On today's show we have Pierre Zarokian, Founder of Submit Express and veteran search marketer. We get into SEO, reputation management, how the SEM industry has changed, and more!
More on Pierre: Website - Twitter - LinkedIn
Reputation management is 10X SEO.
Pierre Zarokian
Show Highlights
We asked Pierre the following questions:
- How did you get started with SEO?
- How important are backlinks today?
- What are some of the challenges today in running Submit Express?
- Tell us more about reputation management and what type of clients you typically work with in this space?
- What type of marketing do you utilize for your own companies?
- Where do you see the future of SEO going?
- What is the process for repairing an online reputation?
- Will voice search be important?
More from the show:
- $500/month won't get you the results it did 10 years ago - now $2 to $3K/month budgets
- SEO as a service has gotten competitive - offshoring, local, more agencies, freelancers
- SEO has gotten a bad rap due to people getting burned
- Reputation management is a really involved practice - lots of work to suppress rankings - building assets, link building, reviews, blogging, social media posts, optimizing existing content, etc.
- 10 properties at minimum for reputation management
- Wild west in reputation management as far as paying people to remove content - its recommend to go through a reputation management company to handle this
- On Yelp you can flag a negative review
- If it's not a first hand account you can ask Google and Yelp to remove (chances of getting removed are less than 5%)
- If this doesn't work you can try sending a legal letter to Yelp
- Can go straight to the person but don't offer money - if Yelp finds out your business could get flagged with a warning at the top of the page for 6 months letting people know you tried to pay to have a review removed (nothing in writing - if you do reach out do so verbally)
- Ripoff report doesn't remove anything unless you opt to pay through their paid program
- Best thing to do when you've got a bad review is to increase the good reviews
- Pierre has a program that will send a survey via text or email to your customers asking for a review - if it comes back positive than they get a followup asking to write a review on Yelp and Google and if they are not happy you can reach out before they write a review
- And more!
Show Links:
- Submit Express
- iClimber
- Web Design Express
- Reputation Stars
- Ripoff Report
- The Hoth
- Complaints Board
- Pissed Consumer
- Scambook