To follow up from yesterday’s post on why you should include “free shipping” in your title tags and meta descriptions (only if you offer it, of course) — today I’m going to demonstrate why you should create a unique page optimized for your “brand name + free shipping.”

We mentioned yesterday that people search for “free shipping.” There’s no doubt.

And people search for products with “free shipping” as a modifier.

Guess what else they search on? Your store name plus free shipping. And who ranks? Often affiliates, deals and coupon sites.

Check out the related searches suggested by Google when you search for “free shipping.”

Let’s click on “free shipping JC Penney”:

Now, JC Penney needs a page optimized for “free shipping” so it would rank #1. Of course, JC Penney doesn’t need to offer free shipping all the time to have its own dedicated page. The page just needs to exist, all the time, as a landing page for “free shipping jc penney” traffic.

These searchers are going to find the coupons one way or the other, so why not have a landing page (perhaps a sub-section of customer service) that shows which products qualify for free shipping at any given moment, and has a link to an RSS feed for future free shipping offers, or an email sign-up link? Then you can even segment these cheapo-s out into their own bucket in your email campaigns (I’m kidding, but I’m not kidding).

And don’t forget keywords in the title tag: “JC Penney Free Shipping Offers.”

Luxury retailer Cartier recently launched a MySpace presence for its Love by Cartier campaign. But it faces an interesting reputation management issue: since MySpace already has hundreds of profiles that use the name Cartier (it is a surname, after all).

If you type in “Cartier MySpace” in Google, this is what you get:

If someone really wants to find the page, they may head over to MySpace and use it’s site search box, and still not find the official page:

You have to type “Love By Cartier” in Google or MySpace to get the link to the Cartier MySpace page (at time of posting, algorithm changes or incoming links to Cartier’s page may change that).

Yahoo’s algorithm does select the right page for “Cartier MySpace”:

Though you can’t control how Google matches pages to the search term (duplicate content filter in action), you can build links to the page you want to rank well to help boost its “Page Rank” which may cause it to beat out other pages in the search engine’s index. (If the search engine indexed 500+ pages from MySpace relevant to the term “Cartier”, it only picks 1 to show in search results, 2 if it uses an indented second result).

Cartier could also nag MySpace to tweak its internal search to rank its page tops for “Cartier” searches, especially since this is an advertising partnership between the two.

This is also an example of why brands should really claim their social network profile names / domains / Facebook Pages and Groups proactively, even if they just sit on them. It’s easy for net citizens to beat you to the punch which makes it harder for you to be found in search engines and social network searches.

According to a recent study by the Society for New Communications Research, 59% of consumers use social media to vent their frustrations about customer service experience, and research other companies’ customer service before dealing with them.

• 74% choose companies/brands based on others’ customer-care experiences shared online

• 72% research companies’ customer care online prior to purchasing products and services at least sometimes
• 84% consider the quality of customer care at least sometimes in their decision to do business with a company
• 81% say blogs, online rating systems and discussion forums can give consumers a greater voice regarding customer care, but less than 33% say they believe that businesses take customers’ opinions seriously
• Search engines are the most valuable online tools for this research. Those rated of no value include micro-blogging sites like Twitter or Pownce (39%), YouTube (27%) and social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace (22%)

Via: Consumers Using Social Media to ‘Vent’ about, Research Customer Service

Do you know what consumers are saying about you?

More than ever I strongly believe each online retailer needs a dedicated social media representative who can perform reputation management by monitoring the conversation on the Web and responding to each concern as effectively as possible. This could be handled internally or by a consultant.

ReadWriteWeb has a great roundup of (free and paid) tools you can use to monitor your online reputation, including Google Alerts, Trackur, Naymz and Monitor This.

Can You Clear Search Results from Negative Word of Mouth?

Because negative comments on popular social networks, review sites, blogs and forums can rank top 10 in search engines for your company name, it can be very easy for customers to find this information on you. Although you cannot demand, beg or bribe search engines from removing these pages from their indexes for you - you can often join the conversation yourself and speak to customer concerns directly.

You can also contact the owners of the websites and negotiate removal or modification of the content. Some will co-operate, others won’t. Some will ask for money. You may think wiping out the content is the preferred approach, but remember that the community is watching you. It’s possible that the thread starters will be notified of their threads’ removal and warned about mentioning your company negatively in the future. These posters can just as easily move their rant to another website, recruiting other members to repeat your company’s keywords and link to each others’ threads and posts to take you down. I’ve seen this happen.

Turn It Into a Crisitunity

I learned from the Simpsons that the Chinese use the same word for crisis as they do for opportunity. Homer coined the term “crisitunity.” I would say the same thing for online reputation management - the seeming crisis is actually an opportunity to show that you listen to your customers and are willing to make good on bad experiences.

You can boast about your commitment to customer service in your marketing all you want, but until you have a chance to demonstrate your service, it’s all hype. So I wouldn’t get too hung up that some people had a bad experience with you, but I would certainly do everything possible to make it right with the customer. When consumers click to read the dirt on your company and read how you handle problems, it gives them more confidence that should something go wrong, they can expect you to fix it.

Glen Allsopp has good advice on how to respond to negative blog posts and how to deal with a RipOff Report listing. Glen also does reputation management consulting for a living.

Bury the Hatchets

Another opportunity is to push negative results lower in search engines by creating content that will outrank it. From my experience helping a national retailer clear the top 3 pages of Google, Yahoo and MSN I have shared a few suggestions on how to create pages on other sites about your company that are likely to rank well. Online retailers can also take advantage of shopping comparison engines, affiliate programs, coupons and deals sites. You want to choose websites that will allow your company name to appear in the title tag of the page, and you’ll also want to link to these pages from other pages to build up their Page Ranks. You have to get creative with this.

You can research which sites to go for by Googling other retailers and see what ranks highly for their names.

Further reading

38 Must-Reads on Online Reputation Management

Twitter is a social networking site that has been described as “microblogging” as it’s essentially a way to post really brief content. I believe the original concept was to create a way for people to let others know what they were doing at any given moment (like Facebook status updates) “I’m watching football,” “I’m going out for sushi,” “the cat is driving me crazy” sort of thing. But users have found bigger and better applications for Twitter. Not long ago I reported on Amazon and Woot’s use of Twitter as a way to broadcast short news bytes and deals of the day to customers. Today I’m going to expand on Twitter’s ecommerce marketing potential for one-to-one customer service, reputation management, affiliate management and a free alternative to mcommerce marketing.

Continue Reading:
Ecommerce Microblogging: More Reasons To Use Twitter »