If a searcher finds positive content when querying a company name, that’s a great first step for building the brand/consumer relationship. If negative content ranks, however, the company doesn’t get a second chance to make a great first impression, and it will be much more challenging to establish trust with their audience. A research study conducted by Dan Hinckley, CTO of Go Fish Digital, found that 22% of consumers won’t buy a product if they find a negative article while researching a brand.

Related Content:

• Online Reputation Management
• Online Reviews Management
• Search Suppression Services
• Yelp Review Management

I have long been fascinated with identifying trends in how Google treats brands. Going back to 2012, we looked at the most frequently appearing phrases for brands in Google Autocomplete.  And then circled back in 2013 and did the same analysis for personal brands using CEO names in Autocomplete.

Because of the importance of page one for a branded query, I wanted to conduct a study that would help brands better understand what content tends to rank well. Then, we could make that data actionable by using it to sculpt the search results for our client’s brand name. From a reputation management perspective, this is incredibly useful data as it shows areas that companies can focus on to protect the first page of their results (or resources to either remove or suppress negative content onto page two).

Methodology

For this study, we used 500 companies from the INC 5000 list of fastest-growing companies in the US as a data source.  We started at the top-ranked company (#1), and moved down the list, removing any companies with names that would require modifying the query to disambiguate a mixed set of search results.  For example, “Podium” is a fast-growing company and is also a raised platform for speakers, and thus has a diverse set of organic search results, so it was removed from our list of companies.

We then wrote a script that searched for each of the 500 companies on google.com and gathered information from the SERPs. For the page one organic search results for each query, we stored each ranking URL, its ranking position, title, text snippet, star rating (if present), and the number of reviews it has (if present).

With this large dataset, we were then able to analyze the data in several different ways.

Highlights from the Results

LinkedIn is King

LinkedIn is highly visible in brand search results. It is the most frequently appearing site for the brands we analyzed, appearing on page 1 for 381 of the 500 companies analyzed!

As part of an overall social strategy, LinkedIn is often an afterthought if it is even talked about at all. And while it may not be as sexy as other social platforms, it is clearly something that should be taken seriously. Job candidates, potential customers, investors, and more may land on your LinkedIn page to learn more about you, so it pays to put your best foot forward with your LinkedIn profile.

Glassdoor Reviews Really Matter

Glassdoor is the third most frequently appearing site (Facebook is second, but most brands have a good enough handle on that site). Glassdoor appears in the search results of 230 companies, and it has multiple page one appearances for 81 of those companies.

Of these companies, 199 had a rating that appeared as a rich snippet in the search results.  We performed additional analyses on these ratings to understand how companies were faring on the site. We found that the average company rating was 3.4. Total review counts ranged from as low as 1 and all the way up to 217.  This shows us that even just one review is enough to put Glassdoor in the branded search results with a star rating rich snippet. The following chart shows the rating distributions for our Inc 5000 sample companies.

We often receive calls requesting consulting for Glassdoor to either push it out of the search results or improve its rating. It is now pretty much impossible to push Glassdoor out of branded search results and keep it out. And, as we can see in the data, it appears for 46% of the analyzed companies.

The solution? While we have some special tactics and strategies for this, at the core, developing a great company culture and treating people well will yield better Glassdoor reviews.

Own Your Crunchbase Page

Crunchbase is a great place to create a profile for your brand. And with it appearing for 26% of companies, if you aren’t on it or haven’t curated your presence, now is the time to do so.  Like Wikipedia, it is open to being edited by anyone, but the risk of vandalism here is significantly lower.

The key to this page ranking well is to fill it out as completely as possible. This means completing fields such as founding date, all locations, investors, news articles, etc, and populating them with unique content, rather than copying and pasting text that appears on other sites.

Social Profiles are Visible

We wanted to look at social websites as their own group to see which of them appear most frequently. In order of visibility, the most frequently appearing social sites are:

1. LinkedIn
2. Facebook
3. Twitter
4. YouTube
5. Instagram
6. Houzz
7. Reddit
8. Vimeo
9. Medium

Sites 4-9 in the list above appeared in less than 3% of the companies’ search results.  So, from an organic ranking perspective, the focus should be on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter first.  Following that, the other sites should be a focus for reputation management if they are highly relevant for your space or are a site you are already very active on.

Most Frequently Appearing Sites

Below are the sites that appeared most frequently for the 500 analyzed companies (included are all sites that appeared for at least 15 companies):

1. LinkedIn (appears for 381 companies)
2. Facebook (246)
3. Inc (236, an artifact of it being our original data source)
4. Glassdoor (230)
5. Crunchbase (134)
6. Bloomberg (107)
7. Indeed (94)
8. Yelp (67)
9. Manta (63)
10. Twitter (57)
11. Wikipedia (52)
12. BBB (49)
13. Amazon (45)
14. PR Newswire (38)
15. YouTube  (32)
16. Zoominfo (27)
17. Instagram (27)
18. Mapquest (24)
19. Bizjournals (22)
20. GovTribe (18)
21. ZipRecruiter (17)
22. Businesswire (16)
23. TechCrunch (15)

How To Use This Data

This data can be useful to you whether you are looking to proactively protect your online reputation or you are in the midst of a reputation crisis.  When people search your brand name, you want them to see positive URLs, and ideally content that you have some control over.

To begin, review the list of the websites and social properties that appear most frequently on page one for companies.  Identify which of those websites are relevant to your company (most should be), and then you’ll need to develop an individual plan for each property to build out robust pages and profiles.  By having these as built-out as possible, with unique information (no duplicate company descriptions!), you make it more likely that Google will rank them well for your brand.

When we are working to improve a company’s online reputation, another strategy we use is to get inspiration from the search results of similar companies (or individuals).  By understanding what Google naturally ranks for a similar entity, we can draw up a strategy that plays to these tendencies.

A strong overall approach would involve taking this qualitative “similar entity” strategy and combining it with this new quantitative data.  The combination of the two would be a reputation management content strategy that prioritizes sites we know have a good chance of ranking well for our targeted brand phrase.  Once these sites are fully built out with good content about the brand, and (if needed) a little help from backlinks, social shares, and clicks, these assets can help protect page one of your branded searches.

[Data Study] The Websites Most Likely to Rank for a Brand Name is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

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One way to achieve this is to build out social media accounts and create professional-looking online profiles. In our experience, we’ve seen the greatest success with the following sites:

Top Social Media Websites to Engage On

1. 1. Twitter
   2. Facebook
   3. LinkedIn
   4. Google+
   5. Instagram
   6. Quora
   7. Pinterest
   8. YouTube

Websites Profiles Can be Created On

1. 1. About.me
   2. Flavors.me
   3. RebelMouse
   4. Corporation Wiki
   5. CrunchBase
   6. Flickr
   7. Photobucket
   8. Slideshare
   9. BBB
   10. Tumblr
   11. WordPress.com
   12. Blogger.com

Here are some additional online tools that may prove useful in improving an online reputation.

Social Media Monitoring Tools

1. Trackur
2. UberVu
3. Radian6

Tech Tools

1. IFTTT (useful for monitoring websites such as Wikipedia)
2. Google Alerts
3. TalkWalker (similar to Google Alerts, only one term free, but more reliable now)
4. Google Analytics
5. Google Adwords
6. Open Site Explorer

Search All Complaint Websites

1. https://gofishdigital.com/complaint-search/
   

Slide Deck on Proactive Reputation Management

Online Reputation Management Resources for Individuals is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

Transcript on How to Improve Yelp Ratings

Hey everybody, I’m Brian Patterson with Go Fish Digital, and today we’re talking Yelp Help.

If your business has a Yelp page, you know what kind of impact it can have on you because Yelp ranks so well on Google. It can really determine if your business is perceived positively or negatively, because it could be ranked number two right below your website if someone searches your brand name.

And if it doesn’t show up for your brand name today, you still want to be thinking about a strategy, because Yelp is just continually growing in scope.  It’s not just about restaurants anymore.  Hotels are popping up, dry cleaners, pretty much every service business is getting created on Yelp.  So if you’re not there today, you still want to be thinking about it and maybe be proactive in getting your page created and loaded up with those positive 4 and 5 star reviews that you want.

So if you don’t have a page and you’re going to create one, you’re going to want to think about how to get those reviews.  If you have a page and it doesn’t have a lot of reviews, or it has a negative star rating, you’re going to want to think about how to improve those reviews.  You don’t want a 2 ½ star, you want a 3 ½ star.  And if you have a 3 ½ star, you want a 4 ½ star, right?  You always can be better.

So here are some strategies to first get those reviews.  The first thing is to claim your business listing.  So if your business is on Yelp, it’s either been claimed or it hasn’t.  If it’s your business and you want to claim it, there’s a link right on the page.  And from there you really need to decide, because you can go two different ways.

Do you want to build out the page and add deals and pictures, or do you want to leave it alone.  The easy way to make that decision is to think about “do you have positive or negative reviews on the page?”

If your page is good or its empty, feel free to build it out, make it pretty, and all of that stuff.  If your page has some negative stuff on it, don’t add a lot to it yet because what you’re going to do is just help it move up higher in Google, by adding pictures, more text, descriptions and all of that stuff.  Google sees, “Oh this is a website that has a lot of information on this business.  We should  rank it highly.”  So you’ve got to be careful there, so choose wisely when building out the page.

The second thing is, Pre-qualify people that you ask for reviews.  So you definitely want to ask for reviews, despite what Yelp says, which is that you shouldn’t ask for reviews. It only makes sense, right.  Because before the internet, if someone came to your business and they had a great experience, what would the merchant say as they walked out.  “Tell your friends,” right?  Now in this day and age, the way that you tell your friends is by posting it on Yelp; for a lot of people anyway.

So who is Yelp to say the equivalent of “Don’t tell them to tell your friends,” right.  It’s not really fair.

With that said, you can sort of refine that and say you only want to recommend people directly to leave a Yelp review, if they had a positive experience.  So that’s the pre-qualify part.  Ask if there’s anything better that you could’ve done and then if there is, great you have an opportunity for improvement.  But if you did a great job and they’re happy, you can certainly ask for an online review and someone can leave it on Yelp.  They may also go to other places like Google Places or Trip Advisor, but generally asking for an online review leads people back to Yelp.

So three is Ask Friends and Partners. You may think that this goes into the gray area where you’re asking a friend to review your business on Yelp.  But what I’m talking about here is having them be completely honest, right.  So think of this review.  Have your friend leave something like, “I’ve been friends with the owner forever.  He does a great service; I use them all the time.  This is my favorite product.  Make sure you call them if you have this kind of problem.”

So they’re stating right from the beginning, you’ve been friends forever.  There’s a conflict of interest declared.  All right, now forget that and write the honest review that’s really authentic.  That would occur in real life.  Even if you were best friends with another business owner, if one of your friends needed that service, you would recommend your friend, right.  So it’s the same thing.  You’re going on Yelp and you’re having a friend leave a positive review about you.  But stating that it’s a friend.

Likewise, partners, right.  So do you have suppliers that you work with or people who do services for your business.  They can certainly leave a review about their experience.  They can say, “We work with them all the time.  They’re always reliable, always on time. Anything we ask for, they make it happen.”  That’s an honest, authentic review of your business, even if there also is a business relationship there.  The key is just to be transparent and authentic, right.  If you’re real, people can see that.

Then finally, Follow-up Emails. So you’ve pre-qualified someone, you’ve asked them to leave a review, but they may or may not do it.  So follow-up.  If you have their email address, shoot them an email thanking them again for their business, how much you appreciate it, and then there’s two ways to ask for that Yelp review.

You can say, “By the way, we mentioned online reviews.  Here’s our Yelp page.” Make it easy for them, right.  Or if the conversation didn’t go too far into leaving an online review, you can sneakily add it to your email signature.  Like, “People love us on Yelp,” and link to the Yelp page.  So it’s like a subtle reminder that they should leave an online review rather than an in-your-face, straight asking for it in the body of the email.

So that’s getting reviews.  And some businesses have a hard time getting reviews unless they’re bad reviews and some don’t.  Some, they just flow naturally.

The other side is improving reviews.  Getting that, like I was saying, 2 ½ star to a 3 ½ star and 3 ½ to 4 ½.  The first thing to know about this is the filter.  So you can do all of this to get reviews, and some people will leave 5 star reviews that get thrown into what Yelp calls it’s filter.  It’s filter is designed to algorithmically weed out people who Yelp doesn’t think are authentic users.  So people who it’s their first review, it’s the only place they’ve ever reviewed, and it’s a 5 star glowing review.  Yelp is most likely going to throw that into the filter.

So there are ways to get all of those great 5 star reviews that are filtered back into the main page that everyone sees, and they get factored into your overall star rating.

So the overall theme of these is to make that reviewer look authentic.  If you’re doing things right, they are authentic right, they just don’t look that way to Yelp yet.  So you’re going to help move that along, and how do you do that?  Well an authentic Yelp user has friends, so why don’t you add them as a friend.  They may or may not add you back, depending on your relationship, but Yelp can see that someone added them as a friend, and if you have other managers at your office who have Yelp accounts, they can do the same thing, too.

The second is ‘Follow’ them.  So this is a little more like Twitter where you can follow their activity on the website.  The third is ‘Like’ their reviews.  So if they have multiple reviews, you can go to each of them and make them as Useful, Funny, or Cool.  It’s a feature built right into Yelp and it’s very easy to do.  And then fourth is to send them a message.

So within Yelp, you can send them a message directly with exactly what you want to say.  And again, they’ve left a 5 star review about your company, so it’s not totally weird to send them an email or a message within Yelp thanking them for that, and then asking for a few things.

You want to tell them their great 5 star review is getting filtered out so no one can see it, and here are a few tips to make it so people can see it, and you’d really appreciate it.

Upload a profile pic.  If they have a default image on Yelp, Yelp doesn’t really like that, so all the have to do is upload a simple profile pic.  Next is review a few other places, because again, if you’ve only reviewed one place, it doesn’t look that authentic to Yelp, so you want them to review a few more.

A good tip here is that if you know someone is going to create an account to leave a review for you on Yelp, why don’t you ask them to review a few other places first before yours.  That sort of throws off the algorithm a bit in getting reviews filtered.  Yelp tends to filter out a person’s first review.  Not always, but sometimes. And the filter is always moving, so things can pop out of the filter, go back in, so keep in mind if it doesn’t happen right away that’s not the end of the world; it can still always come back.

C)  Suggest they add more friends.  So you can pair your Yelp account with Facebook, they integrate pretty easily and that will help you figure out which of your Facebook friends are also on Yelp.  Then you can add them as Yelp friends.  Again, these are all things that a normal Yelp user would do and that’s what we’re trying to mimic.  Because this is a real person and we want Yelp to see that.

D) Check in.  So this involves using the mobile app.  And this we’ve found is really effective.  If you are checking in at other businesses, it seems to signal to Yelp that you’re more likely a real person because it would be a big step for someone to create a fake account and then add it to their phone and then start checking in at locations.  It’s a big barrier.  And so this is really effective, but it’s also a hard one to convince someone to do.  So you’ve got to sort of gage their ability and interest in doing that.

E) Be active.  So overall, you just want to encourage them to be active.  Like a regular Yelp user will look at different pages.  They’ll leave reviews, they’ll like other people’s stuff.  They’ll send them notes and Follower other users.

If you do those things, if there were 10 good reviews in the filter, I bet these steps here could get at least five of them out.  It just works, and all Yelp is looking for is real reviews.

So those are some tactics for establishing a good page, and then making and establishing Yelp page better.  If you have any questions on Yelp or reputation management in general, we would love to help you out.  Feel free to fill out a form on this page or give us a call and we can certainly take a look at it for you.

Thanks a lot….

Improve Yelp Reviews – A Step-By-Step Process is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

Related Content:

• Online Reputation Management
• Online Reviews Management
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• Yelp Review Management

The API behind this is used to power the Google Browser Toolbar, but it also works fine for retrieving the data directly. We’ve built a simple tool that allows you to enter in your keyword and receive those top values automatically.

After typing your phrase and clicking submit, the top 10 Autocomplete values will be opened in a new tab/window in your browser. We open up the results in your browser, rather than us retrieving the results ourselves, so that you can see what they are for you locally. I highly recommend using this tool in an Incognito or Privacy browser mode (Chrome or Firefox make that really easy). So here it is, enjoy:

Another handy tool for reviewing Autocomplete values is UberSuggest.org. This tool shows you the Autocomplete values for your search phrase, and also your search phrase with every letter and number appended to the end of it. It’s limitation is that you don’t have direct control over the location that the values are pulling from, but that is a small sacrifice for the wealth of data it does churn out.

Google Autocomplete API is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

Search All of the Complaint Websites at Once is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

One of the requirements for the website was that it must be PCI compliant.  PCI is short for Payment Card Industry, and specifically the PCI Data Security Standard.  It is a set of server, website, and business requirements to ensure that the website and credit card data are secure from hackers.  The major merchant account websites that businesses use to process credit card payments require their customers have PCI compliant websites.

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We did a lot of searching for information on PCI compliance for WP E-commerce, but there wasn’t a whole lot out there to find.  So, I thought I’d document some of the things that helped us pass the client’s SecurityMetrics automated scan.

Website Architecture

Here are a few particulars you should know about our website architecture:

• Server: Hosting was on a VPS from a well-known VPS hosting company. It is the only website hosted on this particular virtual machine.
• Operating System: We are running the latest version of a well known Linux OS.  For security reasons, I won’t give it here, but its a popular one.
• WordPress: We are running the later version of WordPress – (at this time, WP 3.2.1, although we’ll continually upgrade as new versions are released)
• WP e-Commerce Plug-in: For security reasons, I don’t want to give the WP E-commerce version we are using (but its inconsequential for gaining PCI compliance anyway)
• WP Plugins: We run a couple of popular WP plug-ins, but not a ton.

Selective SSL

We used the WordPress plug-in HTTPS for WordPress to put SSL on specific pages.  This meant that the site was simply in ‘HTTP’ most of the time your were browsing, but as soon as you viewed your cart or hit a login page, it switched to ‘HTTPS’ and stayed that way.  We found this met our needs nicely as we didn’t really feel it was necessary to put the whole site under ‘HTTPS’. Configuring it this way was PCI compliant, and didn’t add the extra weight of being a completely ‘HTTPS’ website.

Automated PCI Compliance Scan

Our client hired SecurityMetrics to review their PCI compliance.  The client fell into ‘PCI Compliance Level 4’, which basically meant that they had to pass the automated security scan and a business assessment test to be deemed compliant.  The first time the site was run through the scan it failed – but none of the flagged issues had anything to do with the website software; all issues were server setting and versioning related.  We were able to fix most of the issues pretty quickly by hand.  Again, we didn’t have to change anything on WordPress or WP e-commerce.

There were two issues that we couldn’t resolve.  The scan didn’t like the versions of SSH and SSL that we were running, and because it wasn’t a straightforward upgrade for this OS, we filed a request to SecurityMetrics for them to manually approve our versions.  We were using an up-to-date OS, and the vulnerabilities they associated with the versions of SSH and SSL we were using had been fixed via backports in the OS.  To appeal, we simply wrote up a 3 page document with some supporting information and screenshots.  After exchanging a couple of emails with them (they were very slow to respond… about once every 7 days), they manually lowered the remaining issues and it passed!

Getting Your Site PCI Compliant

What we learned is that getting a WP e-commerce site PCI compliant is much more about your server settings than it is about the software.  I will say that you won’t get your site certified if you are using cheap or shared hosting.  You are really going to need root access (full control) over your box to adjust any settings that the scan takes issue with.  Assume that it will take you around 3-10 hours to get your site tweaked just right for the automated scan.  Good luck, and let us know if you have any experiences with WP e-commerce to share!

If you are having trouble getting your website PCI compliant, we can help.  Shoot a note to info@gofishdigital.com.

PCI Compliance for WP-Ecommerce is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

Think of it this way…

If you were opening up a little shop or store, would you choose to open it up on prime real estate with lots of foot traffic walking by?  Or would you choose to build it in the mountains, hidden in a forest?  SEO is what puts you on the busy corner. SEO puts you in front of the people ready to buy your product and look at your advertising.  It plucks you from obscurity.

A recent project we undertook was to increase the traffic of a blog that has been around for about a year and a half.  The site is Maciverse.com and they are a blog that covers information, tips, tricks, and how-to’s for Apple products. From ipods to mac laptops and desktops, they cover a wide range of topics relating to Apple.

The site has a massive amount of content and receives most of its traffic through the search engines.  Our goal was to develop ways to increase the amount of traffic it receives and to look for opportunities to increase the site’s monetization strategies.

We began with our “Must Have” SEO package where we do in-depth research to uncover opportunities for quick-wins and important keywords that can quickly drive large amounts of traffic to the site.  Once these words and phrases were identified, we worked on special content that targeted these words and then pushed the posts onto the site.  We developed a strategy for long-term success for sustained growth and built out a monetization plan to ensure that traffic and revenue will continue to grow well into 2010.

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Some quick numbers:

We began our work with Maciverse around the middle of July.  Here are the traffic stats over the past 2 months:

Unique Visitors

July – 31K
August – 45K

This was an improvement of over 50% in just one month.   Month-over-month numbers for the past year have demonstrated an average increase of 7%, so the large jump was directly attributable to the SEO work provided by Go Fish Digital.

Revenue

While we need to hold the exact revenue numbers close to the chest, income at the site increased 77%.  This is due to the increase in traffic as well as an improvement in monetization based on our recommendations.

This project was, overall, very successful.  The guys at Maciverse are great and we had a good time doing the work and research to expose their blog to the masses.  The quality content was always there… we’re glad that now a large number of visitors are, too.

SEO Effectiveness – Research and ROI is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.