Here at Brew City Marketing, we’ve recently moved to a new office with a new street address, which required updating our information across the web. It’s crucial to our business that when customers are searching for our brand online they are getting accurate results, so we didn’t want any potential customers being led to our old address. Once the information was updated, we wanted to do a sweep through of all the major search engines to ensure any searches for our brand included up-to-date information. Even if your business hasn’t undergone any major changes recently, it’s something you should do once a month to ensure your information is up to date and accurate. Here is how to do it in 3 simple steps:
First, put yourself in your customer’s shoes and make a list of at least 3 searches they might be making when seeking your company. At BCM, we included 5 that we thought would be most important for our situation:
- Brew City Marketing
- 9205 W Center St, Suite 209, Milwaukee WI, 53222 (old address)
- 9211 W Center St, Milwaukee WI, 53222 (new address)
- Brew City Marketing + Old Address
- Brew City Marketing + New Address
Next, it’s time to start searching for inconsistencies in the information representing your business online. Start with the major search engines. We scanned Google, Bing, Yahoo, and AOL and dug around 5 or 6 pages deep when it came to search results. Our goal was to make sure any links with our address information were updated to include our new address and not our old one. Also, we wanted to make sure any search results with our new address didn’t include any information on past occupants of the office space. There was previously an optometrist in our office space, so we wanted to know how many links still included our new address with the old occupant’s information. After you finish looking through the major search engines, we also recommend searching major directories like Facebook, Yelp, Google Business, Zillow, or any other sites that may be industry specific.
Third, track what you find. We created a spreadsheet in Google Drive to list the URLs of the incorrect search results. Setting up a spreadsheet is a great way of organizing the collected information and keeping it in an easily shareable source. You can format it any way you like; we found that creating a separate sheet for each search, and dividing the URLs by search engine on each sheet worked the best. Don’t worry if you record the same URL multiple times in the spreadsheet, it will be much easier and clearer to delete the URL after the fact than to try to recognize which sites you’ve already visited while searching. It’s better to list URLs multiple times than miss one or two.
It’s simple to track the incorrect search results, but what do you do with any incorrect information you’ve found? Reach out to websites that have your information listed incorrectly and ask them to update the information. This might include sending an email, making a phone call, or creating an account within the website to claim the correct information and get access to change it. Some may ask you to pay to change the information – if the website isn’t a major player online and probably not influencing many people, we don’t recommend giving them any money. In these cases many times it’s a scam and should be avoided.
Give us a call at 414-208-0700 or visit our website www.brewcitymarketing.com for some one-on-one help or advice!
I shouldn’t even be writing this right now. But I had to – I just had to. I literally had 3 different clients tell me horror stories this week that made me mad. Very mad. As I was sharing these stories with my business partner, I had the idea to start sharing these stories with you. The title for this series of blogs came to me at the same time: “Confessions of an Honest Web Marketer.” I hope you don’t see it as a pompous title because I really do see myself as an honest guy and business owner. It makes me mad when I hear horror stories from my clients on how they were, or currently are, being treated by their existing web marketing company.
Somewhere along the way, some local internet marketers forgot that they had to keep up with the ever-changing rules of SEO to stay competitive. For them, the old days of carefully calculated keyword percentages is still in full effect, even while their page rankings continue to slip.
When you’re building a business, every online review counts. And, the smaller your business, the more painful each negative review feels (and looks). So, how should you cope with bad online reviews and negative social messaging? Here are a few tips:
