Transcript
Hi guys, and welcome to another edition of Zupo's SEO Talk & Tea.
Today's conversation is telling when it is worth it to list your website on a reputation management site. This is an important conversation because a lot of companies, when it comes to SEO, you are battling a nuanced battleground usually. I have filmed another video about this, but reputation management sites like Yelp, Facebook, TripAdvisor and so on and so forth have become more and more powerful in the sense that you need to balance and share market share of search results with these reputation management sites.
So it's an important discussion that I want to have today, but before we jump on in, I want to introduce the tea we had today is a Darjeeling black tea. This is from BLK & Bold, a charitable company that when you buy tea from, 5% of the proceeds go to a disadvantaged domestic youth. This is bought from my housemate who bought it... Said that I could use it for the videos and everything. So I really appreciate that, but let's go ahead and get brewing and talking.
So again, how to tell if it's worth it to list on a reputation management site. There are many reputation management sites that are out there, and there's many variations of it. Google My Business is one, Facebook is one, Yelp is one, Capterra for software is one. There's many variations of it. I would say what becomes difficult though, is many directories and reputation management sites pop up left and right every single day and there's always these newcomers. It can be difficult because you will often get cold emails on cold outreach from these companies to list on their website and generally once you list, then generally they want you to upgrade to a sponsorship or some paid platform, which isn't bad by any means, but if everyone's asking you to pay for leads or listings then you do need to start measuring your effort.
Also on another level, getting reviews can be difficult. So how do you hedge, if there's 10 reputation manager sites, where your reviews should go, and that's kind of what we want to discuss today. And so something that I work with on with my clients is on when we're [inaudible 00:02:03] reputation management size, we want to know if they get the coverage. When you are getting these cold emails or get reached out to by them, generally, it can... You can be unsure if they actually get the traffic that they're saying. Every reputation management site can tell you, "Oh, we get lots of traffic, thousands, millions a day and we can get viewers to see your listing."
That's cool and all, but what I want to make sure is the whole point of reputation management sites is that they need to get traffic that's relevant to you then that can drive to you. Now I'm going to have this discussion in a purely SEO sense. We can talk about other variations later, but what I do with my clients is when reputation management sites go to them and say, "Hey, you should list on our site and focus getting reviews with us." What we often do is we do have back audit of that reputation management of the site and then we determine, "Hey, is this site actually... This reputation management, do they actually rank for keywords that are relevant to us?"
Let me give you an example. We had a reputation management site reach out to one of our clients who was a video production firm. The video production firm sends it to us and said, "Do you think it's worth listing and focusing our resources on?"
I took a backend look of the reputation management site and when I looked through it, they ranked for about 20 keywords on the first page that had the word "video" in it. Now, the site we do focus on... The reputation management site we do focus on, I did a back audit of theirs and they rank for 850 keywords that have the word "video" on the first page. So when I showed this to the client, it became obvious that that new website that was pitching them may not be worth it because they do not nearly have the scale as the other one.
So something that's important for us is that we want to rank on and list on reputation management sites that are ranked on the first page of Google for high value key words that actually will bring that level of business. We want to focus reviews, sponsorship, money, and efforts onto those sites that can actually do it. So in that case, when a reputation management site is coming to you saying, "Hey, you should list on our site," and you're determining, do I want to list, do I want to focus on getting reviews? Then third, do I even want to spend the money to even list on their website? What you can do is do a back link... Not back audit.
You can do an audit of the backend to look up what keywords they actually rank for, determine if it's worth it. If you find that a lot of the keywords they rank for... They might rank for a lot of keywords, but the keywords that you're focused on, they don't rank for, then you should move on and look for something else. So that's kind of my two cents.
The thing I mentioned before about looking at this from an SEO sense. Some firms also rank... Not rank really well, but they do very well on social media. Hey, maybe they get a lot of traffic social media wise, and you need to kind of measure it on that level, but today's video is strictly about the SEO sense. So ensure that when you are considering sponsoring or listing on a reputation management site, check what they rank for. Are they irrelevant? If they're not relevant, then you could probably move on to other opportunities that may exist because there's lots of reputation management sites out there.
So hopefully you can use that when you are being briefed or pitched on certain reputation management sites. I would tell you reputation management sites aren't bad. I heavily encouraged my clients to focus on them, but you just want to focus on the right ones. So I want to leave it at that. If you guys found this video valuable, please like and subscribe. I'm going to go pour out my black team now and I hope to see you guys again in future videos. Thanks everybody.