Blog – Page 84

If Your Business Stalls, Call 41CALLS

Last Updated: November 11, 2011

As a new way to reach out to potential clients, Prospect Genius has just started up a new radio advertising campaign. Broadcast on 104.9 and 100.9 FM, this new radio ad focuses on drawing attention to our effective search engine optimization product. With a target audience of Capital District-area business owners, this ad is coming right into their work sites and service trucks to let them know about our ability to help them connect with new customers on the web.
Using the catchy phone number 518-41CALLS, this radio ad lets small business owners in our area know how to harness our effective online marketing program. Many companies like appliance repair pros and trash haulers are struggling to find new customers, especially in today’s tough economy. But that doesn’t mean those prospective customers aren’t out there! Our 41CALLS campaign is here to let these business owners know that we can help them find the job leads they need, simply by helping them achieve a more prominent Internet presence to reach out to the locals who are already looking for their services online.
If you’ve heard our 41CALLS radio ad, or you found out about Prospect Genius from a friend or other source, we’d love to let you know more about our program and how it can help you. Feel free to contact us today to learn how search engine optimization (SEO) can help your business.

The Small Mistake that Could Kill Your SEO Campaign

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

Navigating Your Online Identity

Here at Prospect Genius, we know how important it is for our clients to be able to track the return on their investment with our SEO program. That’s why we create a metered number and trackable microsite (with a URL that follows the format “some-service-city.state-biz.com”) so you know which leads are coming in from your Prospect Genius campaign.
We spend a great deal of time promoting these numbers and microsites all across the Internet and on many different sites. Sometimes, Google and Bing reps will personally call these phone numbers to confirm that they are active and live, as well as that they actually communicate with the correct business.
So here’s the important part: If Google calls you and asks if your website is:
“http ://some-service-city.state-biz.com”
…say YES!
While your personal website might be “bobsappliancerepair.com,” for example, if you tell Google that the microsite we created for you isn’t affiliated with your business, you are effectively killing your PG campaign. Why? Because Google will then assume that your listing with the URL “http ://some-service-city-state.biz.com” is spam and your information will be blacklisted. Basically, that means we will have to create a new URL for you and begin your campaign all over again. This will, of course, result in fewer phone calls for your business during the initial three-month period—not to mention a whole lot of unwanted frustration.

Just Say Yes to the Address!

If you’re ever in doubt when receiving a call from Google about whether a phone number, URL, or web address DOES in fact belong to you, it’s always better to say yes than to say no. After you’ve confirmed ownership with Google, you can simply call your sales or customer service rep here at Prospect Genius to ask if the phone number or URL does belong to us. If it doesn’t, we can then contact Google to correct the mistake. However, if you tell Google right off the bat that the URL is not yours, Google will instantly blacklist it. There is no way to go back and correct this and there will be no way to get the URL back on Google.
Speaking of Google…

What You Should Know About Google’s Latest Update

As of Friday, October 14, Google has implemented new strategies that it hopes will keep owner-verified business listings as up to date and accurate as possible. Effective immediately, Google will grab data from all over the web to automatically update your Google Places listing as a “time-saver” for you.
If you’ve received an e-mail from Google saying as much, it’s very important that you contact us immediately. We’re unsure about what these automatic updates and revisions may mean in the future for your Places listing and campaign performance—especially given the shady tactics that some competitors are already using—so we want to be able to keep your listing 100% correct at all times.
Please contact us as soon as possible if you’ve recently received an e-mail from Google about your Places listing.

Introducing: Google Maps Monitoring Service

Google doesn’t have a stellar record when it comes to letting business owners know about changes to their listings, and even though Google’s announcement claims they will notify business owners via e-mail as soon as something is changed using this new automatic update system, it’s unwise to depend solely on their promptness or discretion. It’s essential that you monitor your Places listing on your own and check your e-mail regularly since contact from Google can be unreliable.
The good news is that you can hire Prospect Genius to handle monitoring your Places listing if you don’t have the time to check on it every few days. In light of this new update from Google, we are rolling out a brand-new Google Maps monitoring service. It will alert you immediately if your information is changed or if a third party reports your business as “permanently closed.” Right now, this is the most effective way to combat Google’s questionable strategy and keep your Places listing as accurate and optimized as possible.
For additional information about our Google Maps Monitoring Service or to learn more about how PG can help, feel free to contact your sales or customer service rep today.

Are Online Advertising Myths Causing You to Make Costly Mistakes?

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

We’ve talked about this issue a bit in past posts, but since this topic keeps coming up, it’s definitely worth reiterating how common mistakes can lead to some pretty major consequences. Since there is about a 50% chance you’re making at least one of these mistakes, please read this post carefully. Some of the consequences are severe, so it’s best to avoid them if you can. If you have any questions about these costly online advertising myths or how they can hurt you, don’t hesitate to call. The PG team is always happy to help!

Campaign Hopping Redux

We’ve previously mentioned why it’s not a good idea to bounce from one SEO campaign to the next every couple of months, but today we’re going to go a little more in depth about the potentially major damage to your business that this can cause.
When you move from one Internet advertising company to the next, hopping to a different one every few months, a trail of outdated information typically accumulates. In short order, you will have acquired a handful of addresses, eight or ten different phone numbers, and even a couple of variations on your company’s name.
That’s no big deal—everyone has old contact info and such on the web, right? Well, actually it is a pretty serious problem for your company, because when it comes to Google, it really is the difference between life and death!
Picture it as a courtroom. Your company is on trial, with Google as the judge and your SEO company as your lawyer. If you tell the judge eight or ten different stories, you’re probably headed nowhere but jail. If you have five different lawyers telling the judge multiple stories, you’re going to jail. On the other hand, if you consistently provide the judge with accurate, logical information with the help of a single expert lawyer, you’ll be able to go home to your kids at the end of the day.
You have to care about having conflicting info online because Google cares. You may not like it, but when it comes to search results, Google is the judge, jury, and executioner. If you don’t play by their rules, you’re, unfortunately, going to suffer the consequences.

Choose Your Online Advertisers Carefully

This is not to say you can only ever use one SEO company for all of your online advertising. But you do have to be careful about which companies you choose and which types of campaigns you’re running at the same time.
Let’s continue with the courtroom analogy from above: The U.S. legal system allows you to hire one lawyer while still using a co-counsel or two. That’s because they work together as one entity rather than separate bodies. In the same way, you can hire one SEO company (as your “lawyer”) to manage local and organic campaigns and still engage a different company (as “co-counsel”) to do a PPC (pay-per-click) campaign. Because the PPC campaign deals with the sponsored link sections of Google, there is very little overlap in the local/organics area and few, if any, conflicts will arise.
For more details on this topic, check out this earlier post.

Potential Consequences

However, if you’re working with several SEO companies, and they do give Google conflicting information, you’re setting yourself up for a wide range of problems and penalties. In most cases, when they come across different addresses, phone numbers, and other mismatched info for the same company, Google will decide that you’re a spammer and simply stop believing anything—and everything—you tell them. The outcome is a severe reduction in potential success any time you start an Internet advertising campaign with a new company.
If you’re even less fortunate, you may find yourself facing penalties from Google. Penalties can be tied to any of your identifying information, including your website address, phone number, physical address, company name, or a combination of these. That means your rankings could be capped at page 2, page 5, or even page 50, so you may as well kiss the prospect of a first-page ranking goodbye!
Now you may be thinking that your business will be okay as long as you don’t do anything wrong personally, but think again. As soon as any one of the companies you hired for Internet advertising acts against Google’s guidelines on your behalf, your company can be banned. And, sadly, this situation can be nearly impossible to fix, costing you significant time and money. Trust us—this is NOT something you want to happen to your business.
The moral of this story is that even the best SEO company can only swim upstream for so long. Before you’re going to have a chance at success with future campaigns, you must clean up the mess previous advertisers left behind on the web. And you’re not alone: More and more businesses are finding themselves dealing with this reality.

Watch Yourself!

The great news is that you don’t have to fall victim to this potentially devastating problem. The easiest way to avoid it, in fact, is just to do your homework!

Research every online advertiser you’re considering doing business with. Do a web search for the company’s name coupled with words like “scam,” “complaints,” or “reviews” to get a preliminary feel for whether they can be trusted.
Ask for references, and then make sure you actually call them. For a reputable company, it should be easy to provide four or five solid references for you to speak with. But you also have to take a moment to call the references and get their direct input. These folks are business owners just like you, and they’ll be your best resource for reliable information and an honest opinion about the SEO company you’re considering.
Keep tabs on your online footprint. As the owner of the business, you—and only you—are the one who can truly own up to this responsibility. By being an active participant in any online advertising campaign, you can stay on top of what information is being connected with your company on the web.

Get a WebFax™ Report

Prospect Genius has just started offering a new WebFax report service to help with the problems outlined above. In the same way most people wouldn’t buy a used car without seeing a report detailing the facts about the car, you won’t want to sign up for an online advertising campaign without a WebFax report about your company!
Our WebFax report will show you all of the different information that exists online for your business: phone numbers, addresses, company names, and websites. This can be the first step in eliminating current problems with your Internet advertising efforts, or it can simply help keep you aware of your online presence.
Take control by taking an active role in protecting your business and safeguarding the success of your online advertising—call us today to get your WebFax Report!

Fresh Off the Press: Announcing New Product Offerings to Help Your SEO Campaign

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

The PG team is continually working to ensure our customers receive the best, most comprehensive service. As a result, we’re constantly coming up with new ideas of how to better serve you. Today we’d like to announce a few brand-new product offerings that will help us make certain you really are getting a full-spectrum of top-quality options for your online advertising campaign.

E-mail to Phone

Do your e-mails sit around for days (or longer) because you just don’t have time to check the computer? Are you not a huge fan of e-mail in general? Well, at PG, we’ve just launched a product that lets you get your e-mail on your phone. Here’s how it works: Each time you get an e-mail lead, the program triggers a call to your phone. The system reads the e-mail message aloud to you and then follows up with a text message containing the caller’s phone number. It’s like having a personal secretary to read all of your e-mails to you! With PG’s E-mail to Phone program, you’re just a button or two away from returning the call—and you don’t even have to turn on the computer or open your inbox.

Blogging

Share your expertise, announce news/events, and improve your Google ranking all at the same time! Prospect Genius has added a blogging product/tool that allows you to add blog entries right on your microsite. Blogging on your site offers several versatile advantages.
For starters, having good content on your site makes your company more attractive to consumers. When you post blog entries like “Tips for Keeping Your Dryer in Top Condition” or “How to Know If You Need Air Conditioner Repair,” you illustrate your expertise to potential customers and grow their confidence in your knowledge and services.
Secondly, each and every blog post adds another page to your microsite. So if you post 100 blog entries over the course of the next year, you will have transformed your 15-page site into a 115-page site. More pages makes your microsite more credible to Google and Bing, because the larger your site, the more important it seems to the search engines.

Half-Price Until November 1

These two new products are going to be in a beta-testing period for the next couple of weeks, but we are offering a limited number of half-price openings until November 1. If you want to be one of the very first PG clients to experience the benefits of our E-mail to Phone or Blogging features, give us a call and we’ll get you signed up today.

Photo Gallery

You’re right: Photo galleries aren’t precisely a new offering from PG, but since they work almost the same way our new blogging feature does, we wanted to remind you how beneficial our Photo Gallery option can be. Just like each blog post creates a new page on your microsite, with the photo gallery, every new picture you add creates another “page” for your site. When you go ahead and add captions to each picture, especially those containing keywords (think: “ABC Appliance provides professional refrigerator repairs to a client in New York, NY.”), you can get even more value out of this new “page.” More pictures equal more points with Google and Bing.
For a little perspective, this is exactly how big companies like Walmart and Sears stay at the top of the results pages for service searches. Their sites have literally thousands of “pages” because they include a descriptive photo page for each and every product/service that they offer.

Coming Attractions

Next up in terms of new product offerings is our review validation service. Available very soon, this feature will allow you to not only collect customer reviews directly on your microsite, but it will also enable you to have a third party validate them.
The simple truth is that customers view reviews with skepticism. After all, they have no way of knowing if that glowing review was fabricated or written by a real, satisfied customer. Our validation system will actually contact the reviewer by phone or e-mail to verify that they are legit. Once the review has been validated, an icon will appear next to it, illustrating to prospective customers that this review is accurate, authorized, and able to be trusted!
If you’re interested in signing up for the beta-testing period on this feature, just give us a call, and we’ll make sure you get on the preorder list.

EDriven Concepts: Posting Bogus Reviews to Manage Reputation and Counteract Mounting Negativity

Last Updated: September 7, 2011

As a business owner, reputation management is an integral part of maintaining a positive image for your company, especially when it comes to your Internet presence. Given the immense number of online business directories and consumer complaint forums, it’s fairly easy for anyone to post reviews of your business for public viewing. Unfortunately, this means that if any of your past customers has had a poor experience with your business, there’s a strong possibility that they’ll utilize the resources at their disposal to post a complaint online.
One company in particular that is struggling with the issue of customer complaints is EDriven Concepts. Recently, however, it has made efforts to compensate for this negativity. If you’re a business owner looking for a way to counteract customer complaints online, take note of EDriven Concepts’ strategy and avoid it.
Why EDriven Concepts Needs to Manage Its Reputation
Lately, EDriven Concepts has seen a mounting pile of negative reviews all over the web. They have been accused of scamming business owners through deceptive sales calls and fraudulent information, and are now tasked with having to manage their reputation in order to keep these negative reviews from surfacing on Google’s search results pages. Some of those negative reviews can be found here:

The user reviews on Scambook, ComplaintWire, and Brownbook all detail the same scenario:

A business owner receives a call from a representative of EDriven Concepts posing as whichever SEO company that business was currently working with.
The sales rep from EDriven Concepts refers to a previous conversation with the business owner that never actually took place, thus confusing the business owner.
The sales rep requests the business owner’s credit card information but never states his/her true identity.
The sales rep hangs up when pushed by the business owner to reveal his/her identity.

In the Yelp review, a different individual also writes about an experience that she had with EDriven Concepts, wherein she was contacted by a sales rep who was pretending to be from her current advertising agency. They finally revealed their true identity when she asked for her specific account manager, but this was after they had already asked for her credit card information on three separate occasions.
[If you’d like to listen to audio samples of similar phone calls between EDriven Concepts and existing Prospect Genius clients, check out our previous blog post.]
As you can see, these kinds of reviews can be rather damning to a company’s reputation. That’s why it’s important to counteract any negativity surrounding your business with an effective reputation management strategy. This is not, however, what EDriven Concepts has done.
How EDriven Concepts Is Attempting to Manage Its Reputation
While you don’t have the power to permanently delete user comments and reviews on sites that are not your own, there are ways to neutralize them. A very simple way of doing this is to post an even greater number of positive reviews, so that the negative ones will be drowned out.
EDriven Concepts has begun an attempt to push the negative reviews down the search engine rankings by writing and duplicating their own positive reviews. We’ve been following their attempts at reputation management for a few weeks, and their strategy has piqued our interest because their efforts illustrate a clear pattern:

They write a fictional yet lengthy testimonial on behalf of a nonexistent company.
They create fake accounts on various blog sites.
Using these fake accounts, they post the same testimonial in multiple locations.

Below, you’ll see a sampling of different testimonials created by EDriven Concepts that are intended to quash negative reviews that are all over the Internet. While they have succeeded in diluting the volume of complaints against them with a handful of fictitious blog posts, the deceptive nature of these posts is wholly transparent to any casual reader. Sadly, this practice won’t get them far.
We’ll continue to update this post as we find more examples.
First group of false testimonials: “is edriven concepts a scam”

This set of blog posts by EDriven Concepts contains identical reviews from a company called “Apex Plumbing.” The posts detail the experience of “Leroy Gonzales,” an alleged plumber from Dallas, TX, and are given the title, “is edriven concepts a scam,” (that’s not a typo—no punctuation or capitalization are included in the original posts). Right off the bat, there are several elements that stand out as red flags:

A comprehensive search of the White Pages and other Internet directories showed zero results for a Leroy Gonzales or Apex Plumbing in the Dallas area.
The titular question, “Is EDriven Concepts a scam?” is never addressed nor answered.
The team at EDriven Concepts is leveraging a common search term (“is edriven concepts a scam”) by using it as the post’s title with the sole purpose of directing curious readers to a fabricated story.
The fact that the phrase, “is edriven concepts a scam,” is a popular search term tells you that they already have a reputation for scamming clients.

By the time you get to the third sentence of the review, you already know that the premise is completely false.
Second group of false reviews: “As a small business owner I set out to do due diligence…”

The reviews in this group are all identical, with slightly revised titles, under the pretense of a “small business owner” seeking a “quality SEO company.” However, none of the review’s contents coincide with that alleged reality. There are several holes in this review’s logic—for example:

It is 584 words long. Your first thought should be, “What kind of ‘small business owner’ has the time or motivation to write a nearly 600-word review for another company?”
If it were a legitimate customer review, it would be a short paragraph on a popular consumer directory like Yelp, Brownbook, Manta, Hotfrog, etc. Instead, these are standalone blog accounts that are named after EDriven Concepts and contain only one lengthy post.
The review is filled with detailed personal histories of EDriven Concepts personnel. Why would an ordinary client be privy to this kind of information?
It’s fair to say that no average “small business owner” would be familiar with programs like PHP, JavaScript, HTML5, etc., much less identify a team with expertise in those fields.
The company remains anonymous throughout the entire review. If the EDriven Concepts program worked so well, why isn’t there a link to the business’s website? Why isn’t there a name for referral? Why isn’t there any evidence of the program’s efficacy?

Given the combination of blatantly promotional language and zero specificity regarding the actual job performed for this anonymous client, the average reader can easily conclude that this is a fictional review written by EDriven Concepts themselves.
Third group of false reviews: “Is Edriven Concepts Fraudulent? Let’s find out!”

Netlog.com
Dailystrength.com (an online support group)
Wikispaces.com

These are more examples of fake user accounts containing a total of one blog post each. After reading the post in its entirety, you can discount its validity quite easily, as it:

Describes the process of SEO but never offers an answer to the question in the title
Offers no statistics, links, or evidence whatsoever to support the legitimacy of EDriven Concepts
Is written by an “Ezra Finch” who has no profile information, credentials, or authority on the subject

Anyone who has done an hour’s worth of research online can write about what constitutes good SEO practices. However, the fact that this author writes only in vague terms and never offers a direct response to the question in the title reveals that this is yet another blog post designed to misdirect users searching for an actual answer to this question.
Throughout all of these attempts at fabricating and duplicating reviews, EDriven Concepts only serves to exemplify the dishonesty that they are accused of. As a business owner, you can still learn from their mistakes. The only way to manage your company’s reputation effectively and honestly is to provide a valuable service and encourage satisfied customers to spread the word.

Prospect Genius

If Your Business Stalls, Call 41CALLS

EDriven Concepts: Posting Bogus Reviews to Manage Reputation and Counteract Mounting Negativity

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