Welcome back Rankers. Had a couple of interesting telemarketing calls last week. We had someone ring in from India who then transferred us to the USA and it was the same company on Thursday and Friday. We recorded both calls and I’m going to play the second call that happened on the Friday in a second. If it gets too boring for you just fast forward 8 minutes. I know a lot of you aren’t that fond of telemarketers. Personally, I love them, think they’re great.
This is their site and we’re going to review their site and a little bit about online reputation management in a second but here’s the call first: “view the video”.
OK so that was Mario and this is the Blue Ridge Telecom site. You can see we’ve got a couple of formatting issues here. I don’t think the site has been cross browser checked, make sure you cross browser check and there’s a lot of browsers to cross check in these days. You’ve got Chrome, you’ve got Firefox, you’ve got Safari, you’ve got IE, you’ve got Safari Mobile, there’s a whole bunch of other mobile or IOS and Android browsers now as well but you’ve got to do the cross checking because this is the sort of thing that happens. This site might look reasonable in Internet Explorer but I do not know because I do not have a copy. If we have a look at Google and we just type in the Company name and this is where I was having trouble “blue ridge telecom”. Blue Ridge Telecom complaint systems in Australia. The keyword suggestions here are really about what the most popular phrase is in my geographical area relating to this base phrase here and you’ll see it changes as I type. Right up we can see there that the office that Mario was working in or that site doesn’t rank #1 for that phrase. He’s got the page title right but seriously there’s nothing else really, there’s no H1’s on the page. If we have a look at the site, we’ve got Blue Ridge Telecom here but no back links. One of the things I was interested in was the other results have started to come up in Google when you typed in their name.
We’ve done a lot of what we call “Online reputation management” jobs before. If we have a look at the Google results again I’ll show you what I mean by online reputation management. We’ve got forums here from Whirlpool (if you’re in the USA you might not be seeing this) but as you saw from the call, when I was talking to Mario they do have an Australian office as well. But there’ some things in here in the old Whirlpool forums, now a lot of people when they get a bad review or something in Whirlpool forums they are quite worried about it. A lot of people think that when they get a bad review in a forum like Whirlpool, that’s it can’t do anything about it. There’s a couple of things you can do. Either you can choose to engage in the forum itself, some people say that’s just going to inflame the situation whereas you should just let it fade away. Well… that might be a good idea in a lot of cases but you can see here this was posted in 2004 so jumping into the conversation now is probably a bit too late. If you need to make that go away the way to do it is, because it is so old, basically you’ve got to get out there and let Google know there’s more pages on the web other than just your home page. So that can be your Twitter presence, if you have one. In the case of Blue Ridge, I did a long search, no Twitter presence, no Facebook presence. I did actually find the President at Blue Ridge Telecom on Facebook and I’ve befriended him but he hasn’t added me back. There are pages like Linkedin, your Google profile, your twitter presence, your Facebook page, all these things can serve to be pages about your business and get those ranked above, because let’s face it, an old forum post from 2004 if there’s something more relevant about that phrase blue ridge telecom that’s what Google’s going to want to rank. That’s what you’re trying to do here, you’re trying to get more positive pages on the system, on the Google search engine results page above ones that might be negative. Like this one from the Telecommunications Ombudsman, this is not so bad, this is just a member of the TIO so that’s good, here we’ve got all their customer service numbers and fax numbers and the address where Mario was, which is nice. That page is fairly OK to have there, it’s not doing anything bad, it’s not doing any good. Then you’ve got the Australian page, no it’s not an Australian page, it just talks about Australia. You may also have a duplicate content issue here, you might want to check that Mario or get your boss to check it. Then we’ve got another negative one down here unfortunately but you will see that even though I’m doing this search in .com.au these are .com results coming up. Which means if you’re an Australian company and you see a lot of .com negative stuff about your brand and your audience is primarily in Australia you can create a lot of .com.au presence which will automatically rank above the .com if it’s more relevant with keyword density and those sorts of things than these other ones and half the time it will be. This one is Blue Ridge scandal, probably not a good title that jumps out when you’re Googling your name there Mario. You may want to check all these things but just remember that when you’re doing online reputation management quite often it’s far better for you to jump in, engage, nip the bad press in the bud. Other times, if people are just being bullies then it’s probably a good idea to stand aside. In fact, I’m always surprised a lot of the times when Sensis or the Yellow Pages engage on my blog. I think they’d be much better off just letting it go. If they want to engage that’s fine with me, I’m happy to talk
To talk to them.
That is it for todays show. Hopefully that’s helpful, hopefully if you’re spending money on employing telemarketers you may be thinking twice about it now, maybe thinking of putting the money into say search or social which of course have much better returns. That is it for this week. We’ll see you next week. Thanks very much. Bye.
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