Having no reviews can be just as bad as having a bad one because it looks like you don’t do much business. Ask your customers to write about their experience on the web so that you can get a good rating, and you know how your customers feel about your business. Having a few testimonials on your website is great as well. Having a lot of good reviews will help you rank high in Google maps too, which can be just as good as being on the first page.

SEM: Online advertising

SEM includes Pay-Per-Click (PPC), paid advertisements like banners, and you can even go as far as paid directory inclusions and paid backlinks. In short, SEM can be anything that you pay for to increase your websites visibility. The common form of SEM is PPC, which appears to the right of the organic search engine results. This type of advertising is different from traditional advertising in the sense that you only pay for it when people actually click on your ad, hence the name PPC. The price of each click is determined by how much traffic the particular search term receives, how many competitors there are for that search term, and how much they are willing to pay for a click. This means that you can end up paying anywhere from $0.25-$10.00 for a single click. This makes it hard to have any real marketing budget, but Google provides tools through Adwords that help make this a little bit easier. Other types of SEM can be ad banners that are placed on a website at the webmasters digression, and paid directory inclusions.

There is another side to SEM called Adsence, which is basically hosting Google PPC ads on your website. This sounds a bit counter active as it may lead customers away from your site or blog, but you can make money from it depending on how many people click on the ads. Generally, Adsence is used on informative blogs that are not trying to sell anything as well as various article submission sites, but it can be a good source of additional income. Think of it as making money off your competitor’s success, in the end everybody wins.

Learn more about Search Engine Marketing

Pay-Per-Click Ads

What is Online Reputation Management? by The Web Squad is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.