Google’s aim is always, first and foremost, to provide great content for those using their search engine.

Matt says that Google are planning to punish any sites that are ‘overly-optimised’ – I think this plainly says where they’re aiming.

Cutts said that normally they don’t pre-announce changes but there is something the team have been working on in the last few months and hope to release in the next few weeks. The idea is basically to try to level the playing field a bit, so that those who have been overly doing their search engine optimisation (SEO) – compared to the people who are just making great content and trying to make a fantastic site, don’t have an unfair advantage. And they are also looking at the people who abuse it, those who put too many keywords on a page, exchange way too many links, or whatever else they are doing to go beyond what you would normally expect. Cutts has several engineers on his team working on this right now.

This is a wake-up call for many: Produce great, relevant content and add fresh content regularly.

This is something we here at DriveYourBusinessOnline always strive to do for our clients.

Many businesses simply choose to ignore this and, subsequently, will suffer a loss of business. On the other hand, those businesses who decide to be proactive in getting their Review strategy in place and in reacting, swiftly, to any less than flattering reviews posted on the web will see big – and, in most cases, swift – increases in enquiries online, leading to more business.

The Reputation Management Workshops that we’ve put together are proving extremely popular with a wide range of businesses, from small firms located in one area to large companies with branches in multiple locations – each of these branches is targeting its local area.

Everything discussed below on this blog – and more – is covered in the Workshops and, best of all…they’re free.

For more information or to book a free workshop simply contact us here at DriveYourBusinessOnline and we’ll arrnage a date/time and location (most firms have wanted us to call out to them).

Get started on this now and you WILL be ahead of most of your competitors.

There are so many review sites now that it is nigh on impossible to monitor them all – unless you have a system in place, that’s what we at Drive Your Business Online do for our clients. We set up an ‘Alert’ system, which alerts our clients every time a mention of their firm or certain keywords about their company are mentioned online – they then receive an email, with a link to the mention.

Somebody may have posted a review on any of the major review sites, no problem if it’s a good one, but if it’s a poor one – and it isn’t responded to it can lose you the custom of whoever’s reading it. We’ve come across some businesses who have a number of poor reviews – on a number of review sites – and they haven’t been aware of them until we’ve informed them.

As partof your overall Customer Review strategy you should be watching out for all mentions of your company online.

The great thing for local businesses, targeting their local markets, who are ready to implement what we are guiding them on, is that, for now, they will be far ahead of their local competition – so many businesses haven’t yet started doing this. Start putting your Customer Review/Alerts strategy in place now and you really do have a great opportunity to clean up.

Watch out for the next post, giving full details of our Customer Review Workshops.

Drive Your Business Online are helping lots of local businesses with this – we can help you.