In this week’s Sunday Times Prufrock column, Louise Armitstead writes about the Baroness Kingsmill story I commented on, saying that the peer is not going soft on Google (all following on from an article in the FT).

Louise has discovered that Baroness Kingsmill is a consultant to Microsoft (Google’s rival in the search wars) with Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates, an American corporate communications firm. The plot thickens.

Interestingly, Baroness Kingsmill didn’t get back to the Sunday Times’ request for comment either, so it’s not just me!

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A couple of weeks ago I wrote a blog post entitled Facebook - Who’s Doing Your SEO? where I basically said two things:

1. Facebook could dramatically improve their organic traffic by placing a sensible internal linking structure between public profiles
2. By linking to your public profile you can get control of another listing in the search results

I now know both of these things to be true! Within that post I put a link to my public profile. It’s the only link I know of anywhere online and already it ranks above the Tom Critchlow page on the Distilled site!

This is a classic example of how Google treats trusted domains. My public profile page has no links to it from anywhere on the Facebook site, not a single one. That means that Google is unable to my profile page unless there are some external links to the page. Once it does, however, Google recognises this page as being on the facebook domain thus giving it trust and enable the page to rank well.

How long before we see John Poker Smith ranking in the SERPs? Or Paris Buy-Viagra Hilton? (Muhammad Saleem from Pronet covers the Facebook spam angle briefly here)

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I imagine most people who are responsible for any small (or even medium-sized) website have tried out Google Analytics. Since Google made the former Urchin software available for free, the quality of the analytics data available to your average small business website has increased massively. There are definitely places for paid-for analytics software - especially for larger websites or those with the resources to have a dedicated analyst (Clicktracks and Indextools are good options for the next step up), but the power of free is still strong, and, like us, I imagine many people are using Google Analytics on their sites and recommending it to their clients.

Up until this weekend, I have been logging in to check out specific things and also scheduling regular visits to check things out for clients, but I have always headed directly to the reports I wanted to look at, without giving much thought to customising the system to meet my needs. You probably know that you can customise your dashboard in GA, and set it up to email you reports, but I imagine that, like me, you have probably never bothered.

Having taken the time to set up the dashboards the way we want them, and also set up some regular emails, I can highly recommend it both for improving the efficiency of your processes (and if you’re not constantly trying to do that, go and re-read your copy of the e-myth!) and also to help avoid the habit of checking your stats far too often (if it’s not your primary job role, you’re almost certainly better off only checking once per week and spending any other time you would have spend in analytics developing new content or promoting your website).

There are only two reports that most small business owners need to see regularly (we have set up some accounts with weekly emails, some with monthly emails):

1. the dashboard (which should give you exactly the snapshot you need for your business)
2. a ‘comparison to past’ report for your current critical area of focus

More explanation follows:

How to set up your dashboard

When you ask Google to email you the dashboard report, it sends a PDF with a summary that looks like the dashboard you see when you log in, but it also sends, on subsequent pages, the detail of each of those reports. This means that with this single emailed report, you get summary and detailed information on everything you want.

We have set most of our dashboards up with the following reports:

1. Visitors overview (gives total visits and total visitors)
2. Goal Funnel / Total Conversions (or an e-commerce report, depending on the goals or website)
3. All Traffic Sources
4. Organic Keywords (Traffic Sources > Keywords > non-paid)

(Note that we tend to run separate reports when we are managing PPC spend).

Why you need a ‘comparison to past’ report

Google Analytics gives you the option of ticking a box in the email scheduler to have the report include comparison data against the previous period. This means that if you request a monthly report, it will have figures for the month just gone as well as the previous month’s figures - along with a percentage change.

You can set your dashboard up to include this kind of comparison, but we have found that it becomes far too crowded (and that much of the data doesn’t need a comparison every time you see it). Simplicity is power in reporting, and especially if you are answerable to business users (or clients), the simple reports are the ones that hold the greatest power. Having said that, there is almost certainly an area you are currently focussing your attention on - be it an SEO or PPC campaign or a certain conversion rate. For this area, it is important to understand your progress towards your goal. The easiest way of doing this is to see data presented to you as a comparison against a previous period.

Unless you happen to have got the days lined up correctly, the graphs aren’t as helpful on the longer reports as most metrics have weekly cycles that outweigh small trends, but the percentage changes are hugely helpful. We have tended to set up reports on changes to the total traffic from different referrers (i.e. organic search, PPC, referring sites etc.) along with perhaps a more detailed report on keyword traffic or PPC campaign performance depending on current focus.

Another enhancement request for the Google Analytics guys

The functionality of the dashboard is so nice, that we wondered if you could just enhance it in two small ways:

1. allow us to have multiple dashboards within a profile, so that I can set up (for example) an SEO dashboard and a PPC dashboard
2. have the option to customise the dashboard(s) for all users of that account - while it is nice to enable all users to customise their own dashboard in many circumstances, it is also a huge drag to have to go around setting up all the dashboards the same way for all the different stakeholders

Thanks!

Your advice and experience is welcome

Do you have experience in the best ways of setting up reporting? Have you been tweaking the way you do things recently? Or is your system so good, that you just don’t worry about it any more? We’d love to share your advice here, so let us know…

One thing I’ve been wondering about throughout this process (and that I’m not even sure whether we can do in Google Analytics yet) is to have our ‘compare to past’ reports compare to a given historical period (for example the quarter before we started working for a particular client) rather than a rolling comparison to the last period. What do you think? Would that be more helpful or less?

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Daniel over at Reputation Advisor slightly beat me to the punch earlier this week with his excellent article about why you should keep a reputation manager on a retainer.

In the article he compares Reputation Monitoring with Insurance. I have had this article in my draft posts for a while now, just trying to think up one more reason! (On a less than serious suggestion, we vetoed “You can signup online - “)

So without further ado here are my reasons why monitoring your reputation is like insurance.

1. Just like insurance, monitoring what people are saying about you is something you only realise you need to do once it is too late. If you aren’t insured when the disaster happens you don’t get paid. If you aren’t monitoring what people are saying and something negative spreads round the internet it is too late.
2. A small monthly investment could prevent huge costs. Monitoring your reputation doesn’t have to cost anything. Google alerts allows you to track what is being said about you. Obviously we believe the small investment in our Reputation Monitor is well worth it for the time it saves you. The point is though that the small cost is nothing compared to the potential cost of repairing a brand should you miss something that damages your brand. As an example Yahoo Finance are reporting that the damage to Sony’s brand has cost them $500 milllion in one quarter - Found via - if you have any other examples, I’d love to hear them (please leave them in the comments)
3. It gives you peace of mind and helps you sleep better - If you don’t have to stress about what is being said behind your back you can remove a whole pile of stress - helping you to a better nights sleep

3 Reasons why monitoring your reputation is better than insurance

1. Monitoring what people say about you has benefits even if a disaster never occurs - If you go a year without claiming on your insurance that is a year’s worth of premium that gave you no tangible benefits. Where tracking what is being said online differs is that you get benefits along the way.
   1. It helps you engage with people who are talking about you, which in turn helps to build your brand.
   2. It helps to find people who talk about you, but don’t link back to your website. Tom has written about how to use our Reputation Monitor tool as a link building tool

2. Insurance is normally protecting something tangible - How much is your brand worth? Unlike a car, or an aeroplane your brand doesn’t have an easy to calculate value, but damage to your brand will result in loss of business. How much you lose obviously depends on the scale of the disaster and the value of your brand.
   
   Finally (and in my opinion the most important)

3. Monitoring your reputation gives you the chance to avert the pending crisis - Stretching the insurance analogy to its limit, tracking online mentions is a bit like a burglar alarm. If you know what is being said about your brand it is possible to step in and prevent negative press doing much damage. Reputation Management, done well means you never have to cash in your insurance policy.

So coming back to Daniel’s post, I completely agree. Everyone should at the very least be monitoring what is being said about them, and anyone who can’t afford to risk runing their brand should have a Reputation Management company on a retainer. Not only can they help to avert a disaster, but they can help to build your brand.

If you aren’t monitoring your reputation why not give our Reputation Monitor tool a go. There is a no obligation free trial and cheap monthly payments after that.

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Before I get into the real meat of the post let me firstly introduce Brian White - another Googler following in the footsteps of Matt Cutts sharing some great juicy pieces of information on Googling, videogames and general tech-geekery. I strongly urge you to go subscribe to his blog now. Done? Ok, cool.

Why am I talking about Brian? Well, his post on searching conventions has proved to be fantastically useful for us in the office and will be very helpful for understanding this post.

Have I raved enough about you yet Brian? Can we officially become the first whitelets?? (explanation on cuttlets here) Ok, and now for the post:

“it”

Yep, you guessed it, the correct answer to the title of this post is not:

“my, yes actually you have a point, yahoo really is better than google”

but instead:

“it”

You see what I did there? There is a serious point however that I’d like to cover and I’m hoping that someone (Brian?!) can help me out with the answer or failing that at least raise the profile of the issue within Google. This is the issue:

[IT project support] vs [project support]

Google doesn’t seem to be very good at determining when I’m using ‘it’ as in [bend it like beckham] as opposed to [it recruitment]. One of our clients provides IT support and I was doing some keyphrase research and Googling around and discovered some annoying tendencies. While on some search phrases Google does ok at determining the difference between the two uses of ‘it’ on some search phrases they are woefully poor. Take the following for example:

• [it project management] - just returns a bunch of results related to project management. Compare this to [technology project management] where you get plenty of relevant results (many of which also mention it project management in the title tag!)
• [it consultancy services] - just returns a bunch of consultancy services - with only one (maybe two) sites directly related to IT consultancy. It even returns www.juniper.co.uk which doesn’t even mention ‘it’ anywhere on the page (and barely mentions ‘it’ across the site - please note I’m not calling these guys out for any particular reason, just highlighting an issue and they were the first that I saw)

So in summary Brian - what’s going on and can you do something about it? I know that it’s getting better (because I remember trying to do some keyphrase research in the IT recruitment sector about 12 months ago and it was just painful - I remember [it job] and [job] used to return almost identical results) but it’s still incredibly annoying and can’t be returning the most relevant results a lot of the time.

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We have recently been around the houses with our experiences with online payment solutions recently and thought we’d share some of our heartache so you don’t have to go through the same things.

Reputation Monitor is an online service we provide that is paid for monthly by credit card. When we were building it, we went through a few options trying to decide who we should use to help us take and process those payments and ended up settling on Barclays’ ePDQ system. We bank with Barclays and have had a fantastic experience with them generally (our local business manager is very good - if you’re in London and bank with anyone else, or don’t know the name of your bank manager, let me know and I’ll put you in touch).

The reasons for going with Barclays, beyond already banking with them, were that they claimed they could handle all of our requirements, including:

• accepting payments in more than one currency (we wanted to offer GBP and USD)
• setting up and managing recurring monthly payments

The first chink in the armour came when we tried to download a spreadsheet of payments received. We wanted this in order to:

• reconcile our accounting software
• automatically mark accounts as paid when users’ recurring payments went through (we’d already resigned ourselves to the fact that they wouldn’t update us electronically via an API when each month’s payment was received)

It never crossed my mind that an online payments provider wouldn’t offer this service, yet apparently it is only available on their packages for bigger businesses. All they could offer us was a monthly paper statement (not particularly good for either purpose, especially as it only told us amounts received, not who they came from) and an online area where we could log in and create online reports. Without scraping these reports, we couldn’t come up with any good way of getting our payments in electronic form.

It turned out that they weren’t very good at meeting our direct requirements either. Our first USD transaction failed. When we called support to find out why, we were told that our USD ’store’ wasn’t set up. This was a bit strange as (a) it was part of our core requirements and (b) why should we need a whole other store? Surely all it needed was to allow USD payments?

Noooo. Apparently we had to integrate with an entirely new store to accept the USD payments. We started going down this route, but as more and more hurdles were put in our way, we ended up re-thinking and re-visiting our options.

Should you use Google Checkout for accepting credit cards online?

One of the first options we went back to was Google Checkout - we have used it successfully for accepting payments for our recent seminar as well as for a number of clients and other projects so we knew it worked well. We were also pretty confident it would handle multi-currency requirements smoothly - Google’s usually pretty good on the international aspect of its services. Finally, it had an additional benefit over Paypal that the money is deposited into your bank account quickly and automatically without requiring you to login and transfer to your bank.

The hurdle that prevented us being able to offer our users this option was that Google checkout does not allow you to set up recurring payments! This was a pretty big flaw in that plan and led us to reject checkout (reluctantly).

It appears that Paypal is the best provider for accepting recurring payments

We have used Paypal for a few things in the past - both for clients and internal projects. We had felt that it could appear slightly less professional than some of the other solutions (especially for business to business transactions) but they have greatly improved their service recently and, in particular, they are the only provider I have found that offers:

• recurring payment handling and management
• sensible multi-currency support
• statement download in many formats
• automatic notification to our software of successful recurring payments
• automatic notification of cancellation of a subscription

Given that it is also free to set up and charge a comparable percentage of credit card transactions to the big merchant account providers, it seems to be far and away the best solution at the moment.

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Ok, so although I came a little late to the whole Facebook phenomenon I have recently been dragged into the whole thing lovingly embraced the concept.

I was browsing through the various settings however and I noticed that there is an option under your public profile to allow your public listing to be indexed by search engines.

Now, if you’ve ever tried searching facebook for someone you’ll know that it sucks worse than mahahalo. I mean really sucks - so much that even if I know what their name is and where they live I STILL can’t find them!

However, now that there is this option to have your public listing indexed by external search engines (I’m sorry, I don’t know if this is a new feature or not - perhaps someone can update me on this one?) all facebook need to do is put a robust and sensible internal linking strategy in place and everyone’s public listings will start ranking in the search engines. Right now I can’t see facebook getting a whole lot of organic traffic from the search engines but this would drastically change that.

What’s the use in this? Well, where’s the first place your average joe is going to turn to find an old friend? Google of course. Facebook should be licking their lips relishing the thought of having user’s public profiles appearing in the search engines for their name search. It would drive new sign-ups, spread the word (even more!) and lastly it would ALLOW ME TO SEARCH FOR PEOPLE SENSIBLY.

Using Facebook for Reputation Management

We love to put a reputation monitoring/management spin on things here at Distilled and this is a prime example of how you can get another listing in the search results which you are in full control of. Simply point a few links at your public profile URL and it’ll rank in no-time.

Of course, this post wouldn’t be the same without the obligatory link: Tom Critchlow

PS - Facebook, if you need someone to give you a hand putting together an internal linking strategy, drop us a line

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Recently there has been quite a stir within the SEO community with people seeing a huge dominance of wikipedia in the Google search results (Graywolf has been one of the more vocal critics recently with a whole load of posts - although he’s been writing about it for some time).

But don’t just take Greywolf’s word for it - there’s plenty of articles about this, most notably recently the google cache wrote about how 96.6% of wikipedia articles rank in the top 10 of google.

It has been noticed outside the world of SEO as well - PR Blogger has just written an analysis of Fortune 100 companies’ wikipedia pages.

Remove Wikipedia from Google for Good

Here at Distilled, it’s something that came up in conversation a few times, so we decided to do something about it - we have created a Firefox search plugin that enables you to search Google without getting wikipedia results. We call it ‘Google without wikipedia’ and if you’re running Firefox, you should be able to install it by clicking here.

(If that doesn’t work, you can download the files you need and add them manually to your search plugins folder: google-wikipedia.src and google-wikipedia.png.)

Once installed - simply search from your firefox search box:

And you’ll get Google - only without any wikipedia results!

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I went to a seminar on Wednesday organised by Barclays. Our bank manager (who’s brilliant - if you want a good local business manager in London, drop me a line) persuaded me to go along. I went for the networking, expecting the seminar itself to be boring bank stuff with a bit of Barclays-plugging thrown in. I was pleasantly surprised.

It was called “Let’s talk more profit” and was given by Robert Craven. I hadn’t previously come across his work, but judging by the comments of other people there, he’s pretty well-known as a speaker on marketing and profit. There were some really good lessons in the seminar and some advice that I hadn’t come across before. It was such a good session that I ended up buying two of his books, Bright Marketing and Kick-Start your Business.

The one piece of advice that has stuck with me and been bugging me ever since is a little chart he drew of what he called the ‘valley of death’. He said that, as a skilled sole-trader practitioner, you could (depending on your industry, of course) perhaps make £100,000 / year. As soon as you start employing a person or two, your profit tends to decline (with rising overheads, the distraction factor and the time taken for an employee to become fully productive for you). He drew a chart that looked a little bit like this:

He said that it isn’t until somewhere over on the right that you tend to get back up to decent profitability (perhaps making £100k profit on turnover of £0.5-1 million). The number of employees where this typically happens varies depending on your industry, but is typically in the 5-10 range. His advice was that this is the absolutely critical point where most small businesses fail (once they have got past the initial hurdle of getting going and proving that they have something the market wants and that they can deliver in a profitable fashion).

What do you do, therefore? Robert Craven says “run as fast as you can”. As soon as you start going down the route of having employees, sprint like crazy to get through the valley (watching your marketing, operations and financials like a hawk) to get to the other side to sustainable profitability from where the sky’s the limit.

We had been gradually coming to this conclusion - having been thinking a lot about the advice contained in the e-myth recently, and wanting to have the directors spending more time on the business rather than in the business - the inevitable conclusion is that you need a bunch of people to do the work! Our team has already grown significantly this year - we hired Emily as account manager in March and my brother, Tom as head of search marketing just recently - and now we’re recruiting again - looking for a graphically-talented web developer. If you know anyone, please point them at our online application form.

In order to accommodate this growth (we have a full-time graphic design intern for about 8 weeks starting on Monday as well), we are frantically looking for new offices. We want to stay south of the river - probably in SE1 - either in the Waterloo, Elephant & Castle or London Bridge / Bermondsey area and are hoping to push ourselves and get somewhere big enough for this next stage of expansion (perhaps we’ll find a company we have a good fit with, who we can share an office with).

How to hire employees

Another piece of advice from the seminar that has stuck in my head is that Robert said there are two ways to hire good employees successfully and that you shouldn’t be putting out adverts and vetting applicants yourself (and I’m not sure I agree with this - but I’m certainly thinking about it hard):

1. from your network (this is obviously the best possible way - and part of the reason for this post - please point anyone you know who is interested at our online application page)
2. using a professional recruitment company (which I have so far shied away from on the grounds of cost)

We found Emily by doing our own advertising. So far, with our new opening, we are finding that our online application process is helping filter out some of the dreadful applications we have had to trawl through in the past, but we’re struggling to get it in front of enough good applicants so if our network doesn’t throw someone good at us soon, we’re going to have to consider getting the professionals in.

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Business Week reports on an in-depth study into the effects on company share prices of their reputation. The headlines are quite impressive; Coca-Cola would be worth an extra $4 billion if their reputation was as good as Pepsi’s. Walmart’s share price could be nearly 5% higher if their reputation matched Target’s. Also singled out are Intel and Fedex among others. The over-arching message is that there are many large, public companies who are not handling their reputations as well as they could be.

These are focussing on reputation across the board. Increasingly, however, we are seeing the Internet being the starting point where the issues that go on to shape a company’s reputation are formed. The nature of online buzz and the speed with which news and opinion spreads online means that many of the defining events in a company’s reputation history have their roots in blog discussion and social media. Of course, this is particularly true of technology companies whose customers, users and evangelists are all heavily online, but it is becoming ever more important for all businesses.

The benefits of being small

As with many online issues, the big guys do not necessarily have the same weight advantage they enjoy offline. In the same way that the small guy can make a big noise online, and the (dream of) meritocratic search engines allows smaller businesses to compete with their advertising as long as they can create a profitable set of transactions, it is easier for smaller businesses to participate in online discussion of their products and their brand.

When you are a small company, with a relatively small set of enthusiastic customers, you can get pretty close to being involved in all the online discussion about you that you want to. While there are some conversations that are probably best avoided, there are many where a well-timed, friendly and personal response will add up nicely to a ripple-effect improvement in your reputation. Communicating with people who mention your brand has the dual effect of improving people’s opinions of you and spreading the word further afield, to new potential customers who hadn’t previously encountered you or your company.

The first step in this process is, of course, to monitor what is being said about you and it is here that small businesses have an advantage over the large corporations. While there might be hundreds of thousands of new mentions of Coke every time they check, most smaller businesses can easily read through the handful of new mentions regularly and decide if they wish to respond.

So is it all doom and gloom for the big businesses?

Not at all. There are immediate steps that each of the large corporations mentioned in the Business Week study (and others that happened not to be picked upon) could take to begin the process of improving online discussion of their products and brand. This would lead naturally to an improvement in their whole reputation and, as the article reports, a significant increase in the value of the company.

For example, Business Week allocates much of the differential between Fedex and UPS’s reputations upon the fact that:

UPS does a better job publicly communicating its strengths, such as its ability to handle complex global delivery challenges with high reliability.

Suppose Fedex were to monitor the public comments about their brand better, and find criticisms such as this one and this one in a timely fashion so that they could find problems with their processes and attempt to make it up to people who have suffered particularly badly. Even just the fact that it would show that they are listening would help.

By this point, it’s obviously too late to actually fix the initial problem, but even just in a few minutes of searching I have seen a definite recurring theme of the kind of complaints that are being made about them. If Business Week are right about the scale of benefit available if they were to improve the situation, then time spent working out how to fix some of these issues would be time very well spent.

Why are they not doing this already?

Some big companies are. There are some stories you hear about where large companies have participated in the online discussion of their brand in a really positive way (see the Google painkiller story for example). I think it’s mainly a process and focus problem. There is no executive who obviously owns this area (is it marketing?) and so it falls by the wayside. I think, however, that as we see social media continue growing in influence, tomorrow’s leaders are going to be those companies who sit up early and take notice.

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