Transcript
Hi guys, and welcome to the edition of Zupo SEO Talk & Tea.
Today's conversation, how reputation management sites should supplement your SEO. This is an important conversation because I think when it comes to SEO, we often can get singular where we're only trying to rank our site, but the search landscape on Google search results are often... There are usually seven to 10 spots available and with your site trying to rank on the first page is usually only one spot you can take. You often want to think about other positions on the first page kind of give you more opportunity to have more real estate there. But before we begin, as you can tell, I can really dive into that conversation, but I need to introduce the tea we have today because this is SEO Talk and Tea.
This tea is very special tea that I actually don't normally, I don't even know if I have brought it on the show before, but this is a smoked roasted oolong. I'm pretty sure it is. No one's ever told me, but this was gifted to me by my father from our family in China. What I taste, yeah definitely I can taste a smoked roasted oolong. The importance of this tea is just that my dad went back to China to go reconnect with our ancestors. My family has been in the U.S. and Malaysia for about six or seven generations. So we're quite removed, but he went back to China to kind of reconnect with the clan and everything and they gifted him this tea. I particularly really enjoy this tea. It's got a very smoky kind of flavor. So when you drink it as a tea, it's just really unique because you're not used to having something so smoky. But I digress.
Let's go ahead and jump on to this conversation. When it comes to SEO, oftentimes we're so singularly focused on ranking our one site, but then oftentimes there are slots available that we can not take anyway. So let me give you a very, very oversimplified example. If you ever look up restaurants, and I always use pizza. Let's use a pizza. What you'll often find is you'll find stores like the big brands and then you'll probably find some small businesses in your local area. What you'll usually see is Yelp listings come up or back in the day I guess you could use Foursquare or whatever it might be. But Yelp and Google My Business are the two top reputation management kind of displays.
The important thing is if you get your site to rank, that's great, but you need to think beyond that. Is your site ranking on the Google My Business map? Do you have enough reviews? Do you have enough optimizations to have your listing appear on the Google My Business? For the Yelp listing that appears on the Google search result, does your business appear on the Yelp results [inaudible 00:02:32]? Because my thing is, let's say someone is truly looking for pizza and they go on Google and okay cool, they see your website listed maybe on the second spot. They're like, "Okay, cool. There's Jason's pizza shop." But then on the Google My Business map, they don't see you there. Then they go on Yelp and they're like, "Okay, cool. There's all these other ones." They're overloaded with different options.
But let's flip the script now. Let's go and they do the same Google search pizza, and they see the Google My Business. "Okay, Jason's Pizza. I saw the second one. Okay. That's kind of cool." They scroll down. "Oh, Jason's Pizza. Their site comes up. That's cool." Then they see on Yelp, they click the Yelp listing and Jason's Pizza again is on the top. There is something when it comes to marketing advertising with social proofing. The more you see something, the more confident you feel that that's the right choice to go. So what is best for you to recommended to clients is you may have strong feelings about other reputation management sites that you feel that they're stealing your money and they're not getting results, but there is some strategic merit to having a full fledged, holistic strategy.
Google My Business maps have become a very important part of SEO. Therefore, that one you should optimize for and that one's part of Google. That's not too big of a deal. Had your site ranked well, and then if you also have your site lists well on reputation management sites, you can do a lot better. And Yelp, isn't the only one. It really changes by industry. If you're in software, it might be Capterra. If you are in an agency, it's going to be Clutch. If you're a food business is going to be Yelp. It will change based on the industry. You should analyze the keyword rankings, see what does rank on the first page, and then start analyzing. Is it worth it for us to start investing and trying to get to that first spot by asking for reviews and so on and so forth.
Because what we have often found is that once you start really working on those reviews on reputation management sites for the right search results, you can really start seeing improvement. Where I have clients telling me, "Yeah, every sale." They'll say, "Oh, we saw all your reviews." And that's how they get their sale. So, that's something that I would highly encourage you guys to kind of do. Look beyond your site. I know that some people have really strong feelings about working with reputation management sites, but it is well worth it in supplement to your current SEO plans. So hopefully you guys can do that with your own SEO. I really encourage it. I know it can be difficult to get reviews, but the investment can really help turn into sales. If you guys found the video valuable, please like and subscribe and I hope to see you guys again soon.
Thanks everybody.