How much is a good review worth?

Reviews are helpful.. especially when they're good reviews. But in some cases, they are essential to doing business well. For instance, I was on Amazon.com shopping for printer toner cartridges. Some toner cartridge sets had terrible reviews. This scared me because I realized that the issues I had been having with my printer were due to leaking ink that other people who had written reviews had experienced. So I was specifically looking for toner cartridges with good reviews. I found one et of toner cartridges for sale had a ton of good reviews at a fairly cheap price.

I bought the toner cartridges and when I received the package, I got a coupon that told me that if I wrote a review on the product, that they would send me a $10 Amazon gift card. I immediately thought "cool, I can get $10 free" but then I thought, "wait what's the catch?" I quickly realized that all the reviews were written by people who received the coupon for the free gift card and immediately went online and wrote a good review before even knowing whether the ink was good or not.

Why do I know this? Because that's what I was about to do! Because why would you wait to write a review if you know you can get a $10 gift card now, and of course why would you give up your chance of possibly not getting the $10 gift card by writing a bad review? Very smart marketing technique I have to say. Makes you think how much does it cost to sway people to buy your product instead of someone else's by making sure that you get a ton of good reviews? Maybe only $10, maybe only $5, maybe less… people love free money so it's a great incentive to them. You can always add that extra into the sales price because having the good reviews will put you ahead of the competition with cheaper prices and bad reviews. This is great for products that have a lot of competition or products that people may be unsure of the quality when purchasing online.

SEO for better google web ranking

A lot of people have been asking me how they can make their website more visible online. If you own a website, and especially if you have advertised with Google Ads, you probably have already been bombarded with emails coming from SEO companies trying to get your business. The problem is that some (actually many) don't really do much and just take your money. Some even want yearly contracts that you get locked into before you even see results. This makes it difficult to figure out who is real. And the problem with google ads is that many times, the clicks are getting used by these crappy SEO companies who click on your paid link and email you just to sell you SEO services. I'm not sure when or how google is going to find a way to stop them from doing this, but it's definitely a problem.

So here are some suggestions for you to figure out who you can use to do your SEO:

1. Don't use a company that wants more than a one month at a time contract. SEO is usually done monthly, so it's necessary to pay by the month but don't get locked into a yearly contract without seeing results.

2. If you have a small business who is advertising mostly locally, the average rate is $300 per month. Much more and you might be getting ripped off, much less and your might be getting ripped off.

3. Use a company who has a portfolio of previous clients and a website. Why wouldn't they have their own website? And you don't want to use them if they are new at it.

4. Use a company who is a small business and doesn't have sales people who don't actually do any SEO. This is just an extra expense and this probably means that the customer service will disappear later.

5. You're going to be stuck with this company for a while possible, so choose wisely. It takes several months for SEO to even start working- up to 6-9 months possibly so you want to make sure they're good because you can't change SEO companies each month.

6. Don't use a company that says they can get your keywords to the top of google in a month, they are probably using some black SEO techniques that will get you penalized by google.

And finally, my long sought out recommendation for SEO services:
www.sitesmartmarketing.com
Their SEO packages start at $300/ month and are very friendly and knowledgable about SEO and online marketing and will help your business achieve it's SEO goals. Call them at 702-666-8875 and tell them that Megan referred you. :)