Website Promotion is not Voodoo

Who dat?

Who dat?

Who dat say dey gonna beat dem saints?

#whodat - from Maitri

The above is my best approximation of the phonetic for the entire “Who Dat” chant. Who Dat, used to be a very personal, private New Orleans thing. I was in New York a few weeks ago visiting my mother and she asked “What’s this ‘Who Dat?’ thing all about”?.

And yes, I use my mother as my barometer for ubiquity. For instance, when my mother’s on Facebook everyone is on Facebook.

In the middle of August we started testing Facebook Advertising for one of our plastic surgeon clients.  The surgeon wanted to reach potential tummy tuck and breast augmentation patients.  We selected a number of stock images and loaded the ads.  However, Facebook rejected all of our ads (The Downsides) because they did not follow the Facebook advertising guidelines.

Facebook Advertising Early Lessons

This was a shock to me, the surgeon and the 5 other people who saw the Facebook advertising mockups, because we thought we used:

• relevant and appropriate images and language
• correct grammar
• spelling and punctuation

Recently, I received the phone call that no one in SEO ever wants to receive. In a nutshell, our clients’ site had completely fallen off the rankings. I, of course, began scrambling for what could have possibly happened within a week- the final result…..duplicate content! (Disclaimer: We did not place duplicate content up. It was a franchise site.)

Acceptable Reasons for Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is not looked upon highly by Google, and can either hurt your rankings or make them disappear completely. According to Google Webmaster Tools, there are a few places duplicate content is acceptable.

One of the first road blocks we often have to get around is the belief that the Google Local 7-Pack map listing is the “whole enchilada.”

Yeah, the Google 7-Pack is definitely a positive listing for a local business, gets your listing featured at the top of the page with your primary competition.   It’s good stuff, sure.  This is not an exact quote, but it comes from Steve Espinosa: “With a #1 map ranking and #1 organic ranking, organic get’s 1.8 times the traffic.”  Of a potential 100% combined traffic, 30% would come from the map listing.

Have you ever asked your mechanic to reupholster your seats? Have you asked your aesthetician to give you a face lift? Probably not and with good reason. It isn’t their job. There may be mechanics out there who know a lot about upholstery and some who can actually do it. I’m sure somewhere out there there is an aesthetician who knows all about plastic surgery but that doesn’t mean they are qualified to perform it.  I thought it was funny the first time I saw a clause in a designer’s contract stating that they are not IT and will not teach HTML to the recipient of site design.  The longer I’ve been in the industry the more I understand why.

The reason testimonials and reviews are so powerful is because they provide a third-party (and hopefully, unbiased) opinion of what actual users think about products and services. Google knows this and considers reviews and citations an important factor in local search rankings.

Studies have shown that not only do long customer stories (2.5 times longer than reviews) lead to increased, more relevant search results, but increasing website interactivity with fresh, real-world content like customer questions and answers can increase sales conversions and lower customer service costs. For some business owners online reviews have become far more useful than the traditional print yellow pages and savvy business owners have figured out proactive ways to use online review sites.

Plastic Surgery Internet References Benchmark for December Shows Overall Decline of Less Than 17% from Spring – The Busiest Season of The Year

We work with a number of plastic surgeons and have the opportunity to really get a sense for their zeitgeist. Right now many of them are feeling a pinch – our review had, to this point, been anecdotal rather than analytical. Suffice it to say we knew there was a problem but didn’t know if it was a lack of traffic, or a lack of conversion (window shopping but no buying).

Your Google listing and its Google Place page is a great central depository for all information about your business.  It is the compilation of business owner provided data as well as user-generated reviews. The Place page is an incredibly valuable tool for a small or medium size business owner.  The Places page URL is friendly to users, easy to share, and easy to find …

You will want to search for your company + geo modifier.

For example, “Search Influence, New Orleans, LA” will get me here:

Google’s idea of giving small businesses their own page through their project, Place Pages for Google Maps, has got local search buzzing with the SEO implications of this move for small business websites. Could Place Pages provide competition in the SERPS for the small business website? It’s possible. Will they be bad for business? That’s not so clear.

For one, a business without a high ranking or optimized website would benefit from the obvious boost of having Google display “all the information for that place in one place” on its very own Place Page. On the other hand, the fact that Place Pages also provide user-generated content, in the form of reviews, has just made the task of online reputation management that much harder.