Win the Game of Googleopoly

Chapter 8Online Reputation Optimization

There are multiple layers of online reputation or reputation management. There is the obvious “reputation” aspect of it. Perception is reality. What people see, they will believe. It is like back in the day—when something was on television, it had to be real. Today if it is on Google, it must be real. Or if “Google says…,” it must be real. As mentioned earlier in Chapter 2, Jim Lecinski from Google wrote the book Winning the Zero Moment of Truth, or ZMOT. What he said is that more than 80 percent of all transactions in the United States start on search engines. And the number one influence point is online reputation—the “zero moment of truth.” When someone reads a Google review, a Yelp review, or a MerchantCircle review, it can and will cause them to react to the person, product, or service differently. An online review on Google will influence a person's buying decision. Google places a very high level of value on reviews, especially on reviews people leave on Google+ Local Business/Google Reviews.

There is another reason why reviews are so important to Google. Google wants to give people what they are looking for, when they are looking for it. Google wants to give the absolute best possible results—that means the best possible person, place, product, service, thing, and so on. Google knows that 95 percent of people do not go past the first page, so out of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of search results, Google has ...