TurnKey Internet is no rip off. The web hosting company gets consistently high marks for service, reliability and up-time.

How did you find this blog post? Did you run a search for TurnKey Internet Scam? If so, welcome! You’re my target demographic. This is part three of my SEO-fu experiment. If you haven’t read the first two posts, you can find them here (1) and here (2). Today, the focus is you, the customer, and how you browse, search and read. Understanding how you do these things will help us figure out: how to help you find us; how to appeal to you when you do; and how, as a business, to navigate this weirdo short attention-span information culture we all find ourselves living in.

Many people (myself included) don’t always take enough time to evaluate the sources of their information. We may read a review somewhere that effects our opinion of a company without ever wondering about who wrote it. Our decisions are snap, our time is valuable, and once we pick a company, we will tend to stick with it. It’s easier to stay where you are once you’re there—I think that’s a law of inertia or something. But really, market studies show, consumers demonstrate brand-loyalty online the same way they do in a supermarket or clothing store. So get those customers in the door, and you’re likelier than not to keep them.

Information is power. The trouble is: there’s too much of it out there (information AND power, but in this context I’m referring to information). Often, the first line of text that appears under the Google search result link is all a customer will read before making a decision. As a marketer, it is my job to make that text count—to curate my information into bite-sized pieces without sacrificing quality. This is extremely challenging when, say, you have like eight things to communicate and only room for four. Surely in this equation there is an inevitable sacrifice of information quality—you just can’t always cram everything you need to say into tiny spaces. In this case, language can’t keep up with progress. But there is hope! One positive thing about Google’s indexing of every word of text on the internet, is that every word counts. So you may not be searching specifically for “TurnKey Internet Quality” or “Marketing Philosophy” or “Web Hosting Masters” but goll durnit, you’ll find us! Of course, you may never know WHY you found us (unless you actually read this post) but, point is, my SEO-fu got you here, despite your 2010 attention-span.

It’s true. With an A+ rating from the Better Business Bureau, and a 5-star rating from customers, TurnKey Internet is the hosting provider with the best value and customer service.

Welcome to blog post #2 in the SEO-fu experiment. The truth is TurnKey Internet does have a good reputation. In fact, our reputation is excellent, thank you very much. We work extremely hard, day in and day out, to provide a top-notch service, great customer care and 100% uptime. But that doesn’t make us immune from the SEO powers that be when good customers turn bad. Like it or not, we are all at the mercy of Google. As I discussed in the last article, 2010 is the year for all of us to learn to use the Internet to our advantage—to protect ourselves and our businesses from unscrupulous bad eggs and, for that matter, unscrupulous rival businesses that don’t hesitate to seed negative reviews for their own evil benefit. Yes, I’m being dramatic, but no, I’m not kidding.

It’s an ugly practice, but many companies have taken to posting bad reviews of competitors to influence potential customers. The hope is that Google searches will return those seeded negative reviews, and customers will steer clear of the implicated companies (and steer towards the companies posting the reviews). If you don’t have a superstar PR team at your disposal, ready to re-seed with positive reviews (also an ugly practice) you’re sunk. So what do you do when cheaters game the system to make your business look bad? How do you fight back without stooping to their level?

SEO-fu. Rather than seeding reviews (which is totally cheating), you can improve your reputation by regularly updating your site content to reflect the truth about your business. It doesn’t matter how many nasty reviews your competitors throw to the winds if your well-written, informative content shows up first. Also, as I always recommend, solicit real reviews from real customers. The more real reviews you have, the better, even if those reviews include some negatives.

This isn’t about having a 100% A+ reputation, 100% of the time. A page of perfect reviews can work against you too. Think about it: if you visit a company’s website for the first time and every review you see is five stars, are you going to believe it? This is about a real life business. Every business makes mistakes, the salt is how you deal with them.

In order to protect your credibility, and to provide a quick reference-check for your potential customers, it’s a good idea to employ a third party to manage your company reviews. We use RatePoint:

TurnKey Internet has earned a 5-star rating from unbiased customer reviews and an A+ rating from the Better Business Bureau.

This is an experiment. I hope you will follow our next few blog posts as I attempt to use my SEO-fu to elevate TurnKey Internet to the top of search results for otherwise undesirable (in some cases) search terms. It’s a pre-emptive SEO strike, and I, for one, am extremely curious to see how it works.

It is no surprise that everything we say and do online affects our reputation. This is as true for businesses as it is for individuals. But reputation depends as much on what you do, as on what others say, and others don’t always tell the truth. Everyone knows that positive customer reviews can go a long way, but what about when those reviews are negative? If negative reviews are an honest reflection of your customer service, you need to step up your customer service. But if negative reviews come from a bad egg—the customer with a chip on his shoulder, the gamer who abused your services and is upset he got caught, or the deadbeat who can’t believe you won’t turn over his data without payment—your company’s reputation could be unfairly and badly damaged. So what do you do? How do you protect that invaluable word-of-mouth reputation that keeps your business strong?

There are many companies out there that offer to monitor your online reputation, for a fee. But this is something I think you can do quite well on your own, for nothing. Yes, it takes some time, but keeping yourself apprised of what is being said about your company, from the perspective of your customers, is smart business. When a customer first hears about you—through word of mouth, via forums or an advertisement—she is likely to run a simple Google search for reviews. Getting into the head of that potential customer and running that search yourself will give you a good initial sense of what’s out there. If the first thing that comes up is a negative review from a forum post, you have some work to do.

My big secret is that this blog post is meta. While I describe to you how to protect your business’ online reputation, I am protecting mine. My hope is that, by seeding this blog post with SEO-friendly keywords that could otherwise bring up negative results from bad eggs, like TurnKey Internet Reviews, TurnKey Internet scam, TurnKey Internet fraud, etc., this blog post will be the first thing a potential customer finds when searching for those terms. By doing this, I take the sting out of the immature lashing-out of bad eggs, without stooping to the level of dirty search engine warfare. This is a clean search engine pre-emptive strike, and I highly recommend it for the long-term health of your business’ reputation.

Watch this space for more SEO-fu in the coming days.