Transcription of “Why Review Sites Matter For Your Business”:
Shama: I know you also stress a lot about review sites. What is it about review sites like Yelp and others that are important to search engine optimization?
Idan: Users gather information on the Internet. If it’s from your Website, from a competitor, from Yelp, from another citation, like Google Plus or Google Places or even Bing. All these citations, people go on and they place their view. If you’re not there, your competitors are.
Shama: What’s a citation?
Idan: A citation is basically a website, a directory, that people have their place of business.
Shama: Ok so your information is linked in it. It’s kind of like a yellow pages on the Web and you have so many directories. That’s a citation.
Idan: Exactly and there are so many of them.
Shama: I love SEO speak.
Idan: There are so many of them because different people go to different places. You may like Google Places while I may like really Yelp. I like the information on Bing more than just Google Places. It’s really important to be everywhere.
Shama: One of the things that I really like about you and your team, when you think about SEO people think about just Website or just search engine, but you really look at all the ways you can get traffic to the Website. You look at, how can we best convert that so I think that’s a novel approach. Do you find that more SEO’s are looking at it that way? That they’re starting to broaden their horizons a little bit, without being obsessed with your rankings and your numbers.
Idan: Absolutely. That’s the key element that I feel like a lot of agencies that I’ve seen lose out.
Shama: Not us.
Idan: Not us of course. When you collaborate all of the channels, like SEO, even paid advertising, because you are getting more people onto your Website which they ultimately will actually talk about you on social media and many, many other channels, or they’ll come and visit you and give you a review later on Yelp.
Shama: Ultimately you want get all these multiple channels and pull all these people in and sort of meet them where they are.
Idan: Absolutely.
Shama: Which is what I always say, meet people where they are and sort of bring them where you want them to be.
Idan: Yes. Everything I connected, exactly.
Shama: I love that. Everything is connected. Maybe that should be our new title. Zen Media Group, everything is connected. I’m curious, one of the things that we hear a lot is, if I am doing SEO organic optimization, why do I need to do pay-per-click? What’s the point? Why do paid advertising if you are organically building up your site?
Idan: Paid advertising vs. organic. You have paid advertising where you can launch something today; within 15 minutes you get leads to your Website. You can’t do that with Search Engine Optimization.
Shama: You’re paying for the click.
Idan: You’re paying for it.
Shama: It’s not organic, but you can bid on keywords and pay for that.
Idan: Exactly.
Shama: It’s quick.
Idan: It’s quick. It’s quick and easy. You get leads fast, if you optimize your website of course.
Shama: Correctly, yes.
Idan: You want to be relevant, because it’s very important. The greatest thing about paid advertising is that you can test things right away. So if you have a page, a splash page let’s just say, that you drive a lot of people onto the page, and it’s not really converting, you can change that page to something else.
Shama: It’s a good testing tool, I didn’t think about that.
Idan: It’s definitely a good testing tool, and another thing is with SEO, you cannot go after every keyword that you actually want. The advantage with paid advertising, that you can list those keywords in ad group that is relevant to what you are trying to sell, and then you can get leads that way.
Shama: I’m guessing if you do optimize and pay-per-click in both, then you just own more real estate on the page.
Idan: Absolutely.
Shama: Which is a great way to get branded.
Idan: Also there’s Google Plus; you get more real estate.
Shama: I like that
Idan: With that thumbnail.
Shama: This is really cool. It’s all about how to steal more real estate away from your competitor.
Idan: Real estate is a commodity.
Shama: Yes, even online oddly enough, isn’t that funny, we thought it was just to the geographical world.
Shama: Not really.
Idan: Exactly.
Shama: It’s all over.
