Conferences

Last week at Blog Indiana I sat in on the Search Engine Reputation Management (SERM) session, presented by Slingshot SEO co-founder Jeremy Dearringer, mainly for two reasons.

1. After seeing mentions of Slingshot SEO all over the place I was curious as to what Slingshot SEO did.
2. I was curious as to their take on tackling brand management in the search engines.

Going in everyone who has listened to me knows my take on the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) industry as a whole.  It would seem that the vast majority of those that claim to be “SEO Experts/Gurus” are paranoid, incompetent and up to no good which turns out to bite their clients in the rear eventually.  My blood boils when new clients come to us stating something like “our last SEO guy got us banned from (insert search engine here), he took a ton of our money, can you help us out & get that behind us?”.  While we can help out, it’s a long road back to normalcy.

All of that to say, in the first few minutes of Jeremy’s presentation it was clear that Slingshot SEO was legit and he had my full attention.

As to what Slingshot SEO does, I would peg them more as a search engine PR firm as opposed to simply optimizing content.  Their approach is optimizing content in multiple places and across multiple services with the goal of resolving small problems before they become large ones.

A few of the key points Jeremy hit on are:

• Most people click on negative search results first
• Most people don’t actually read everything and often stop at the title and make assumptions
• Use monitoring tools such as Google Alerts (which we highly recommend)
• Make sure your most important information is on your home page (that would seem obvious, but take a look around and let me know what you see)
• Focus on customer service (you are in business for your customers)
• Respect others
• Know when to say no (this is a hard one to learn, especially when business is slow and/or you’re a start-up, but trust me, LEARN TO SAY NO if you don’t feel good and/or confident about something as it’s not worth damaging your business for)

However, I have to disagree with the stance of staying away from all review sites/directories (i.e. all of the”Local” sites within the search engines).  Yes, I understand that you don’t control these in any manner and people can try to ruin your reputation there, but if you are confident that you have a good product and good customer service any negative responses can be dealt with.  As a consumer I don’t expect everyone to like everything, but if something is clearly crap, let it be called out as such.  And as a business owner myself, if something I do is honestly below expectations, I want to know that and to be held accountable.  My business isn’t here for me or my feelings, it’s here for my customers.

Overall it was one of the better sessions I sat in on and thanks to Jeremy for sharing.

Here are the slides if you wish to view them…

{ 1 comment }