Tips and Tricks – Page 32

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.

Too Busy to Advertise Online?

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

Some customers tell us that they WANT to sign up, but they just don’t have time to do it. What they’re really saying is that they don’t want to take an active role in the promotion of their own business.
We understand that you’re busy, and that being a small business owner often entails a hectic schedule, but if you don’t take the time to actively participate in promoting your business as accurately as possible, the consequences can be disastrous!
No matter how many jobs you have lined up or how complicated your schedule has become, it’s critical that you take an active interest in the information circulated on the Internet regarding your company. So shuffle your calendar or take a quick break, and spend a little while focusing on how your company is being promoted on the web. Remember, the content generated and distributed by an online advertiser on your behalf DIRECTLY reflects on your company and represents your brand.
If you allow inaccurate, low-quality, or just plain wrong information to spread out all over the Internet, the message you send to potential customers is that your reputation and professional image are not important to you in the slightest. Customers will assume automatically that these errors and inaccuracies are an indication of how you conduct yourself as a general rule, seeing them as symptoms of an overall lack of professionalism and customer service.

Web Advertising: How Much Time Should You Spend?

So, if taking a little time to sign up for a program that promises to create a web presence for you (in the form of a website, advertisements, etc.) is to the benefit of your company, how long will it take? The answer varies from business to business, but you can be certain it’s more than two minutes!
Consider it this way: Could you walk up to a stranger on the street and describe each and every service you offer in just two minutes? Probably not! So why is it fair to expect a third-party advertiser to understand all the nuances of your business in that short an amount of time?
Here at Prospect Genius, it doesn’t take long to sign up, but we do make sure we learn all about your business. The time you invest at this stage gives our team more ammunition to promote your business online, in the end helping drive maximum traffic back to you.
Just how long does it take? Well, in our experience, when a new client signs up with PG, the initial interview typically takes between 20 and 30 minutes. The follow-up interview usually lasts another 10 or 15 minutes. If you’re a chatty person, or your company offers a number of different services, you could spend up to 90 minutes on the phone with us going over the type of work your business does and what makes your company unique.
Everything that you tell us about your company is the fuel we need to make sure your business is represented accurately and promoted efficiently on the web, ensuring you get the most out of your new online presence.

Food for Thought

If a web advertiser says the signup process will only take 30 seconds, or even just 5 minutes, shouldn’t you be concerned? How will they learn anything about your company in that period of time? Especially if all they want is your billing address and credit card number, the red flags should go up.
At Prospect Genius, we take the approach of using in-depth interviews with a number of different goals in mind:

To make certain you get the types of calls you want (for example, calls for repairing large appliances rather than small appliance repairs)
To ensure we promote your business in the correct location and service areas
To identify the details that make your company special, unique, and different from your competitors

All of these goals are for your direct benefit!
If another online advertising company does NOT invest time in getting to know your business when signing you up (by asking for specific, detailed info about your services, etc.), you may find yourself facing several problems:

They may not be planning on doing a whole lot of work for you, so detailed information would be irrelevant.
They may be planning to send you every and ANY call out there, including junk calls. This can be an especially major issue with a pay-per-lead or pay-per-call system.
They may just be planning to copy and paste from your existing website, duplicating content and potentially earning penalties from Google.
They may be planning to spam Google Maps by posting a slew of phony addresses on your company’s map listings page. This may give your company a quick boost in Google rankings, but any unverifiable addresses will be blacklisted by Google. Since your website will be connected to one of those map listings, you’ll also be risking a penalty on Google’s results pages. In extreme cases, Google may even penalize your business name and phone number across the board.

Why It Really Matters

So what? What’s the worst that can happen if you choose to use a web advertising company that doesn’t take the time to learn about you and your business? That’s a really good question because one answer is that you could even go to JAIL!
Sounds extreme, right? Never gonna happen, right? Actually, we’re not kidding. Imagine you sign up with “Advertiser X” and spend just one minute giving them your credit card info and business name, but almost nothing else in terms of information. Then, if Advertiser X puts content on your website that includes false claims of certifications, memberships, or licenses you don’t actually have, you could easily end up on the wrong end of a sting operation.
Several states, including California, are seriously cracking down on these types of violations because the resulting fines are a source of revenue for their cash-strapped coffers. In fact, some of our clients have endured similar situations because they failed to comply with some aspect of state law regarding exactly how you can advertise your services.
Of course, these are the most extreme examples, but the threat of fines and penalties is REAL. In the end, it’s up to you as the business owner to verify that the content on the Internet regarding your company is 100% accurate.

Vet Advertisers Carefully

With all that can go wrong through cutting-corners or just plain sketchy online advertising, it’s vital that you be careful when choosing who will represent your company’s interests on the Internet. In the same way you wouldn’t hire just anyone to answer your phone, you’re better off not hiring just anyone for online advertising.
What an advertiser puts out there about your company invariably becomes the basis for first impressions for many potential customers. If there’s information on the web that’s untrue, misleading, or even misspelled, it could end up costing you a whole lot more than the 30 minutes it would have taken to do it right in the first place!

Warning About Fraudulent EDriven Concepts Calls

Last Updated: August 1, 2011

It has come to our attention that a company called EDriven Concepts has been calling our clients and leading them to believe that they represent Prospect Genius. We would like to clarify that those individuals, along with EDriven Concepts as a whole, are NOT associated with Prospect Genius in any way.
The rest of this post will provide you with a few audio samples of calls placed by representatives from EDriven Concepts so that you will be able to recognize them. We will not make any recommendations about whether you should do business with this company; rather, we intend to provide you with all of the relevant facts so that you can make an informed decision on your own.
As you can hear from the audio clips below, which were taken directly from the aforementioned phone calls, the sales approach is always the same. First, the sales representatives try to confuse the business owner by referencing a “previous” conversation that never actually took place. Then, they continue the present conversation and allow the client to believe that he or she is speaking with Prospect Genius, not EDriven Concepts.

In these additional audio clips, you’ll also hear how EDriven Concepts further attempts to mislead business owners. Given that these phone calls took place on our metered lines, which are designed to record every single incoming call, Prospect Genius can say with absolute certainty that the purportedly “previous” conversations between EDriven Concepts and these business owners never actually occurred. Below, numbers 1 and 2 are portions of the same phone call.

In the following audio clip, you’ll hear Josh Murlin, a sales representative from EDriven Concepts, claim to be a former employee of Prospect Genius. This is completely FALSE.

These amusing clips below show the sales rep attempting to locate a handful of random towns in which the business owner has a poor search engine ranking. Unfortunately for him, it turns out on both occasions that the business owner is already ranked on Page 1 of Google thanks to the work done by Prospect Genius.

Repeatedly, the strategy of Mr. Murlin and EDriven Concepts is to mislead the business owners and let them believe that they are speaking with a representative from Prospect Genius. In Clip 1 below, Mr. Murlin does not admit to being separate from Prospect Genius until three minutes and 43 seconds have passed in a phone call that only lasts five minutes in total. In Clip 2, it takes eight minutes and 44 seconds for him to admit that he is not affiliated with Prospect Genius. But the most shocking part is not that nearly nine minutes go by before he admits this—it’s that the confession occurs AFTER he has already instructed the business owner to stop payment on a check for Prospect Genius and to instead fax the check to him!

These next two clips offer some insight into the “SEO” that EDriven Concepts will provide. In actuality, the company plans to utilize several different local numbers on Google Places in an act that is, quite clearly, spamming. Why is that a problem? Well, as we all know, spamming goes against the rules established by Google. One rule in particular clearly states, “Do not create listings at locations where the business does not physically exist.” In other words, the practice of creating multiple listings—which EDriven Concepts promises to do—is strictly forbidden. Unfortunately, going against Google’s published guidelines is a lot like playing Russian Roulette: while there’s no guarantee that you will get caught, the consequences are dire if you do.

During this final audio clip, you’ll hear Mr. Murlin from EDriven Concepts promise to list the business owner in 150 directories each month. There are two problems with this. First, while there may be hundreds of online directories in existence, the majority of them are not useful or effective in the slightest. In fact, the latest Google algorithm update called “Panda” targeted exactly these kinds of low-quality sites. (You can learn all about Panda here.) This means that since the Panda update, there is little to no chance that any value whatsoever will be provided by links from those directories. Furthermore, as a team of SEO specialists and industry insiders, we can tell you that those directory submissions are almost always done by a piece of software, which means that no human thought or effort goes into the submission process. In short, it’s a very spam-like tactic that no longer works. The second problem with this approach is that many of those hundreds of links will likely end up being relegated to one of Google’s “bad neighborhoods,” a classification saved for directories of poor quality that contain spam-like activity. If that happens, you won’t just receive zero value from the directories—you’ll actually be penalized.

If you would like to research EDriven Concepts even further on your own, here is some contact information that we’ve collected:
EDriven Concepts
41951 Remington Ave Ste 100
Temecula, CA 92590
Miranda (customer service): 951-296-2041
Josh Murlin (sales): 951-296-2245
Please be very careful not to give representatives from EDriven Concepts any sensitive or personal information, as we cannot guarantee its security. If you have any doubts regarding the legitimacy of a phone call, simply hang up, dial our main line (1-800-689-1273), and ask for your account manager.

Wishing you pleasant, honest dealings and continued success,
Prospect Genius

Making SEO Work for You

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

Double Trouble

When your sink is leaking, would you call in two different plumbers to fix the leak at the same time? Would you have two different dentists fill one cavity? Having two pros in to do the same job, at the same time, just doesn’t make much sense.
Of course, these are rather ridiculous examples, and you certainly wouldn’t follow through with either of these scenarios. However, many small companies do work with two separate SEO companies at the same time, hiring both to market the same business… The perception is that this commonplace tactic will help the company get ahead: Two is better than one, right? The truth is that working with two different SEO companies at the same time can be quite damaging. That’s because instead of helping each other out, the two companies are struggling for control of the SEO campaign, and your business ends up caught in between their tug-of-war. The end result is more often a penalty from Google or Bing for activity that looks like spam than it is successful SEO for your company.

The Tortoise Is Better Than the Hare

The reality is that slow and steady wins the race. If you choose to use SEO for your web marketing campaign, the smartest choice is to carefully select a single company to work with. Let them focus on optimization for three to six months, and THEN consider whether you’d like to try a different company.
During that first three to six months, do be involved in and aware of what’s going on with your SEO campaign, but don’t be obstructive or intrusive. SEO doesn’t happen overnight! Contrary to what your high-speed connection might have you believing, the Internet is actually a very slow entity. It reacts and adapts very slowly due to its sheer size and immensity. Google and Bing have to constantly sort through and analyze billions of pages of information to do their jobs effectively, so they may only get to your site every other month or so. Essentially, this means a change on your site that’s implemented today might not be seen for 30 or 60 days.
Because the Internet reacts slowly, SEO can also be a slow process. In order to do it right, small business owners need to realize that Google owns the ball, the bat, the gloves, and the ballpark: if the Internet is like a baseball league, you’ll have to play by Google’s rules if you ever want to see a good ranking for your site.

So, That Means I’m Stuck, Right?

Just because you need to give SEO time to work doesn’t mean you’re stuck with whatever company you choose from the get-go! If they’ve provided zero return on your investment over a six- to nine-month period, and you’ve provided all of the information and resources requested, it’s time to start looking for a replacement. After that much time, a lack of results means you may want to switch to a second SEO company.

Okay, What Should My Business Do?

If you want more than your current SEO campaign is providing, there are still a number of options that don’t include sabotaging yourself by bringing a competing SEO company on board. While you’re waiting those three to six months for your SEO program to develop more fully, you can also promote your business online by:

Using a pay-per-click campaign. PPC can be implemented on your own or with the help of a professional.
Hiring a lead generation program that works differently from an SEO provider. This might include companies similar to Service Magic or Yodle (this is not an endorsement). Each of these drives leads to your company in a way that may complement, not compete with, your SEO campaign.
Expanding your Facebook page and Twitter profile. Putting time and resources into these pages can help your Internet exposure. This type of work can be handled either by a professional or by business owners themselves.
Posting ads on Craigslist. This service is free and will take you just a few minutes.
Exploring the possibility of a radio ad that would promote your business name or website. This can set the stage for more web traffic and be a complement to the SEO work.
Putting a sign on your fleet truck(s) or other vehicles. Not having signs means you’re missing out on an important branding opportunity.

Giving your SEO campaign time to develop fully doesn’t mean you have to sit by the sidelines for months. However, trying the aforementioned options will almost always end better than trying to stack the deck by working with two different SEO companies at the same time–which nearly always backfires!
Have questions? The PG team would love to help. Feel free to contact our customer service professionals for more information.

The Mobile Revolution: Maximizing Your Website's Potential

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

The Future Is Mobile

Most business owners have caught up with the fact that optimizing their website for search is vital to the success of your company. However, now that advertising your business online has become the norm, the game has changed again. Getting to the top of Google/Yahoo!/Bing has long been the leading goal, but you might need to retool your web strategies as the playing field changes.
That’s because mobile search (using a cell phone browser to check out sites on the web) is becoming increasingly popular. Did you realize that approximately 50% of the cell phones sold in the U.S. are smart phones? This adds up to an Internet climate where ranking is no longer the only important thing. In light of the mobile revolution, it’s important to cater to prospective customers who are using mobile browsers, not just desktop computers.
Maybe you’re asking yourself why it matters how a prospective client gets to your website as long as they get there, right? The truth is that this is a rather critical issue, so let’s dig into it a little deeper…

Mobile vs. Desktop Browsing: What’s the Difference?

As you’re certainly aware, when you’re creating a standard website, you want it to be visually pleasing, simple to navigate, and fast to load. Those goals are the same when you’re considering web optimization for mobile devices, but how you achieve those ends can actually be VERY different. Consider this:

Mobile browsing takes place on cell phones and other mobile devices. That means screens are much, much, much smaller.
Phones also have limited power, usually just a fraction of the power a typical desktop has at its disposal.

These differences may not seem like that huge a deal, but they actual mean that mobile browsing is substantially different from standard web browsing. And if your site uses Flash or relies on tons of images, you’re probably in major trouble. That’s because most phones aren’t able to display Flash content at all, and images are generally quite slow to process on phones. In short, Flash and/or lots of images mean two things for mobile browsing and your site:

The content will either not display at all, or it will take so long to load that visitors will lose patience and go elsewhere—perhaps straight to a competitor’s site.
Search engines use load times as one of their factors when deciding results rankings, so slow loading = low rankings.

What to Do About It

If you’re wondering what to do about catching up with the mobile browsing revolution, take a deep breath. For those of you who are already Prospect Genius clients, you don’t have to do anything! The same proprietary content management system that runs your microsite also powers a mobile version that’s automatically optimized for search and mobile display.
For everyone else, there are some steps you can take to make your site more mobile friendly. Consider:

Using code to check the “User Agent String.” If it is reported as a mobile browser, that code can display a different version of the web page. Unless you’re a tech pro, you probably won’t want to tackle this on your own though…
Submitting a mobile sitemap to the major search engines. It’s typically best to never force the search engines to guess about anything, ever. Just come right out to the front and tell them all about the mobile version of your site.
Making sure excessive images don’t clog up the mobile version. Remove all images or, at the very least, switch to small image sizes so they load faster.
Utilizing obvious and simple navigational items. Remember, not all phones are touch screens, and many lack a mouse-like pointing device.
Making mobile pages extra narrow. People on older style phones have tiny screens, and even BlackBerries have a fairly small display. Don’t make people scroll horizontally AND vertically.

If you’re looking for more tips and tricks on mobile browsing and your website, check out this older, but still valid, blog post.
Have questions about this or any other SEO topic? Feel free to contact Prospect Genius to learn more. We’re available by phone at 800-689-1273 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 800-689-1273 end_of_the_skype_highlighting or you can e-mail our account managers at sales@prospectgenius.com. Additional info about our products, services, and online marketing is also available throughout our web site, so don’t forget to look around!

Prospect Genius

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

Warning About Fraudulent EDriven Concepts Calls

Contact Us

Business Hours

Let’s Connect!

What Drives Us?

Client Portal App

Helpful Links

Sign up for our newsletter!