Website Ranking Factors For Small Business (Part 2 of 3)

In my prior article in this series, I discussed website On-Page Ranking Factors for small business websites.  This article will cover factors that are considered Off-Page Ranking Factors and how they apply to a small business trying to achieve first page rankings for desired keywords,

Off Page Search Engine Ranking Factors for Small Business Websites

This first article will cover what is known as Off Page factors, meaning what can be done on the website itself. We will cover the following:

• Link Quality
• Embedded Link Text
• Number of Links
• Domain Age
• Social Media Shares
• Social Media Reputation
• Locality

Inbound Link Quality

As a small business owner, you have no doubt been presented with so called “opportunities” to link your website with other web properties across the  web.  These solicitations often come in the form of emails or phone calls promising hundreds of inbound links to increase your optimization, often for a nominal fee per month.  The other form of linking small businesses are often presented with are paid links from local directories such as: dexknows.com, yelp.com, yellowpages.com and others.

When considering buying links as a small business, it is very important to weigh the quality of the links, and what if anything they will do for your website.  Solicitations that promise hundreds or even thousands of inbound links for a very low monthly price I recommend steering away from.  These links are often generated from spam activity to other websites, or they may even be links traded or bought through other webmasters.  Paid links can get you penalized by the search engines.  No matter what kind of testimonials, reviews or whatever you see from these folks – however tempting it may be – don’t do it.  SEOMOZ did an experiment with paid link building, you can watch the video here on why paid links are bad.

The second form of link building for small businesses above is links from local, trusted directories that Google and other search engines consider “Authoritative”.  I do recommend this, as it will help the search engines understand what your small business does – and when you tell Google what you do, and an authoritative source says the same thing – that’s a good thing.  I do however caution small business owners to buy listings on local directories for the right reasons.  In my opinion the only thing you are looking to achieve with these local directories is getting the authoritative juice from them.  This can be achieved many times with just a basic listing and profile, which often can be bought for under $40 per month.  Many of these local directory companies (sometimes referred to as IYP’s or Internet Yellow Pages) offer so called variations of pay per click and SEO services, I recommend steering away these services as almost 100% of the time they are optimizing “doorway pages” to your site.  They call these doorway pages many different things such as: store fronts, business profiles, 1 page websites and more, but the bottom line is that they drive the traffic to their site and not yours.

Embedded Link Text

There is a lot of speculation these days from different SEO experts on the value of embedded link text on your website…but since this article is related to SEO OFF your website, I won’t go into that.  Embedded link text is the practice of try to achieve what is known as “link juice” from another web property.

Whether the website you are trying to gain juice from is a blog, forum, or maybe just a related type of business, embedded link text is nothing more than placing a link on another site with keywords you hope to be found for.  For example in this article about Link Juice you can see that the person who wrote it linked the following terms: Link Juice, High Quality Backlinks and SEO Link Building Service.  The hope here was that they would rank for these terms – which worked because I searched Link Juice and found them in 6th position.

Number of Links

PageRank is an algorithm that Google uses to measure the popularity of a website, page or post in relation to competing websites, pages or posts.  I won’t even attempt to explain it further as the algorithm was developed by the famous mathematician John Nash – winner of The Nobel Math Award – he had a movie made about his life called “A Beautiful Mind” which starred Russel Crowe and Ed Harris.

Here recently Google has changed the way it applies the PageRank Algorithm to websites, but for purposes of local small businesses essentially it boils down to how many quality websites link to your domain.   These days inbound links can be achieved through social media also…maybe the start of Link Building 2.0?

Domain Age

How long have you owned your domain?  How long has it been registered?  How long till it expires?  These are things that the search engines check.  A domain that’s been active for 10 years will be considered as a more trusted source than a domain that’s been active for 6 months.  Unfortunately websites come and go for many reasons, if you’re the new kid on the block, registering your domain for longer periods shows the search engines that you are serious about your commitment to your website for years to come.

Social Media Shares and Social Media Reputation

I’ve been in the internet marketing arena for almost 10 years now.  Eight years ago when I would meet with small business owners, often the question was “do I really need a website?” and for obvious reasons I always said yes…fast-forward  to the last few years the question is now “do I really need to do social media?” and again my answer is the same.  Google and the other major search engines look and grade on how people socially engage your business, website and content.  Whether someone is sharing your business on Facebook, or someone is Digg’in your website, it’s all tracked.  How people are engaging your business right here, right now matters – not matter if you use social media or not.  With the roll out of Google+ and the popularity of other social media sites, it’s something that can’t be ignored by a small business.

Social Media Reputation is a measurement of who shares your information on social networks.  This is probobly one of the biggest reasons to get involved in article writing and blogging.  Small business owners in local areas are in a unique position to set themselves apart as locally trusted sources on social media outlets by publishing high quality content that demonstrates their expertise in a certain field.  98% of small businesses will never take it to this level, so that leaves 2% to propel themselves ahead of their competition – garnering valuable real estate on SERP’s and social media sites.

Locality

Have you let the search engines know where you pull your customers from?  The search engines realize that local search is huge, Google estimates that 20% off all their queries have local intent.  Not telling the search engines your service area will leave your business in the dark to consumers looking for you outside of your immediate area.  Google Places, Yahoo Local, Bing Maps, your website content, and those authoritative sources we spoke about before are great areas to start letting the search engines know where you serve.

Next article in this series will be: Website Ranking Factors for Small Business – Things that will hurt your website

Online Reviews Boost Rankings and Sales for Small Businesses

Back in 2007, The Kelsey Group along with ComScore compiled a study which studied the relationship between positive online reviews, off line buying and price paid for services by consumers.  Now understanding this study was done in 2007, some percentages may have changed since then, but the data complied in this study should make generation of positive online reviews a priority for any small business.

How Many Of Your Customers Look For Reviews On Your Business?

The above study found that 41% of consumers read reviews before deciding (have to believe that percentage is higher 5 years later).  And of those, as high as 87% of polled said reviews (or lack of) had a direct influence on their decision to purchase (or not).  One of the greatest findings in my opinion was that 97% of everyone that took part in the study said reviews had some sort of impact on their decision to buy.

So the question I often ask my customers is: What is being said about your business online?  Are you making it easy for people to leave reviews on you business?  Do you engage your customers and prospects through social media, your website and in your store ask for their online recommendation?  If you’re not doing these simple things, I can honestly say you are missing the boat with your biggest fan base…your current satisfied customers.

Online Reviews Generate Sales

Notice I didn’t say “positive” online reviews generate sales?  Often I get push back about making it easy for people to leave reviews about a customers business.  I think with many small business owners there is always that fear of generating the dreaded Negative Review.  I wholeheartedly believe that the vast majority of small business owners want and strive to do what is best for each and every one of their customers.  Are there times when you’re not going to be able to satisfy every single customer?  Of course.  Is it plausible that a disgruntled customer may post something online that’s less than stellar?  Of course.  But in response to the fear of the dreaded Negative Review, I ask my customers if they were searching online and found a business that only had 5 star reviews, and nothing else, what would they think of buying from that business?  I get several responses to this question, but in general the sentiment is that they would proceed with caution before buying from that business…because as they are already well aware, pleasing everyone is impossible.

Dealing With The Dreaded Negative Review

Now that we have addressed and mostly agree that all reviews won’t be 100% positive, lets talk about how to address and take care of that negative review, if it ever comes your way.  First as a small business you need to decide where to invest in trying to get customers reviewing your business.  I typically start my customers on Google Places, Yahoo Local and Facebook.  Each one of these have functionality to be able to publicly respond as the business owner, or a representative of the business.  Responses to negative reviews should be done quickly as possible to show that you as the business owner follow up on every customer issue quickly.  There are many different software programs and platforms available to monitor your online reputation.

How Not To Respond to a Negative Review

If that negative review comes in, as a business owner you want to respond to it.  I really recommend taking emotion out of your response as it will most likely tarnish what should be a professional response from you.  Lashing out, picking apart, belittling and other such responses have no place here.  Below I have placed a screen shot of one such response I found online.  Obviously the business owner was hurt and dismayed at the review, but placing threats, or questioning someones motive should not be done here.  If I had run across this response while looking for what this business  did…I would have run the other way…and interestingly enough, 5 out of 8 people that were asked if the negative review helped them said yes.  In my eyes. complete failure on the business owners part.

The Correct Way To Respond

I’m not going to pretend that I know your business and how you should respond to a negative online review.  You know your customers and you know how they talk, act and what they respond to.  Obviously responses would vary depending on your business.  A daycare center would respond differently than a tattoo shop, so understand that, you as the business owner should look at your response as everyone else will…a direct reflection  on how you treat upset customers.  Going into long drawn out rants on why this particular customer was impossible to service, or attacking their credibility will do little to improve any damage that may have been done.  Instead I recommend asking details about what was wrong with the service, dates and times, who they dealt with, and personally asking them to call the business and asking for you by name will reap must greater results.  That will go miles further than the example above.  Below I have included a response from a business owner that I thought was very good.

The business owner concluded the review by leaving their full name as well as a phone number to contact them personally.