McIntosh Marketing Blog

While BP struggles with the citizens of the Gulf Coast to survive the America’s worst environmental disaster, BP is also attempting to stage a reputation management onslaught with the help of Google and Yahoo, via purchased keywords.

When American’s type in these keywords, “oil spill” on Google or Yahoo, each of their page one results will direct one’s attention to BP’s “Gulf of Mexico response”, their official page spinning BP’s version of their attempts in controlling this epic spill.

Google and Yahoo have become an immediate and easily accessible resource for American consumers to search for related information in any crisis situation.

While a host of companies resort to this strategy in crisis situation, BP and its CEO, Tony Hayward,  have received harsh criticism from many outsiders, as well as President Obama, who have openly condemned BP’s reputation management move as questionable.

Reputation management has become a vital and integral part of any company’s online marketing strategy, with the rapid transparency that can expose one’s weak spots or outright blunders. In their book, Radically Transparent: Monitoring and Managing Reputations Online, authors Andy Beal & Judy Strauss point out that social media has radically changed how companies need to engage in PR.

And BP is not the only major oil company that appreciates the need for reputation management and PR. This video from Chevron shows how important their spin is and this video shows clearly why.

Let’s say you have a local flower business.  You create a website, expecting to show up in Google when someone in your area is looking to buy flowers.  You get some advice that tells you to make sure your website is rich in content and uses lots of keywords. 

So you make lots of pages on your site talking about different types of flowers and you list special arrangements you have and provide lots of good pictures.  You make sure to use the word “florist” a lot as that is what people would likely search for when trying to find you. 

After you’ve spent a lot of time and money to build your site, you search for a florist in your area and your site is nowhere to be found.

What went wrong?

A search on Google for the term “florist” returns about 16,900,000 results. That means your site has to outperform almost 17 million other sites in order to show up for that specific term.  And on top of that, there are some major players in the online flower business and your hopes of outranking them are pretty slim.

So, how do you get around this?  The answer is simple: You need to be more specific!

I’m going to take the area around our office as an example: Lets search for the term “florist orange county” – 307,000 results.  Now we’re getting somewhere!

None of the major players are anywhere to be seen in the results, so you have an excellent chance of showing up when someone is searching for your business in your area.  The odds of showing up for “florist orange county” are much better than just “florist”. And if the term “florist orange county” exists on your site and is prominent, you’re way ahead of your competition!

Make small changes to your site and to be sure the term “florist orange county” or “orange county florist” is used instead of just florist.  You will see some major differences in your traffic and results!

There are two points I’d like to caution you against when using this technique:

1. Don’t spam your site and put “florist orange county” 10 times on every page.  Use it naturally in your content, and maybe have it included in your business name which appears on every page of your site.  Again, it should look natural.
2. Don’t spam the cities in your area and have a page or a footer that looks like “Florist Stanton, Florist Huntington Beach, Florist Anaheim, Florist Orange, etc.”.  Remember, you want to be specific and target just one area, so choose either the county you are in, or even better,  one specific city where your shop is located.

You must follow certain rules in writing a good Google Ad. Many people have made the mistake of stuffing keywords to find out that this strategy can be costly by attracting the wrong types of public who are not inclined to buy or take action.

From our experience with Google AdWords, SEO and SEM, these are key points to follow:

1. Your grammar, spelling and punctuation must be perfect. Capitalize the first word in each sentence.
2. Provide four lines of text with no pictures.
3. Your first line must be limited to 25 characters.
4. Be as specific and precise as possible.
5. Lines two and three must be 35 characters each.
6. Use keywords twice more when possible.
7. Tell users why they MUST have your product. Have a “call to action”.
8. Cite statistical information and facts.
9. When you are selling something, include the price.
10. Use your third line for a “call to action”.
11. Line four is for your destination URL. You must place your URL within the ad itself.
12. Sell your benefits with power words and hot buttons.
13. Write in simple, everyday words.
14. You must utilize keywords within the ad itself.
15. Test, Test and Test. Place many ads simultaneously and test which is best.

Google Ads can be a powerful and profitable means to driving people to your website and to generate a lot of sales and profits. Use them right and you will find that your Google Ads strategy could be your biggest edge against your competition.