Do you think that social media isn’t right for your business. Well, think again after you watch this video on my most recent social media clinic I did for Iowa Women Farmers.

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If you have ever spent any amount of time doing keyword research you can walk away amazed (or even frustrated) about the sheer volume of ways people search for what is essentially the same thing. Take a single core term like “window cleaner” and you can get dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of search terms all using those two keywords. This is what happens in the world of search. Someone starts with a basic concept, then continues to refine their search by adding qualifiers such as: homemade, recipes, magnetic, insurance, liability, vinyl, glass, streak free and “confessions of a” (that’s no joke) to help them find more sites that offer what they are looking for.

If you are in the window cleaning business, you can easily discount many of these qualifiers. But there will also be others in there that you most certainly will want to use to optimize your site for higher search engine rankings.

The question is, how do you target all of these qualifiers on your window cleaner web page? The simple answer is: you can’t. Nor should you want to.

Whatever keyword you are researching, the mass of keyword phrase + qualifiers can make you a bit overwhelmed. How do you target so many keywords without mucking up the site? One solution is to look at your keywords from a Research, Shop, Buy lens. Separate them based on visitor intent.

The next step is to start grouping and separating your keywords based on qualifier similarity within each segment of the shopping cycle. Pouring through a list of 50+ keyword phrases, you can immediately begin to see some distinctions between qualifiers and their meanings. The goal is to group together qualifiers that are similar in meaning and/or form a logical grouping together.

In the example above, I’ve chosen three words that can quite easily be worked into the content of a single page. If you are selling cars, you can now easily target “exotic cars,” “vintage cars”, and “classic cars” all on the same page without diluting the effectiveness of your content.

As you group similar qualifiers together, be careful about placing words together that either change the meaning or negate the others. If you were to add the word “cheap” to a page where you are also using the word “quality”, you are pretty much negating the ability to sell your item or service as “quality”.

The qualifiers used in the image above could also easily apply to a jewelry site as well. However, if you provide dance lessons, you probably won’t want to use “exotic” on the same page as “classic”. That gives these keywords an entirely different meanings.

Not all keywords will have a positive or negative impact on each other. But, for the ones that could have a possible negative impact on each other, use them together as a last resort. It’s better to find phrases that have similar meanings first.

When you target phrases with similar meaning and intent, you reinforce the message on the page. Why target the word “discount” when you’re talking about the quality of your products? Let the quality speak for itself. Have another page that offers discount items where you can go after “cheap” and “sale” and all those other words that would otherwise provide additional support or value to similar qualifiers.

Using similar qualifiers together is a great way to reinforce your message without having to repeat yourself over and over. It also helps you give your page an overall unifying theme that speaks to each visitor’s particular wants and desires.

The combination of qualifiers used will vary from site to site. Some combinations will work well for one site, but not for another, as I demonstrated above. But by grouping these similar qualifiers together, you are giving yourself fodder to move up, not only in searches using those qualifiers, but also in searches using your primary phrase. You use the many, similar words to help you focus on the one word that really matters.

This post was inspired from The Princess Bride themed presentation I gave in early 2010 at SEMpdx’s Searchfest titled Inconceivable Content: The Dread Pirate Robert’s Guide to Creating Swashbuckling Content, Pillaging the Search Engines, and Commandeering a Treasure Trove of Conversions. If you enjoyed this post you also might enjoy other posts inspired from the same. Search for “inconceivable content” on this blog to find them all.

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Though the likes of Facebook and Twitter have taken the marketing world by storm, many of our online experiences though still start through search. With well-known brands and small businesses alike now using social media marketing in earnest, it’s worth exploring how to get more from your company social pages, namely helping them rank higher in online searches, alongside your corporate website.

After a few tweaks, your social media pages can give you more opportunities to dominate page one of Google and other search engines. Here’s an example. If you look at our properties, SEO Advantage isn’t only our company name – it’s also an important keyword and source of traffic for us. So we want all our web properties to dominate for that term. If you seach on “seo advantage”, you’ll see first our corporate website, then our Facebook page, our Twitter profile, our reviews on Kudzu, our marketing blog, our LinkedIn profile, and also a press release or article we’ve recently written. 

The best thing is that most social media platforms allow for some customization that lets you optimize them, even if the standard no-follow tag applies to links. Here are 5 things you can explore across the various social media platforms you’re currently using.

1. Grow your following. Tthis seems to hold true for Facebook and Twitter as it does in the general realm of web sites – the more followers you have, the more authority your social media page carries. (Except when it comes to websites, you’re usually evaluating links, not followers, and the exact number can be a little harder to assess.)

Of course there are great benefits to having a large number of followers even beyond ranking higher. But did you know that the people you follow may also impact the search engines’ assessment of relevancy? That’s right, there may be benefit to following people in your direct line of business most importantly, as this helps strengthen the signal of what your business is all about.

2. Optimize your profile page’s meta tags and URL. Twitter creates your page title from your username and your name. Your bio becomes the description tag. Kudzu is using our company name and address as the title tag, which is great for local searches. Take note of which parts of your page are comprising the meta data and make sure it’s optimized accordingly. You can also nab your own name as part of your Facebook page URL now, too. (It used to be that you had to have a certain number of fans.) And your Twitter URL includes your username, so choose wisely.

3. Post links to your newly produced content to help it get indexed faster. Though social media sites use the no-follow tags, new content seems to be getting indexed faster when posted to Twitter and other social media sites. One reason may be that it gives an opportunity for your followers to link to it from other sites, like their blogs, for example. Since your Tweets and Facebook updates get exposure for pages you reference faster, your linked content can also gain exposure much faster than previously.

4. Optimize your updates. This will depend on the platform, but especially Twitter can offer opportunity here, since tweets themselves can show in search results.

The title tag for a tweet is around 42 characters: the first 30 characters or so of the tweet together with the username of the account tweeting it. So make sure any keywords appear as close as possible to the front end. You may also want to append RT@username at the end of your tweets when retweeting, and keep your tweets to 120 characters or so to avoid truncating.

On Facebook, keep your updates related to your company’s line of work as much as possible. This helps build the theme for the page.

5. Build links to your social media profile pages. As with any web page, inbound links matter. Include links to your pages on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. in your site footer or elsewhere so it can be found from every page of your site easily. 

In closing, one word of advice. As with your regular online marketing and SEO efforts, the needs of the users take precedence. The above points are tweaks only. Build up the value of your social media accounts by serving your customers and followers well, and the rest will follow.

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If you have a business-to-business (B2B) Web site, you’re probably tired of all the trite advice you see out there from experts who are clearly speaking to those in the business-to-consumer (B2C) industry. I mean, each time you read these opinions about what you should do, do you find yourself asking, “How is that realistic in my B2B business?” And you might be wondering where the really smart B2B marketers look for their new ideas. And the answer is…those crazy B2C Web sites. Let me explain why.

No matter that all of your customers are businesses themselves, each person you sell to is also a consumer, and they spend far more of their time online being a consumer shopper than a business shopper. What that means is that every time they come to your site, they bring all the sensibilities of a consumer to your business interaction. They expect you to be just as easy as Amazon.com—being a B2B company doesn’t change what they expect.

Image by dailyinvention via Flickr

So, when you are trying to figure out how to improve your B2B experience, look to B2C for your inspiration, because they probably got there first. Which of these things wouldn’t improve your Web site?

• Providing customers the choice of buying online or offline
• Making products easy to return
• Providing chat or phone support for those unable to understand your Web site

Now, not all of these things are affordable for you, but you might be able to do something better than you are doing now. Don’t believe me that your customers want what they get as consumers? Take a look at the history of B2B experiences:

• It wasn’t long ago that most B2B companies did not accept credit cards, requiring credit checks and paper billing at the end of each month.
• B2B sites didn’t offer any form of sign-in or other means of personalization, but now several do.
• B2B sites never posted ratings and reviews, but now a number of them do.

If you expect that B2B user experiences will remain wholly unaffected by B2C experience improvements, you haven’t been paying attention to what’s been happening. Your cheapest market research on what’s next in your business might be to look at businesses that you aren’t in.

Just a note to regular readers. I am disappearing for the next few weeks for my annual August vacation, but I will see you in September.

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The only way to avoid hearing criticism is to be deaf or dead.

The only way to avoid being criticized is to never have been alive.

As history books have shown, even the dead can’t escape criticism. So, those of us who are alive must simply learn to deal with it; even as we often try to avoid it.

As much as we hate it, criticism isn’t all bad. Criticism, regardless of how it was intended, can help us adjust and adapt to situations. It can provide useful insight, justified or not, into our lives and give us the opportunity to become a better person.

Rarely do we enjoy hearing it, but criticism is a needed component for growth as a person.

There is an old Arab proverb that says, “if one person calls you a donkey, forget it. But if five people call you a donkey, buy a saddle.”

Or, take a lesson, and perhaps try a different approach.

In most circumstances, you can freely ignore criticism coming from a single source, or perhaps a few dubious sources. But be careful about ignoring criticism from someone who knows you pretty intimately and is likely point out things that other people won’t–or can’t.

Regardless of the source, if you find yourself hearing similar criticisms from multiple avenues, it might be a good idea to take stock in what’s being said. Failure to do so will only result in the same mistakes being made time and time again.

Of course, not all criticism is justified. Sometimes we get criticized for things that other people don’t understand. Often ignorance or lack of information, combined with a healthy dose of bias, can bring someone to criticize something that they really don’t get. I have recently found this to be true of myself. People just don’t know the full story of what is going on in other people’s lives, but they often find it easy to criticize anyway.

Preacher, Henry Ward Beecher stepped up to the pulpit one Sunday morning to deliver his sermon. As he put his bible on the pulpit there was a paper with the word “fool” written on it. He lifted the paper for the congregation to see then announced, “Generally I receive letters from people who write letters and forget to sign their name. This letter is different. The person signed his name but forgot to write the letter.”

There is nothing you can do about unjustified criticism other than to let it roll off your back. Don’t let it get to you, don’t let it bother you or change you. But take note of what you hear; if the same criticisms keep coming up from multiple and trusted sources, then it may be justified. In which case you need to accept it, learn from it, and change what is necessary to become a better person, employee, business owner, spouse, parent, grandparent, friend, etc.

Criticism is a part of life. But, what we do with it makes us who we are.

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Search Engine Strategies is less then a month away and this year it’s taking place at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Earlier this week I had the opportunity to catch up with Andrew Chang, Marketing Manager at LinkedIn, to get some insight into his session on PPC and SEO best practices–specific to B2B. Read our conversation below:

[Manoj]: Your session at SES is related to SEO/PPC strategies with regards to B2B, how does LinkedIn become part of equation?

[Andrew Chang]: Millions of people visit LinkedIn each day to connect and re-connect with colleagues and business associates. Our members come from all walks of life – accountants, financial advisors, attorneys, web developers – and they are well-connected and active professionals that many B2B marketers are trying to reach. For this reason, we built and launched our own self-service PPC advertising offering called LinkedIn DirectAds (http://www.linkedin.com/directads) that allows anyone with a LinkedIn account to place text ads on prominent pages and target those ads to only people you’re trying to reach.

A quick example of how this works: One of our most successful customers is an e-learning company that’s trying to attract the attention of primary school teachers to sign up for a Master’s degree program in Education. Over 214,000 LinkedIn members have identified themselves (in their LinkedIn profiles) as being in the “Primary/Secondary Education” industry. Within a few minutes, the e-learning company created a text ad and start displaying the ad only to those 214,000 members when they visited LinkedIn. Teachers click on those ads to learn more about the Master’s programs and the e-learning company pays for those clicks.

[Manoj]: How has the game of lead generation changed in 2010?

[Andrew Chang]: Two ways: Social media and mobile. The increased use of social media services like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter is forcing businesses to rethink how they spend their time and budgets. On LinkedIn, thousands of LinkedIn Groups have sprouted up and liked-minded professionals are engaging in conversations that span the buying cycle. Businesses should be thinking about how they might engage with prospective customers within these groups, encouraging their employees to participate in these conversations. Increased mobile internet access worldwide requires that businesses take a second look at how people experience their website, emails, and other marketing assets from mobile devices.

[Manoj]: I’ve always thought that the importance of SEO never weakened over the years, what do you think?

[Andrew Chang]: Even though I work in online advertising, I always recommend to business and website owners that their websites and web content is optimized for both search engines and social media. I’ve noticed that in recent years this has become easier to say but more and more complex to do. Just take a look at the Google’s Webmaster Central Blog and you’ll see that it’s not just about having the right content on your pages and getting high quality websites to point to your content. With YouTube videos, tweets, and other online assets now crawled and indexed in search engines, you need to think about SEO for more than just your website content.

People don’t realize that your presence on LinkedIn can be optimized for search as well. At a personal level, your own LinkedIn profile often appears in search results when people search for you by name. To make a great first impression, you should make sure that your LinkedIn profile is current and complete. Here’s a link to our learning center where you can learn more: http://learn.linkedin.com/profiles/overview/

Companies also can have their own pages on LinkedIn and you may be surprised by how many people click over to your company’s profile after visiting your personal profile. Anyone at at company can edit the company’s profile on LinkedIn. To learn more, check this out: http://learn.linkedin.com/company-pages/

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Now that you’ve chosen your keywords to create ad group themes, you want to have ads that will move targeted users from whatever they’re doing online to being aware and interested in your product or service. Remember, since the Display Network operates by completely different rules and the users are in a completely different state of mind, the ads should be different than Search Network ads.

With Search, users are somewhere in the buying funnel; whereas with Display most of the users are likely not in the buying funnel at all. Therefore, the goal of the ads in the Search Network is to persuade the user that your solution is the best choice out of all of their options to make their life better; whereas the goal of the ads in the Display Network is to make users aware that you have a solution that could make their life better.

Here a some general characteristics of ads that are effective at starting users down the buying funnel:

1. Benefits – It’s not about you or even what you’re offering. It’s about the improvement of the user’s life in a way that’s more valuable than the cost associated with the purchase. Communicate that and then prove it on your landing page.

2. Relevance – You’ve picked keyword themes for your ad groups that will show on sites with those themes. So, is your ad relevant to the users hanging out on those sites? Make sure it is. You may find ads that don’t perform how you hoped because they are being delivered to the wrong kinds of sites. Make sure the ad and sites are a good match.

3. Sneak Peek – Let them know what they will learn about your offer after they click on the ad. This can help in two ways. It may deter some users from clicking because they are not really interested in what would be found. This is good because you are filtering out some users that may have clicked on your ad without being truly interested in what you’re offering. So, you save money on the wasted clicks that you would have received.

Also, it can give insight to the user about what kind of information they will receive once they click through. This is good because you are interrupting their current activity and asking them to go on a detour. So, if you can assure them it will be worth it, they can be more likely to click through and give your landing page a chance.

4. Call to Action – Tell the users what they should do once they get to your landing page. This is similar to #4 except you’re not only telling them what they’ll find, but what they should do on the landing page. And since your primary goal is to get them to enter the buying funnel, you want to….

5. General Offers – Most of these users are not ready to commit to a customer relationship right away. So, a good strategy is to hook them with something that is helpful to them in their pursuit of gaining the benefit you have claimed they would gain by becoming a customer. Therefore, offering free sample, the ability to calculate ROI or savings, a free information download, or whatever is applicable to your business is a logical conversion step for this audience. Your offers can get more specific if you get to the place where you’re writing ads for specific sites and you are targeting those specific users.

I remember a professor of mine always said, “There are no rules, just strong tendencies.” These are good “tendencies” to follow when creating your Display Network ads. But, as you get to know your audiences more and more and test your ads, you will adjust according to what works for them.

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 Earlier this week, I explained the concept of micro goals in regards to social media and why it’s so important to track such a large collection of seemingly insignificant numbers. I walked you through both the universal micro goals and how to establish campaign specific micro goals. Today, it’s time to look at how those numbers can be of value to us over the span of a social media campaign.

Looking for What Works and What Doesn’t

The single biggest benefit of tracking things on the micro goal level is the ability to quickly identify the areas of your campaign that are performing well and the ones that aren’t. Micro goals are all part of the wonderful world of metrics and each of them acts as a clue in the mystery of campaign results.

Making sure each of your metrics lines up carefully with your campaign efforts and goals will go a long way toward equipping you with the information you need to refine your campaigns.

Finding Problems within a Campaign

Let’s say you’ve just launched a new piece of viral content on your blog and you’ve pushed it out via social networks. The content is aimed at educating your target audience about a new product offering and does it via a creative and entertaining video you’ve hosted on your blog.  You launch the content, seed it with influencers and watch the traffic start rolling in.

Traffic spikes and sales don’t just stay flat, they drop. What happened?

If you have established and kept tabs on a set of micro goals for your blog, the story may tell itself. On the surface, the campaign looks strong. Traffic, links, social mentions are all up, leading your team to celebrate with nice graphics like this:

But if you dig a little deeper and look at all of your micro goals, a different picture begins to emerge:

Despite the uptick in traffic and links, we see a distinct decline in engagement related metrics. Time on site has dropped, the number of pages per visitor has dropped, comments are down and less people are converting. Each of these micro goals matches up with a drop in sales.

It’s also enough data to make us go back to our campaign and ask ourselves what might have led to this combination of metrics.

Match What You Know with What You Planned

In this instance, we can go back to the original campaign idea and look at it from the perspective of the metrics. There was clearly interest in the video because we see a rise in traffic. The content clearly resonated in terms of word of mouth, because we see strong numbers of social shares and a nice increase with links.

When we take a second look at the content, however, we might realize the $250 price point and the fact that it’s an add on accessory to a $700 piece of electronics gives us a naturally small target audience. That means that while the video we’ve created has broad appeal, we’re not focusing in on our targeted audience. For our next campaign, we’ll want to focus more on the specific needs of our target audience and focus less on getting a broad launch and more on reaching into targeted communities.

Variations in Metrics Tell us Different Tales

Of course different metrics on your micro goals might help you come to different conclusions.
Let’s say the video was for a brand new cell phone battery extender that cost $20, fit on a key ring and delivered an extra hour of battery life to a phone. This is the type of product nearly anyone can use and the price point qualifies it as an impulse buy. In this case, perhaps our metrics look something like this:

You’ll quickly notice our metrics are up across the board with the exception of our conversion rates. We’ve got moderate increases in links, traffic, social shares and comments. We’ve got zero movement in our conversion rates. We’ve got a very strong increase in time on site and pages viewed per visitor. This tells us something. On the surface, everything looks good.

The problem here is that a huge jump in pages per visitor and time on site simply does not mesh with zero change in sales. There’s simply no reason why an increase in targeted traffic that has demonstrated an interest in the product via their use of the site wouldn’t result in conversions. This means we need to go back and look more closely at the site itself.

More than likely, the issue here is about usability. Ask a friend to watch the video and take action. You might be surprised to find out they can’t locate an order now button or they’re hunting for shipping prices and giving up in frustration. A few quick fixes to your interface may result in a sudden jump in conversions and a slight decrease in time on site and pages per visitor.

You Can’t Fix it if You Don’t Know it’s Broken

Of course the above examples are only looking at the micro goals for your blog. This same type of examination in other social media outlets and even across the board for your campaign can often give you a completely different perspective on the success (or failure) of your campaigns.

Stop looking solely at traffic or conversions to determine the success of your campaigns. Sometimes it’s a lack of RSVPs or a dramatic increase in social shares on a specific network that clue you in to the changes you need to make. Either way, if you aren’t gathering data, any decision you make will be based on your best guess rather than supported logic. Take a look at your campaigns and dig deeper into the metrics of you campaign. You may be surprised at what you learn.

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One of the first things you need to do when developing your website is to perform research on your target audience. Without it, you won’t know who you are trying to sell to, or how to reach them with your content.

The best way to attract the specific customers you want and make sure you are meeting the needs of your audience is to write your content specifically for them. But even knowing who your audience is doesn’t mean you’re able to speak to them on their level unless you know where they are in the buying process.

Content designed to inform won’t do a good job of selling, just as content designed to sell isn’t what people need when they want to be informed. Therefore different pages of your site need to be targeted, not for a different audience, but the same audience in different places of the buying cycle.

There are essentially three phases of the buying cycle that need to be addressed: Researchers, Shoppers and Buyers. Generally, people start in the research phase, then move into shopping mode, and finally are prepared to buy the product or service they are in need of. A single site can help these people move from one phase of the buying cycle to another and, hopefully, to the goal of getting a conversion.

Not everybody will land on your site starting with the research phase. Some will hit only as they are ready to buy, some will shop and leave, and others will be there for the duration of the process while also moving in and out of other sites as they go from research to buy.

Researchers

Most people start out in the research mode as they get an inkling in their mind that there is a product or service they want. Unfortunately, they don’t quite know what they want or what will meet their specific needs. So, they set out to do some research.

A significant majority of searches performed every day are informational based – where people are looking to gain some knowledge about something, not necessarily looking to buy a product or service. That’s not to say that these people don’t become shoppers at some point, but research is where they start.

Broad category pages and blog posts are generally the best place to target these types of searchers. They are looking for content that helps them gain a better grasp on the topic, so you need to write content that provides the information they need. Don’t try to sell them… just inform them with whatever information is necessary for them to begin to be convinced enough to move to the next phase.

Blogs are especially good at hitting this because information-based searches are often very broadly focused. As informational searches get more specific, the topics (and keywords) you can reach them with will increase as well.

“Research” content is the bait you use to get people to your site. It allows you to become a source of information for their query and gives you the ability to start earning trust.

Shoppers

The next phase people move into is the shopping phase. This is when they know they want to buy something, only now they are trying to learn more about what solutions are out there that will meet their needs.

Think of this as window shopping. They are looking around trying to figure out what they like, don’t like, or has the “features” that will help them accomplish their goals. They are comparing products, looking at the details, and using the new information gathered to help them narrow down their list to only what they believe will give them the best satisfaction.

You generally want shoppers to land on your main product category pages. This will give them some information and a whole lot of products to explore. If you have multiple product sub-categories within categories, use your keyword research to help you determine which sub-categories are the best place to land shoppers, based on how they searched.

You want to optimize your category pages so shoppers land closest to the products that meet their search query without pushing them to a specific product. Pushing them to a product page before they have all the information they need will simply push them away from the sale.

Buyers

Buyers are those who are using the search engine to deliver them the right product with the right features. They are performing very specific searches designed to get them to specific product pages that match their criteria for a purchase.

These guys are ready to buy, and there is no need to try to pre-sell them. Getting them to product pages that have specific details and features listed is the fastest route to a sale. If you deliver these searchers to informational pages or even category pages, you run the risk of sidetracking your visitors. You’ll move them out of buy mode and back into shop mode. Instead of getting a sale, you just have another window shopper.

Knowing your audience is important. But knowing them in broad, general terms is not a substitute for knowing what they need when they search. Obviously, knowing the need of each searcher is impossible, but you can optimize your pages to meet the needs of your audience at large depending on where they are in the research, shop, and buy process.

This allows you to give your visitors more of what they want, when they want it. Get the right content to them early in the buying cycle, and they are more likely to stick with you through the buying process. Get them different content late in the buying cycle and they may buy now! Of course, this is providing that what they want earns those trust points that will turn into sales. Sales are not made by the products you offer… it’s in the content you write.

This post was inspired from The Princess Bride themed presentation I gave in early 2010 at SEMpdx’s Searchfest titled Inconceivable Content: The Dread Pirate Robert’s Guide to Creating Swashbuckling Content, Pillaging the Search Engines, and Commandeering a Treasure Trove of Conversions. If you enjoyed this post you also might enjoy other posts inspired from the same. Search for “inconceivable content” on this blog to find them all.

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I couldn’t help him. After 45 seconds of conversation with a local business owner who phoned me out of the blue, his voice literally quivering with rage, I knew my words could bring scant balm to his personal inferno of a Gilead in which the negative review had been left and the whole world, he was sure, was laughing at him.

I never know what squirrely local search scenario I will find myself embroiled in when I pick up the receiver these days. This unfortunate gentleman had apparently come across a popular article I wrote last year that summarized business owners’ capabilities to edit, remove or respond to user reviews in the diverse top review entities. He wasn’t looking to hire me, he just wanted some advice and I’m usually game for that, though I like it better when it seems like the caller will actually take my advice after taking some of my time. My hopes were not strong for this when I hung up the phone.

The basic scenario was that the business owner had received a bad review on Google, was sure he knew who had left it, was convinced it was left out of personal vindictiveness and wanted the review demolished and the reviewer punished. A tall order. I gave him the best advice I could:

I have never been one to scorn emotions. In this case, the business owner was so upset, he sounded like he was barely able to keep from yelling – at me, a total stranger who had nothing to do with his situation. I began by sympathizing with him, sincerely. Criticism is hard to take, whether deserved or not, and perceived injustice is one of the bitterest pills of all to swallow.

I then brought up his Google Place Page and saw that he had very few reviews – less than ten, 80% of which were glowingly positive. I read the text of the offending review. I read it aloud to him in a dispassionate voice and he confirmed that this was the bad review and proceeded to launch into further angry details about how he knew who this person was and how this person was out to destroy his business. Strong words. It became evident that the negative reviewer was someone with whom the business owner had some type of personal problem – I didn’t ask what it was. I felt I needed to make an effort to bring this situation into perspective for this business owner who had so blown things out of proportion, that he literally felt his whole business future was threatened by this one negative review. This is what I told him:

1. My perusal of the review revealed what I consider typical of negative reviews – a disgruntled customer complaining. Nothing out of the ordinary. One person, in the midst of other satisfied people, claiming not to have received the services he paid for. To anyone not initiated into the dark details of whatever personal conflict was going on, this review was no worse than someone saying the food at a restaurant was blah, and certainly less bad than claims of food poisoning which are sitting on the local business profiles of thousands and thousands of eateries while doors remain open for business. And, nothing to compare to the absolutely nutty reputation management problem that Beth Haven Baptist Church may have to cope with, as was recently pointed out to me by my friend, Mike Blumenthal.

I made an effort to point out to the business owner that this review, which seemed to him to spell out doom, looked like just about every other negative review I’d ever read and that, in the mix of many positive reviews, it would seem like one crabby soul in a sea of contentment. He was genuinely surprised to hear this outsider’s viewpoint, I think, and I hope he was listening as I recommended that his company implement a staff-wide program for gathering positive reviews from happy customers to push down the bad review as time went by. I recommended he branch out and start getting reviews from other review sources, and that he meet this negative action with a deluge of positive effort.

2. The business owner’s hope was that the review could be deleted, but I had to point back to the article he’d read and remind him that, sadly, Google is infamous for their lack of accessibility. There is no one to phone, no one to email, nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide…Bottom line, you can’t get Google to remove a review because you can’t speak to anyone there.

Other review entities have taken a much more friendly stance on giving business owners, whose data they have, after all, co-opted, control over whether various reviews appear on their profiles. Google has made commendable recent strides towards enabling users to report problems to them via the Report A Problem link in Maps, but this link does not seem to be intended to cover review disputes, and so far, the only link I know of that you can click regarding this issue is the ‘flag as inappropriate’ link. To date, I’ve never heard a single case of that causing a bad review to disappear. If you have, please tell me about it! I told the business owner that I wouldn’t hold my breath about the flag link doing anything, but that it wouldn’t hurt to try.

The most proactive advice I could give him, in the absence of a way to have the review removed, was to claim his business listing (he hadn’t done so and had never even heard of doing so) and to refer back to point 1; start actively seeking positive reviews.

3. So, at this point in the conversation, I had given the business owner the best advice I could: try to see the review as one unhappy blip on the radar that can be counteracted with other happy blips, and claim your listing so that you can begin to gain at least some control of your business data. Overall, I was advocating a positive mindset and actions that could be undertaken to positive effect. But this just wasn’t enough for this agitated business owner. I think what he really wanted was revenge for the humiliation he felt he was suffering as a result of his adversary’s actions. Frankly, I just can’t go there, but for the sake of example, let’s play that scenario out in two different ways.

“You’re a busy small business owner,” I pointed out. “You don’t really want to spend money and hours in court do you?”

“Yes! I don’t care. I’ll spend money. I’ll sit in court. I want to stop this person. He’s out to wreck my business,” he asserted, vehemently.

Well, it’s his dime and his time, but I can’t think of any worse outcome of a negative review than that the business owner would end up blowing money on a lawyer and spending hours sitting in a chilly, uncomfortable court room (if it came to that). What an inconvenience! And for what gain?

Let’s say he hires some lawyer to send some type of cease and desist letter, demanding that the offender remove his review. Well, Social Media and Internet Reputation Management have both been around long enough now for anyone who is paying the slightest attention to have noticed just how huge the reaction can be when a company decides to try to silence an unhappy customer and that unhappy customer happens to have a blog or an account on Twitter, Facebook or YouTube. The company never, NEVER comes out looking good and more attention has been drawn to the negative situation than could ever have happened around the initial scenario of this single, bad review. Not a winning move, and I tried to tell the business owner this.

Let’s look at the second imaginable scenario. The offending reviewer is frightened off by the letter printed on scary legal stationery and the owner pays the lawyer’s fat fee. The reviewer removes his review, crawls away into a dark hole and is never heard from again. Hooray!!! But wait…what about that next guy? That next reviewer who got sand in his salad, a double charge on his credit card or a lousy auto repair job? When he leaves his bad review, do we start all over again, marching furiously back to our attorney’s office? Get out that scary letterhead again, we bark, rubbing our palms together in furor. Who cares if I can’t be on the job today, winning new clients, making money, running my business? At least I’ll get that guy!

To my mind, no one but the lawyer will stand to benefit from this merry-go-round of litigation over something as utterly common as an unhappy customer standing on his 50 pixel soap box, complaining of dissatisfaction.

“Reviews aren’t going away,” I advised the caller. “You have to learn to understand the game and play it with aplomb.”

In a rather combative tone, he told me that that this whole thing would go away if it ever happened to some famous politician or business. I felt it my duty to inform him that, in fact, some goofy friends of mine had actually experimented with hijacking the business profiles of Google, Microsoft and other quite large companies, and that while this had pointed out some of the weak spots in the system, the system had not gone away.

Reviews are not going to go away any time soon, and unlike my little red ball in the photo accompanying this article, you shouldn’t bury your head in the sand about this. If point of fact, it has been posited that a profile of all-positive reviews can look fake while a few bad ones add the leavening of reality and trustworthiness customers find believable. What I’m saying here is certainly not news, but it was news to this business owner who is representative of that very large segment of the business world which has still yet to hear about the basic functions of Local Search. No shame in this. My firm still gets calls from people who aren’t sure exactly what a website is, even now in 2010, so it’s small surprise that busy SMBs have yet to encounter so under-promoted an area of marketing as Local SEO.

But to ignore this extremely significant part of running a modern business would be foolish, indeed, once you know it exists, and the gut reaction of hiding from tough situations is not one you can sustain if you hope to succeed.

As I ended my call with the business owner who would not be mollified by my proactive, positively-slanted advice, he was still talking about getting that lawyer and making that guy pay. He was trying to ask me for legal advice and I had to tell him, politely, that I’m not in the business of making people pay…I’m in the business of making business pay off for my clients. And you don’t achieve that if you’re wasting time tilting at windmills. As embarrassing, hurtful or enraging as it can be to feel you’ve been unjustly accused, success is the best revenge.

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