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SEO 101 CRM with SEO

By Dwayne Goerges of www.topwebsitetips.com

Just reading the title is enough to give me a headache. CRM or Customer Relationship Management has to do with people and SEO has to do with the search engines, how can they possible be related? Well, hold on to your seat, I’m going to try to tie these two seemingly unrelated terms together.

CRM It’s about the customer

As stated above, CRM is the art of managing a company’s relationships with its past, current and future clients. Usually the best way to handle a complaint by a past or current client is to handle it directly. When done online this is often done by using twitter tweets, blog posts, replying on to the same blog post the complaining client used, etc.

Many companies use Google alerts to let them know when someone writes anything about their company on the internet. A quick response may save the client or at least minimize any damage the disgruntled client may have started to cause. Future clients like to see companies that are highly responsive to complaints and seem reasonable and willing to try to make the client happy.

In a way you can call this a form of SEO due to the fact that normally links to your site will be involved, often responding to the complaint may require linking back to your site to pages that clarify how to handle the problem. But for the most part this is straight CRM, quickly handling complaints and by doing so assuring future or potential clients of the responsiveness of your company.

In reality not all “bad publicity” is really bad; it’s only bad when it is not handled quickly and properly. When handled correctly “bad publicity” can be turned to advertise how much your company values its customer’s happiness.

Some customers won’t be appeased

As hard as you try, there will likely be times that you are just unable to do enough to make the disgruntled customer happy. At times that may mean that there is now a bad review on the front page of the search results right under you sites links when searching for your company name.

Now what?

This is where that crazy phrase CRM with SEO comes in. While this may seem a little harsh, if you can’t smooth over the problem, bury it! While a complaint on the front page of the search engines can cause a large amount of damage that same complaint buried down on the 2cd, 3rd, or 4th page ceases to matter much.

So, how do you go about burying an unjustified complaint against your company? This is where SEO comes in. It’s time to start creating articles about your site, optimized for your site title and getting them on strong websites. This also means getting links to these pages so that they will continue to raise in the search engines until they start taking all the slots on the first 1-3 pages of results. This can be a time consuming job because every article should be unique and highly optimized and then well linked to in order to work. There are some faster ways though.

Page burying through Site analysis sites

Another way to bury pages that are not extremely strong is to start submitting your site to the large number of website analysis sites out there. Many of these sites are very strong and the page talking about your site may reach the front page of the search engine results in only a few days, thus pushing the offending page out of sight quickly. This gives you time to start developing stronger pages that actually have value in promoting your business.

Pre-emptive strike

Personally I like to make sure that any complaint page that may ever come up will never reach the front page of the search results. To do this, I like to be in control of every search result in at least the first page of search engine results for the name of my company. Sometimes this is not always possible because other companies share you company name or something close to it. Dropping those companies off the first page is not quite as important for the sake of CRM, these sites are less likely to be posting critical reviews of your site (unless you’re battling from the same customers)

So there you go CRM with SEO. Yes, I know, I’ve barely scratched the surface of real CRM. Other facets of CRM require software to track current customers, find new potential customers and contact past customers to get them to return, but that is way out of the scope of this intel (maybe a future one?)

Contributor's Note

This is the twelfth in a series of SEO 101 articles I am writing. I am a 10 year veteran of website building and promotion. These articles outline some of the basic steps I use to promote my clients websites.

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Wildnet Technologies
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I think in your third paragraph you mean "Many companies use Google alerts" instead of "Many companies use Google alters". I could be wrong ?;)

My wife who is an author uses this all the time to keep track of when her pen name gets mentioned anywhere on the Internet.

Often it alerts her of copyright infringement also known as pirating. When she finds it leads to a good review she goes and "pours gasoline on it". She might mention the review in her newsletter, Twitter, Facebook, Myspace or on her website with a link to the review.

Uh No, that was right. See people pray at the Google Alter and hope the Google gods will help them. but I like your version too, so I think I'll change that to Google Alerts. :)

Thanks For catching that, I wonder how many people I confused with that one. :P

This sounds a little familiar, I heard of a budding article-website-directory-cum-networking-site that had this exact same problem.

Thank you for this awesome guide to CRM aka online reputation management. You da guru!

Yes, that did give me a little inspiration for this article :)

Not the first time I've seen the tactic used, or even used it my self for a client. Sounds pretty bad when a company decides to use the bury method, but sometimes there is no other choice (like when the complainer is being unreasonable)

Thank you for the great details and the valuable information, Dwayne.
I can only hope to have your level of knowledge someday.
Keep up the good work.
Best to you.
Frederick

Thanks, and someday I hope my skill at wood working will match yours. :) Maybe when I'm done with my latest carving project I'll do an intel on it. :)

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