Humour me with a quick experiment: run a Google search for the keywords “yd refund” or “yd refund policy“. If your search results are anything like mine, you’ll see a blog post written by Adam Jaffrey on 8 Jan 2010 in the top few results (it’s called Start your complaints at the top | by Adam Jaffrey).
My blog post ranks higher than Yd’s website in Google Search.
My post seems to rank higher for searches originating from Google Australia (i.e. http://www.google.com.au) than from the non-localised Google (i.e. http://www.google.com). I’m not particularly sure why this is.
What is interesting, is that (under the Google Australia search scenario) my blog post (which essentially trashes out Yd) ranks higher than Yd’s own official website! Why? Well it’s likely because I talk a lot about the topics of yd and refund throughout my blog post. Conversely, Yd does not have any section of their website which addresses the topic of refunds. In fact, Yd’s website doesn’t even mention the word “refund”!
If you’re the Marketing Manager for Yd, fear not! There’s likely an easy fix for this. Just create a page on the Yd website which contains your refund policy and title it, ahem … Refund Policy. That should give you enough Google Juice to jump above me on the Google Search page.
To date, since that original blog post was written it’s had 118 unique pageviews. Granted, most of those were from within my own social sphere. But, I do get website traffic from Google searches of “yd refund”, and other similar keywords.
So my blog post, which speaks poorly of Yd, ranks higher than the official Yd website. Does this pose a problem for Yd? Maybe.
I think the bigger problem is that it seems Yd is unaware of the issue. From a marketing perspective, we are entering an age where it is almost brand suicide to not be monitoring your brand’s consumer sentiment online.
After all, “your brand isn’t what you say it is, it’s what Google says it is” (quote attributed to Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail and Editor-in-Chief at Wired Magazine).
You make a good point here Adam, brands should not only consider monitoring the key words associated with their brand and products but also the key words associated with their complaints! Never thought of it that way… love the tag line at the end
Thanks for checking out my blog, Janine!
Yes, it is important to monitor positive, negative and neutral conversations around your brand. Brands don’t always need to intervene, but it’s important to know what’s being said.
It’s a great quote. I’ve updated the post with credit to its owner.