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Today’s Article

The deeper information technologies penetrate our lives, the more powerfully you and your customers can use them for decision making. All we need to make the best available choice is reliable information – from eyewitnesses, first-hand users, reviewers, and experts. Search engines and news feeds give you a good idea if your brand is established and how it is perceived on the Web. But sites providing user-generated content – shared opinions in the form of ratings and votes, reviews and comments, tags and bookmarks – are even more important places for you to check brand reputation, and measure brand popularity.

What are the measurable signals of brand popularity?

Search for mentions of your brand name, create benchmarks, and run comparisons with your top competitors. Brand popularity metrics can be monitored at:

• Major search engines for both search volume (Google) and the number of found results.
• Blog search engines (Technorati, Google Blogs) for the overall number of blog posts, tags, comments, blog authority rates. There is no need to track all the blog search engines – select one or two with the results that you find most representative.
• Sites consisting of user submitted content (Digg, Reddit, Newsvine, etc.) for votes and comments.
• Twitter for found search results, followers, retweets.
• Media sharing sites (YouTube, Hulu, Yahoo Video, Flickr, Deviantart, and many others) for the number of uploads and downloads, views or listenings, video/image/photo/music ratings, number of comments.
• Social bookmark sites and toolbars (Delicious, StumbleUpon, Diigo, and others) for tags and saved bookmarks.
• Product and service review sites if applicable (Epinions, Ratings, Buzzillions etc.) for the number of reviews, pro and con votes, ratings.
• Forums for the number of search results, threads, user reputation, connections.
• Social networks for engagement facts such as the number of connections, profile completeness, recommendations, participations in groups, Q&A, etc.

At the same time, brand reputation measurement should rest not only upon the numbers being quantitative characteristics of popularity, but also upon qualitative evidence. An analysis should also include the prevailing tone of the reviews, articles or comments.

How to automate the brand popularity analysis

The market has replied to a social media boom with numerous buzz and sentiment analysis tools. The most comprehensive solutions are quite costly. Nielsen BuzzMetrics, Sysomos’s MAP and Heartbeat and Radian6 are outstanding web buzz tracking and analysis solutions covering tens of millions of blogs, social networks, groups, boards and other CGM platforms, but a typical ‘do-it-yourself’ small business marketer could hardly afford them.

So if the perspective of paying a three- or even four-digit monthly fee is beyond your purse, a healthy approach would be to focus your analysis on a) the most popular (and crowded) social media and b) the most targeted (niche) sites while using free tools to check your brand reputation on them. The below free services will automate your brand reputation monitoring task rather efficiently.

• Major search engines – use the Web CEO Keywords tool to retrieve the search volume from Google and competition numbers from all the major search engines.
• Blog search engines – Nielsen BlogPulse is a great free service to see brand popularity trends. You can also use BlogScope for the same purpose.
• For Twitter info analysis, you can use TweetStats, Twitter Analyzer, TweetVolume and Twopular.

Measuring positive and negative sentiments is still difficult to achieve via automated measuring services. Scoutlabs service (which is quite expensive) brings the best results in sentiment analysis and trend building. To our best knowledge, the current technologies for automated text meaning recognition are far from perfect. This is why, to guarantee the most accurate results, some expensive reputation management solutions offer manual sentiment measurement.

Web CEO Metrics

Here we are sharing the generalized numbers from our HitLens Web Analytics service. It covers 300,000+ websites from all over the world.

Microsoft’s Bing has grown its number of queries from 5% to 8% of global searches. Little by little, Yahoo’s visitors are declining with 8% of all Internet searches compared to the previous year’s 9%. Google continues to dominate – it refers 81% of all searches.

Global Search Engines(%)

You can see how visitors are being referred to websites.

Search engines hold the first place as a principal site visitor referrer, and their share has significantly grown compared to February 2009. Bookmarking and linking, with shares fluctuating between 20% and 22% during the last year, refer an almost equal number of visitors. The number of search marketers who use paid advertising has increased.

Visitor Referrers (%)

SEO Experiment

Competition Number Comparison

This time we’ve queried the major search engines for approximately 1,000 popular and unpopular keywords and then grouped them by common themes. As a result, we’ve got the number of search results (competition) that each of the requested search engines returned.

A long time ago, search engines expressly boasted their search indice volumes. Now they don’t disclose this information, but we all want to have at least indirect evidence of how large the major search engines’ indices are. From the diagram, we can see that Yahoo! is a champ in serving search results (competitors) for popular and unpopular keywords. Google comes second and Bing comes third. But does Yahoo have a quality advantage? And is the Yahoo’s search index size larger because it has more unique sites in it? Or is it more likely that Google and Bing have more advanced technologies in dynamic page indexing and they are able to filter out dynamic URLs pointing at the same pages? A good point for a further research study, isn’t it?

SEO Experiment

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Today’s Article

70% of online consumers have said they use the Internet to research everyday grocery products. (Prospectiv, January 2008)

41% of Europeans claim to have changed their mind about what brand to buy as a result of researching choices online, according to EIAA’s latest Mediascope survey. (Mediascope Europe, November 2008)

Brands with the highest “social media activity” (includes reviews) increased revenues by as much as 18%. (Media Post News, July 2009)

Over half (51%) of consumers are using the Internet before making a purchase in a shop. They educate themselves on the best deals available. (Verdict Research, May 2009)

Do you still think online reputation is something you may ignore?

It is very important for present-day businesses to carefully listen to what is said online, even if what is said is negative. Listening gives you the ability to react, resolve problems and disprove untrue information that may negatively affect your brand and corporate reputation.

Consumers use search engines to gather information. When they search for your company or product names, you will want positive information to be found in the top positions of search engines results pages (SERPs).

Online reputation management is a combination of marketing, public relations and search engine marketing efforts. Visibility and high keyword positions are the main goals for good publicity, because you can facilitate favorable information to appear and spread and, at the same time, push negative reviews out of the SERPs and, accordingly, out of the potential consumers’ sight.

The aim of online reputation management is to make search engines index and rank highly all positively associated web sites and corporate communications. It should result in the increase of positive Web presence, i.e. occupation of multiple top positions for your targeted keywords in search engines. Online reputation management lets you defend and manage your reputation by putting forth proactive efforts to achieve predictable search engine results through a three-step process: monitoring – analysis – influence.

What to monitor and how:

• Set up Google and Yahoo Alerts to catch mentions of your company and product names in the news.
• Use blog search engines like IceRocket and sites like Technorati to watch your keywords in blogs.
• Customize RSS readers for brand tracking. The free FeedReader3, for example, lets you create search feeds to be alerted when your keywords are used on Twitter, eBay, YouTube, etc.
• Keep track of all names including your company name, product names, and key employee names.
• Be sure to monitor industry-related sites, forums, social networks.

Analyze sites under your control to dominate SERPs. They include:

• Your corporate site.
• Your product sites.
• Corporate blogs.
• Your employees’ blogs.
• Partner or affiliate sites.
• Corporate communications like press releases, your articles and news.

Document positions that your sites have ever occupied, so you can monitor future movements and activities (Web CEO Ranking tool will provide you a report on how page rankings change over time. Double-click on a page address in the main Ranking report to get to that report.)

Influence your results by active participation

Your participation will give you the opportunity to improve the perception of your brand. Take part in your industry conversation, become a regular contributor to blogs and forums, make this a two-way communication experience and use comment sections of others’ blog and forums to get your viewpoint across and lead the conversations about your brand. Choose the most authoritative sites in your niche and participate in them. In addition to a constructive dialogue, think of potential sponsorship opportunities – this will help you build relationships and alliances with the authoritative sites.

Remember that online reputation management through monitoring, analyzing and influencing online communications can prevent damage to or even collapse of your business and ensure the ongoing success of your company.

What experts say…

Once a negative mention has been identified, here are a few basic steps in dealing with it:

* Research the situation – is there merit?

* If not, provide the facts and ask for corrections

* If yes, then offer to discuss

* Be ready to respond with your own blog

* Be honest, be transparent and LISTEN

Lee Odden

Basics of Online Reputation Management

You may find a printable PDF of this article in the ‘Whitepapers’ section.

SEO Companies’ Visibility Rate

Are SEO companies as good as they claim to be on their sites? Will they return the efficiency they promise? Are their skills qualified? The only way to find it out is to check how they optimize and promote their own sites.

Here we share Top 10 SEO Companies according to their search visibility rate for January 2010.

Click here to see the complete rate.

Web CEO analysts use objective evidence to rate SEO firms according to their search engine visibility. SEO companies’ visibility rate is calculated using a special formula that considers the positions of SEO companies’ sites in search engines results pages for the keywords their potential clients use, popularity of these keywords and number of competitors.

Learn more about the formula.

Here you can see how Top 10 SEO companies’ visibility rate has changed from November 2009 till January 2010.

Top 10 SEO Companies Trends