by Peter Wilson | President
Times are tough for small business owners, who have to deal owning, operating, hiring, filing, and all the other “-ing”s that come with a business. One of those is “optimizing,” as in “Search Engine Optimizing,” aka SEO, which has its own complications on the web.
Reaching customers online is a challenge, and making sure customers see a positive message whenever you reach them is even tougher. That’s why review sites exist, to point customers to a webpage for your business so they can find information and (hopefully!) good reviews about it. SEO is, in a sense, the process of competing for these rankings, making sure that search engines favor your business.
As you might expect, whenever there is competition, there is bound to be cheating. There’s obviously a lot of demand for SEO and related services; more people research and buy products online than ever before, meaning more money is up for grabs. Unfortunately, with the stakes this high, some SEO companies have resorted to cheating by placing fake reviews, fake accounts, and fake website visits to make their clients look better.
In this article from The Guardian, you can read about how a sting investigation by New York’s attorney general caught 19 companies lying online by setting up a fake yogurt stand. The stunt ended with the both the firms that bought and those that wrote fake reviews being fined $350,000.
At bizmktg.com, we won’t write fake reviews for you. But we will help you prevent bad reviews and help you get more good ones. Call or e-mail the marketing machines today: (800) 808-0249 or info@bizmktg.com.
