Rising Above the Rest
“Nothing is as approved as mediocrity,” Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician, physicist, inventor and philosopher once said. “The majority has established it and it fixes its fangs on whatever gets beyond it.”
The idea of mediocrity — that of being average — is the subject of this week’s newsletter.
One of the tools we use to ensure that your business does not succumb to mediocrity is Vendasta, the reputation management software platform that allows us to optimize your listings and drive market share your way. We checked in with Vendasta Vice President George Leith and will use the next few issues of this space to pick his brain on a series of topics aimed at growing your business.
Leith abhors “average,” and you should, too.
“Do you wake up in the morning, look in the mirror, and say ‘I think I’ll aspire to be a 3 on a scale of 5 today?’” asked Leith. “Life is just too short for average.”
A key metric we track on the Vendasta platform is the Listing Score from your New Plains MediaMedia monthly report. Presented in the form of a percentage, the score measures how you size up against competitors in your industry (restaurants, plumbing, landscaping) in terms of accuracy, completeness and overall effectiveness of your listings compared to the half-million businesses tracked and surveyed in the Vendasta database.
How the Visibility Score is Measured
“With data from reputable sources like Alexa and Moz,” Leith explained, “we identified the top 100 online business directories in the US and assigned scores to each site based on its popularity. We assess the accuracy of your listings on the top 30 sites and adjust the score accordingly:”
- Accurate = 100% of potential score
- One Error = 60% of potential score
- Multiple Errors = 20% of potential score
For example, if a business has an accurate listing on Google, they will get 100 points. However, if their address and website are incorrect, they will only get 20 points (100 points x 20 percent).
“The remainder of sites in the top 100 are assigned a score of five, regardless of accuracy, and all sites outside of the top 100 are assigned a score of two, regardless of accuracy,” Leith continued. “This includes some primary listings and other citations.
We then add up the points from each site to give you your Listing Score.
A score of 50 percent here is … well … average, but very few of our new clients had attained a score of 50 percent when we began our SEO work with them. Scores of 20 percent and below are not uncommon discoveries in early meetings as we get to know new clients in our consultative approach to partnering.
Worse yet, when we do encounter the occasional 50-percenter out there — and this is the noggin-scratching, goes-against-every-grain-of-my-being part of it — the decision-maker’s response is all too often “Fifty percent! Hey, that’s not too bad.”
Average is Not Good Enough
“Average is not good enough,” Leith says, “not in 2016. Current data points to the fact that a consumer will search 15 different sources before making a buying decision. And since 2013, over 80 percent of buying decisions are made before the customer even walks through your door.”
When you run advertising in a traditional business model, Leith adds, you’d naturally expect to get a certain amount of response. But the rules have changed in terms of the form of that response.
“You wanted the phone to ring or the door to swing,” Leith says of that traditional model. “That’s not how advertising works anymore. What advertising does in today’s environment is to generate online searches. Google coined the phrase a number of years ago that those searches are your “Zero Moment of Truth,” that moment when you seek answers to such key questions as:
- Can I find what I’m looking for?
- Does the business have a good reputation?
- Will they take care of me before and after the sale?
- What are others saying about this business?
“You need to be a four or better in this five-star-rating world of ours,” Leith says. “That’s why an average score is just not going to cut it anymore. There will always be those who will put out the effort to do this better than you … and they’ll take your business. You need to be above average. Way above average.”
At New Plains Media, we specialize in “way above average.” One of the most rewarding parts of our work is to take a “That’s not too bad” and turn it into a “That’s awesome.”
Sure, it seems complex to the uninitiated, and even we as pros stumble upon new learning opportunities (snags, glitches, mysteries, ah-ha moments) each and every day, but there are few things more gratifying than raising a client’s Listings Score through our hands-on process that is sure to be reflected in good things happening at your cash register.
