Significant shifts in society, accelerated by the internet, have meant that customers are getting better and better at not listening to polished marketing promises, so how can customers not listening to you be good news for marketers?

It’s because according to Nielsen (Global Online Consumer Survey, 2009) research, 35% more people trust the recommendations of friends than trust radio adverts.  Even 15% more people trust the opinions of strangers!  Therefore the thousands of customers-turned-salespeople which good businesses generate mathematically outweigh even the most impressive marketing budgets of companies with massive wallets and no advocates.

We have stopped trusting big business and started trusting “people like me”.  The comment, recommendation, endorsement, or anti-endorsement of a friend, or even a complete stranger, means more to us now than the words and promises of big business.  And nowhere is this more true than online, where the view of “people like me” is more easily found than ever before.

The quintessential bad day? Let down by your telecoms company and jeans just too short for your boxers.

Consider the plight of Verizon and their beleaguered marketing department seeking to communicate to America how the organisation is being true to its mission and why that matters to its customers.

“As a leader in communications, Verizon’s mission is to enable people and businesses to communicate with each other. We are also committed to providing full and open communication with our customers, employees and investors.”

Lofty stuff.

However their customers know that their bills are impossible to decipher, compulsory data plans are punishing, dropped calls are maddening, and customer care is not advisable for pregnant women and those of a delicate medical disposition.  And there’s not a damn thing the Verizon marketing team can do about it.  The only way Verizon can improve its marketing is for Verizon to improve its business.

It’s no longer just a cliché that your business is your marketing.

The Google search “Verizon Sucks” has over 17,000 results, “I Hate Verizon” has more than 7,500.  They are the fifth most hated brand online according to Less Everything.  That’s at least 22,500 “people like me” who are influencing what I think of Verizon.  It’s going to take a lot of marketing consultants, a lake of cappuccino, and an unthinkable amount of smiley facey stock photography for me to ignore what they’re saying to swallow the corporate line.

Struggling to work out how to hold both the tick and the briefcase.

None of this has gone unnoticed by the clever people at Google.  Their unquenchable obsession for relevancy has meant that in recent years, on top of their regular search results they have more closely integrated local search, social search, video search and image search.

Performing well on Google over its first ten years required an ability to identify key phrases, and simulate popularity via inbound link building.  As Google’s big brother department gets its paws on more and more data related to what our customers actually think of us, our online reputation will have an increasing impact on our search engine performance.  Simply put, what our customers say about us on UGC platforms will be more important than the number of inbound links to your website.

It’s official, the days of running a second rate business and papering over the cracks with first rate marketing are over forever.

Nice pens, poor online marketing plan.

When Charlie got his web designers on the job, they created a fantastic online business-to-business outlet.  They did everything right.  The site looked great, the site was optimised and was perfectly formed for search.

After 6 months of no new customers Charlie started to blame the designers for the lack of sales.  “How could they have got it so wrong?” claimed Charlie.

Charlie explained how his attention to customer service set him apart from the competition.  However he never made it to the top 10 in Google searches and Charlie felt the web had let him down.

On examination, Charlie’s claim of offering better customer service was the same claim that all his competitors made.  His competitors online included Viking Direct, Eurooffice, Staples and WH Smith.  The competitors had spent millions on natural Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).  His sale price for goods was nothing special either.  On reflection Charlie admitted that he had no real differentiator and gave potential clients no compelling reason to switch to him.

Had Charlie set the goal of the website to, improve customer service with existing clients, create up-sell opportunities and increase average order size or increase advocacy (get his customers to talk about how good his business was) and get new customers that way, then his online goals would have been realistic.

Charlie can still get a great return on his online investment. He is now setting realistic goals and creating a multi-channel online marketing strategy to achieve those goals. He still feels a little cheated. He listened to the hype, the false promises of overnight success but with his realistic goals now in place he stands a much higher chance of winning.

Take a hotel for example.  Many hotels work hard to be in the top page of a search result for most of the big search terms like “Hotel in [insert destination]”. The site is built optimised for search.  The text is written with key words appearing frequently within the body of the text. Inbound links are generated artificially to make it appear that the site is relevant under key search terms and the hotel gradually floats north toward the top of the search charts.  So how does Google reward these efforts?

Take the example search term “Hotel in London”:

• The first 3 links are paid for sponsored links and not influenced by SEO
• The 4th link is a local business directory link
• Links 5 to 11 are Google Local links based upon both geography, reviews and other non-SEO related activities
• Link 12 is a hotel resellers site
• Link 13 is the Ritz Hotel.  At last a hotel that has focused on SEO! In SEO terms the Ritz is #2 in the natural SEO results.  In real terms it’s not in the race.

SEO Natural Position #1 is Now 13 Links From Top

I don’t have the conversation figures of lookers-to-bookers for the Ritz in London or how many people eventually convert from Google generic searches like mine.  What I do have however, are the analytics results of many other hotels in different regions and the results show similarities across the regions and search terms.

Even though most of the hotels, restaurants, shopping centers or any service based destination clients we look after have good natural SEO results for generic terms, around 80% of the searches for their site include their brand name and not simple generic terms like “Hotel in London”.   My guess is that the Ritz is no different and that the vast majority of bookers who find the hotel search for it by name.  It has an enhanced reputation.  This means the visitor is looking specifically for that destination.  They have researched elsewhere and their decision on where to stay is already at a closing stage when googling the hotel name.

If you extrapolate this out further and take the amount of visitors to the site that search by brand name, have clicked on inbound referral links or visitors that have simply typed in the URL of the destination, it vastly outweighs the generic search term in the order of 95% to 5% of visitor traffic.  Unless you have a really generic name like “Smiths of London” appearing #1 for your own brand takes little to no SEO effort.

The question then switches to being “Why do we spend so much time, money and effort on being #1 on Google when less than 5% of the visitors arrive at the site for generic terms?”   Where is the customer taking their influence?  Why am I only getting attention as part of their already filtered field of view? The answer is that the customer is taking the opinion of others that have used these services.  They are reading the reviews of what other people say about the business and believing that before the businesses own marketing message.

If you are in the services industry this is happening to you.  Regardless if you supply stag weekend clay pigeon shooting in Brighton or zorbing in Ballymena, your online reputation management and what is said about you on review sites, forums and blogs is having an enormous influence on your bookings.  ORM takes effort and means focusing on leveraging customer’s good experiences and getting them to publish their positive experiences.  It requires a deep understanding on where your customers or potential customers are taking their influence from and understanding how you can influence that process.  A bi-product of good ORM is that your natural SEO will look after itself.

SEO is still a valid channel and shouldn’t be ignored, however its relevancy in converting lookers-to-bookers is weakening as Google restructures its results pages and customers become more informed and only Google your site as part of the decision making process. The pending introduction of Google Real Time search is set to further enhance the argument that SEO isn’t what it once was.

The website owner understands the need for SEO, but fears the risk of low return on investment.  Removing that risk and allowing the site owner and the SEO expert to share rewards in the lift of business achieved from improved search results, is the likely future for SEO.

If the site owner’s goal is to get more people to attend an event, donate money, purchase a product or generate sales calls, it is now really easy to measure where the sites traffic comes from and calculate the lift in business coming from search.

Using the model of Pay Per Goal SEO the site owner needs to be generous in the reward on offer, as the SEO expert has taken 100% of the risk.  The SEO expert needs to have the confidence they can affect change quickly.