Stop Competitors and Mean People Destroying Your Reputation – How I Removed My First (FAK*E) Negative Google Review

April 27, 2016/0 Comments/in Uncategorized /by KostaKondratenko

Recently I had setup my Google Local page and was excited – I had set the address to be in the centre of Sydney – which I believe would help my local search results.

However right after the first client had left a very positive review something happened.

Not to get into specifics but let’s say I had a spat with a certain person who I believed was upset and wanted to get me back. And this person went on Google and left a negative review for my business.

It’s interesting how vulnerable we all are as business owners – as far as our reputation goes.

Lucky for me though the negative Google review that was left was complete bulls#$t – in the sense that it was verifyable false.

Unlike other businesses that serve the public such as a coffee shop for example – all my clients are businesses and so it is much harder for someone to just come out and say I did a bad job – since they would then have to say what I did wrong and I could then place a dispute with Google that their review is bogus. Whereas if someone just says the coffee shop staff was rude you can’t really dispute that.

Anyway right after the first client had left a positive review – this 1 star review was left:

Firstly – there are a number of things with that Google review that are sketchy – and when a Google review is left for your business – when the reviewer is saying things that are verifyable true it’s a good indicator that the review was left for nefarious purposes (such as by a competitor).

To quickly break down this bogus review here are just a few inaccuracies and outright lies:
There is no public file on me at the … – their dispute handling process is done internally and any mediated decisions are not released to the public
The client cited as being ‘fake’ is actually very real – and I have evidence of the website I built for this client as well as the invoices I have sent
The account which left the negative Google review is an anomyous business account – incidentally they had another negative review left for another business leading me to think that maybe this account was just created to leave negative Google reviews (or it’s just a very terrible/negative person)
Oh and I’m not a ‘fly by night’ operation as evidenced by the Wayback Machine which will tell you my business and website have been around in various iterations for 5+ years

Anyway below I will outline what I did to have the Google review removed – I’ll also note some things I could have done to speed up the removal.

Remember your reputation is everything and one negative word could make a high profile client look the other way – so reputation management is big. Here I’m basically laying out the blueprint on how to keep yourself sqeaky clean from the ill motives of competitors.

The steps are actually really simple:

Step 1: Reply Politely and Clarify

The first thing you need to do is to make it clear to anyone reading your side of the story. In my case I realised there was no point in trying to reason with the person that left the review – since their intention was to damage my reputation.

Instead my reply – which is now gone (since Google has removed the negative review) was somewhere along the following lines:

The review left above was not left by a customer but rather a disgruntled competitor and contains verifyable untrue statements. The domain age of my website is 5+ years and I am far from a fly by night operation – the client the review is referring to exists and I would be happy to provide evidence to anyone that enquired. Further there is no public file on me at the Department of Fair Trading.

My hope in leaving this reply was that while I was waiting for Google to remove the negative review – anyone who would stumble across my business page would get both sides of the story.

As the owner of the Google Business Page you can reply to reviews.

However if the negative review was left by a genuinely disgruntled customer my advice would be to engage the customer in seeing how you can make it right – even if you feel the customer is in the wrong. It would be a lot cheaper to give the customer a discount or a partial refund in exchange for the negative review being removed rather than have the reputation of your business come down.

Step 2: Call Google (and how to call Google)

So how exactly do you contact Google and ask them to remove a Google review? There’s no ‘Contact Us’ button at the bottom of Google.com. However most businesses have no idea that they can actually call Google and talk to them about their website.

So here is a step by step tutorial on how to call Google:

Login to your Google My Business Account (if you have a local business page then by defination you would have a Google My Business account which you can login to here: https://www.google.com.au/business/
Select the business page which has received a negative review (if you are just running the one business just select that page) – you can see an example of me selecting my local business location below:
Click the 3 horizontal lines in the top left hand corner of your My Business page for your local business and click ‘Contact Support’
Scroll down in the popup window that comes up on the right and click on ‘Phone’
Enter your ‘Contact Name’, ‘Email address’ and ‘phone number’
Finally click on Send
Wait for Google to call you! (usually about 5-10 seconds)

How cool is that?

And now when the person answers simply explain to them your request to remove your Google review.

Bonus Step: Follow Up with Evidence by Email

Here is what you must understand about Google’s resolution process.

Let’s say you call Google and you speak to Cindy who tells you that she will review this issue and resolve it for you.

You get off the phone (and this happened to me) – and you wait for Cindy to get back to you.

You’ll wait 3 days and hear nothing so you call back to Google to speak to Ryan – who checks the issue – puts you on hold for 15 minutes only to return to tell you that since Cindy is looking after this there is nothing you can do.

In order to make the issue go quicker make sure you have Cindy’s contact email address and follow up with evidence if the review is not true.

Note: Google My Business support don’t have direct email addresses however if you get the person you’re speaking with to send you an email you can then interact with them by replying to that email.

In my case I could have emailed them a confirmation from the Department of Fair Trading that they have no file on me for example.

The more information you can give Google – at the very least – will remind the person about the issue and will get them more reasons to remove the negative review.

Finally – The Good News

When it’s all said and done you will eventually get an email that the negative Google review has been removed. You can see what this email looks like below:

Hope that helps and good luck!

Who’s Writing Your Copy? Why a Beautiful Website Won’t Save An Alphabet Soup

April 4, 2016/0 Comments/in Uncategorized /by KostaKondratenko

Depending on your perception of the value and skill required to write good content for your website – you may be surprised to learn that the content creation of your website will usually cost a lot more than the actual design part of your website.

Yet what’s ironic is that many of my clients don’t even consider their content needs when building a website.

Sure – they know they’ll need to write out some content – but in many cases it’s more of an after thought.

Here’s the thing – there can be many examples I can point to where a poorly designed website with excellent copy – which included a hot offer, a time limit etc. – which made the owner of the website a lot of money.

However I don’t think I can find a single example of a well designed website with crappy copy (badly targeted offer, boring content, failure to list benefits) that made the website owner any money.

So the big question for this article is – who’s writing your copy?

Note: copy just refers to the words on a page – however copy is specifically referencing the words that will sell your product/offer rather than generic words like for example your contact information or About Us page.

While I would recommend – if you have the option – to engage with a high end copywriter I realise that for many people reading this that is simply not an option. The reason is that GOOD copywriters are expensive – like really expensive.

Luckily when you work with me you’ll get to work with a web developer that has an understanding of what makes a website sell – as far as content goes. While I love coding – I also understand the traditional word.

This is very important – a lot of people engage web developers/copywriters overseas who not only don’t understand the local dialect and cultural slang of Australia – but even worse may speak broken English in general.

So I’ve decided to do something different in this blog post – I wanted to show you a technique that a copywriter taught me that I have used for pretty much every single piece of copy I write. It is so simple – and can be remembered with 3 letters (PAS) – and I will include an example of an ad for my own services which has converted like crazy.

By learning this simple technique you’ll be ahead of 98% of business owners – and you can start writing original copy instead of just copying other businesses.

The Secret Recipe of Highlyg Converting Copy – the PAS Method

PAS stands for ‘Problem’, ‘Agitation’ and ‘Solution’ and your copy must include those elements in that order.

I’m going to include an overview of each step – or letter – and then show you how I incorporated those elements in my own ad:

Problem

This is where you identify the problem the client is having – and it’s the place where you identify and show the client you understand what they are going through.

Depending on the format that you structure your ad – you can begin this with a story -or if it’s more of a billboard or an image ad you can just include a bulletpoint or headline.

A mistake a lot of companies make is leaving out the problem – so for example a company could make an ad like so:

Our beds have NASA technology foam!

And while that’s great it’s not linked to the problem the person is having, so a way to change the above line to incorporate a problem could be as follows:

Want to keep your back after 40?
Our beds have NASA technology foam!

Note: I’m no expert in beds as you can see but I’m just showing the concept.

This is a very simple example and in most cases your copy will have much more content but stating the problem is a critical part of your copy.

Agitation

The agitation part is where you really step up to being a master word smith with the ability to control your client’s emotions and lead them down the path of getting excited to part with their cash for your service.

You see when a client has a problem – in many cases it’s an emotional issue which is forcing them to find solutions.

We are emotional creatures and this is the most important thing to understand when writing copy.

So since I’ll be using an example from my own ad further down this blog post I’ll use an example in this section.

People want a website because they want people to find out about their product/service online right? And perhaps even order that service online and make an enquiry.

That’s a pretty logical statement – and if you have started a business or are operating one – it would be logical for you to create a website to be found right?

However did you know that if you set your website up incorrectly it could lead to your website not being found in Google – and even worse it could lead to your website being penalised and banned from Google outright?

Do you see what I did there? Suddenly – if you are a business owner – your chest tightened up – the idea of having your website banned from Google – or not being found causes anxiety. The embarassment of not having your website display – the thought of losing all that money from customers who can’t find you.

This is the agitation part of my copy – and I could go further – I could talk about how your competitors are currently getting the most high margin clients – and how 90% of people in your market will go to Google to find what they are looking for – and how if you are not on Google you don’t even exist.

This is not going to make you do business with me or order a website – but it will make the pain of making the wrong decision very real – and it will get you primed as a potential customer to hear what I have to say next – as the information is very relevant to you.

Does that make sense?

Can you take your own product and after listing the problems it solves – agitate those problems further to create a real emotional connection for your prospect – the person reading your copy?

This may seem un natural at first and you want to be conscious of who you are targeting but believe me – EVERY SINGLE PRODUCT/SERVICE offering uses agitation to some degree – there is no target market or target customer that is ‘too sophisticated’ for this technique.

Solution

This is where you offer the client a solution that will solve all their problems – the trick is to offer a solution that addressses all the pain points you have raised so far in your copy.

For example taking the copy for my own service that I have mentioned before – regarding not being found or being banned from Google – my solution could (and does) include the following:

‘SEO Optimized website FREE’

Now the client can rest assured that part of his website package will include an SEO optimised website.

I could also include a testimonial that will subtly communicate that I have the knowledge and the practical experience that they can trust me with making their website Google friendly such as the following:

‘”Within 2 weeks of working with Kosta over 1,500 of our products were indexed by Google. This caused a traffic increase of 74%. also our newsletter subscriber count has jumped by 340%. We just wish we would have found Kosta sooner than wasting thousands with our previous SEO company.” – Harrison Logan, DragonImage’

So you can see how you can address the Solution in various ways – through testimonials, images and videos!

So there it is, that’s the PAS method – you don’t have to write the greatest piece of copy ever to make your offer sell – however if you can look at the copy that you write and point to the Problem, Agitation and Solution section you are ahead of 98% of business owners.

This stuff is powerful – make no mistake about it.

What I have given you above is a very useful tool to throw in your arsernal.

My advice is whoever you choose to write your copy – yourself, someone in your business – a copywriter or even me – make sure they understand the elements of successful selling through the written word.