On today’s show we have Pierre Zarokian, Founder of Submit Express and veteran search marketer. We get into SEO, reputation management, how the SEM industry has changed, and more! 

More on Pierre: Website – Twitter – LinkedIn

Reputation management is 10X SEO.

Pierre Zarokian

Show Highlights

We asked Pierre the following questions:

• How did you get started with SEO?
• How important are backlinks today?
• What are some of the challenges today in running Submit Express?
• Tell us more about reputation management and what type of clients you typically work with in this space?
• What type of marketing do you utilize for your own companies?
• Where do you see the future of SEO going?
• What is the process for repairing an online reputation?
• Will voice search be important?

More from the show:

• $500/month won’t get you the results it did 10 years ago – now $2 to $3K/month budgets
• SEO as a service has gotten competitive – offshoring, local, more agencies, freelancers
• SEO has gotten a bad rap due to people getting burned
• Reputation management is a really involved practice – lots of work to suppress rankings – building assets, link building, reviews, blogging, social media posts, optimizing existing content, etc.
• 10 properties at minimum for reputation management
• Wild west in reputation management as far as paying people to remove content – its recommend to go through a reputation management company to handle this
• On Yelp you can flag a negative review
• If it’s not a first hand account you can ask Google and Yelp to remove (chances of getting removed are less than 5%)
• If this doesn’t work you can try sending a legal letter to Yelp
• Can go straight to the person but don’t offer money – if Yelp finds out your business could get flagged with a warning at the top of the page for 6 months letting people know you tried to pay to have a review removed (nothing in writing – if you do reach out do so verbally)
• Ripoff report doesn’t remove anything unless you opt to pay through their paid program
• Best thing to do when you’ve got a bad review is to increase the good reviews
• Pierre has a program that will send a survey via text or email to your customers asking for a review – if it comes back positive than they get a followup asking to write a review on Yelp and Google and if they are not happy you can reach out before they write a review
• And more!

Show Links:

• Submit Express
• iClimber
• Web Design Express
• Reputation Stars
• Ripoff Report
• The Hoth
• Complaints Board
• Pissed Consumer
• Scambook