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Posts Tagged ‘reverse SEO’

SEO Consulting Improves Lead Generation

November 24th, 2011 No comments

SEO consulting can help grow a company’s lead generation numbers just by virtue of making the company website found more easily on different search engines. SEO consulting agencies work to optimize a company’s website, following the different techniques and tactics that SEO experts have found to work well.

Here is how SEO consulting can help improve lead generation.

A realtor specializes in mid-century modern homes in a particular part of town. Her website is currently a few pages of the usual real estate speak about customer satisfaction, putting buyers in their new home, and pictures of happy families. But the realtor’s site does not rank well, and gets very few leads.

1) The SEO consulting professional first determines which keywords and phrases potential customers will use. They do this by checking other real estate websites, looking at the realtor’s website analytics, and using SEO tools that show the best/most used keywords other visitors use when performing similar searches.

2) Next, the SEO consulting pro will revamp the realtor’s website as needed, placing keywords in strategic areas, like page titles, headlines, and body copy. This “on-site SEO” an important part of any SEO consulting work, because this is the structure the search engines look for in order to determine what a website is about. If this important structure is missing, it is more difficult for the search engines to determine what a website is about. While it will not ruin the realtor’s chances for being found, it does make it that much harder to be found, compared to other, similar websites.

In the realtor’s case, the SEO consulting firm will recommend keywords like “mid-century modern,” the name of the neighborhood, and the name of the city.

3) Blogging is another important tool in an SEO consulting pro’s toolbox. While the SEO consulting firm may not provide this service themselves — it is either up to the client to write their own content or an professional business blogging service — they will recommend it, and can even help create the blog. For the best effort, the blog should be a part of the realtor’s website.

That is because the search engines focus on a website’s frequency and recency of updates — how often do they do it and when was the last time they did it? The more often a website is changed, the more valuable a search engine assumes it is. A blog is the easiest way to update the website, because a weekly or twice-weekly blog post will have the same effect as constantly changing the website.

For the realtor, she should blog regularly about new houses for sale, changes in the neighborhood, state of the school, new restaurants, and anything else that will mention the keywords from point number two.

4) Backlinking is another service that top-flight SEO consulting firms will provide. While on-site SEO is important, it only tells the search engines what is important. Backlinks are what tell the search engines if something is popular and important. In that sense, backlinks are like votes. The more votes something has, the more important the search engines think it is. While anyone can read a book on SEO and call themselves an SEO consulting pro, the best agencies will actually manage backlinking for their clients as well.

For the realtor, her backlinking strategy needs to include articles written by other bloggers, comments left on other blogs, and even special mentions on discussion forums and community sites.

By hiring an SEO consulting agency to handle these details, the realtor will begin to see her website climb up in the search rankings. As she climbs up the rankings, she will also see an increase in traffic to her site — that traffic represents interested home buyers and sellers. As they read through her valuable information, they will then contact her for help in buying or selling their homes. The more contacts she gets, the more opportunity she has to close sales.

SEO consulting can help other businesses grow in this same manner. It is all a matter of knowing the best and latest techniques, and knowing how to capitalize on the things that potential clients are looking for.

Rostin Ventures SEO consulting services of social media marketing, search engine marketing and reverse SEO techniques proactively brands online which will improve lead generation.

Reverse SEO Through Good Customer Service

June 5th, 2011 No comments

Reverse SEO was all about getting negative information pushed down off of Google, keeping it out of the top search engine ranks, to make sure people did not associate a brand with being an awful place to do business. Reverse SEO was necessary for companies that had a run of bad luck, or a few cranky customers who wanted to harm it. But no one used negativity as a marketing tool.

Then one New York business owner found that the negative results actually increased his sales. The owner of an online eyeglasses company found that by providing bad customer service, which people would complain about online, his page ranked higher on Google. The angrier people got, the higher it went.

It was not until a New York Times article detailed the company’s practices — including fraud and violent threats — that Google was “horrified” to find their search engine was being gamed in so evil and heinous a manner.

What was happening was as people posted their complaints online, they backlinked to the vendor’s website, which is a popular reverse SEO tactic. Google assumed that a backlink to a website was an endorsement, which meant Google believed it was an important site that provided a good user experience. (This is why backlinks are crucial in a reverse SEO strategy.)

Google quickly released a statement that they had “developed an algorithmic solution which detects the merchant from the Times article along with hundreds of other merchants that, in our opinion, provide an extremely poor user experience.”

In other words, Google was now looking at the sentiment surrounding a backlink to determine whether it was a real vote or not, and their solution served as a notice to companies who screwed their customers: do business right, treat people decently, or get banned from Google.

This also means that the best reverse SEO tactic is going to be great customer service.

A lot of businesses already worry about what will happen if they receive a negative complaint on a user review site. They might lose sales, the complaint might be seen on the search engines, etc., so they use any reverse SEO tactics they can. But now that Google has changed, a new strategy to eliminate these complaints is to reverse SEO them through kindness and decency.

The best way to do this? Use these three “customer service reverse SEO tips:”

Customer Service Reverse SEO Tip #1: Ask customers and visitors for positive reviews, if it is truly deserved. This can done on a comment card, a copy of their receipt, a sign by the front door, or even a quick email to the company’s contact list.

Customer Service Reverse SEO Tip #2: Make sure to earn those positive reviews by providing great service and a memorable experience. Everyone loves being made to feel special and important. They love a great experience. And they certainly love being treated with respect and kindness. Nothing will engender a greater positive review than treating customers with sincere respect and kindness.

Customer Service Reverse SEO Tip #3: Visit the sites and social networks where most of the business’ customers are. Many businesses make the mistake of continuing to market and advertise in the places they always have — phone books, newspapers, billboards. But these are not always effective marketing channels. Instead, ask customers where they spend a lot of their time online. If it is a social networking site like Facebook, join Facebook, and friend them. Communicate to them like a person, not like a commercial.

Google has made sure that companies that game their algorithm through customer anger will not benefit. But that does not mean they will eliminate all negative comments. For any companies who still need to remove those from the search engine rankings need to let a positive customer experience be the reverse SEO they need. Follow these reverse SEO consulting tactics to building quality links through good customer service.

Using Reverse SEO To Avoid Name Confusion

February 19th, 2010 1 comment

Reverse SEO’s importance never became more apparent than it did a couple of weeks ago. I got a call from a potential client — we’ll call him Ken H. Block — who had a Google problem.

Ken was a former sports anchor, well-known to sports fans in his area, and has been online for years. He does video marketing for a couple of very large, multi-national companies, as well as some smaller clients. He banked on his name, but hadn’t done very much to promote it. The problem was that there was another man — Ken S. Block, a convicted felon and scam artist — who had the same name. The problem became obvious when the CEO of one of the companies had Googled his name, and found Ken S. He knew Ken H. was not Ken S., but he couldn’t resist teasing him about it. During a phone call with other company executives.

Ken H needed some reverse SEO badly.

What is Reverse SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of optimizing your website so it appears at the top of search engine results. Conversely, reverse SEO means you push down unwanted, negative results by piling your pages on top of the negative one, pushing it right off the page.

Most people only have to worry about name doubles stealing their thunder, but Ken H. had a problem with people confusing him with a convicted felon. While it wasn’t an issue for the people who knew Ken, it could be a problem for the people who wanted to hire him. And short of paying for a Google Ad that said, “Ken S. Block the felon is not to be confused with Ken H. Block the video marketer,” reverse SEO was going to be his best option.

What can Reverse SEO do for me?

Since Ken H’s search results were a single blog post, it doesn’t look like it will be that difficult to knock from the top rank. But it is not always this easy. We know people who share names with other notable people, and they have worked hard to maintain a top search ranking. One friend shares a similar name with a Big Ten running back, which can sometimes lead to some interesting search results.

There are only a few steps we would need to take for Ken S, but we need to do them many times until we achieve the desired result.

  • Blogging is the primary tool in our reverse SEO toolbox, and should be the hub in your social media campaign. Ken H should blog about anything and everything related to his work. He should also write about the Ken S./Ken H. confusion (“I am not Ken S. Block”), and try to focus on getting that as a featured post so people will find it during future searches. By winning searches with that post, he can reverse SEO the Ken S. Block page down from the top position.
  • YouTube videos are a great reverse SEO tool. And since Ken H. is a video marketer, he needs to use video to promote his work anyway. And as videos become more popular, easier to access, and available on mobile devices, this will become more important in reverse SEO campaigns.
  • Backlink to your website. This is a practice for regular SEO, so you know it’s going to work for reverse SEO too. Basically, the search engines put more stock into websites with a lot of links going into them (that’s a backlink). The more you have, the higher your site appears. In Ken H’s case, if he were to increase his backlinks, his blog will rise to the top of the rankings, which will push Ken S’ name down.

Reverse SEO is not that difficult. It’s just time consuming. You can’t just do a couple of optimization tricks and sit back and relax. These steps need to be repeated many times, and in the right places, if you’re going to have a successful reverse SEO campaign.