Understanding the New FTC Rule on Fake Reviews and Endorsements
As a small business owner, you might have heard about the new rule from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) banning fake reviews and endorsements. The new rule goes into full effect in mid-October, 2024.
This rule is super important for anyone who relies on online reviews to attract customers. Let’s break it down in a way that’s easy to understand and see how it might affect your business.
What’s the New Rule About?
The FTC’s new rule is all about cracking down on fake online reviews and misleading product or service endorsements. Essentially, it aims to ensure that all reviews and endorsements you see online are genuine and not paid for or fabricated. This means no more fake five-star reviews or influencers promoting products they’ve never used.
Why Should You Care about Fake Reviews?
As a small business owner, your reputation is everything. Genuine reviews can help build trust with potential customers, while fake reviews can do the opposite. Here’s why this rule matters to you:
Trust Building: Authentic reviews help build trust with your customers.
Fair Competition: Ensures a level playing field where businesses compete based on the quality of their services, not fake reviews.
Legal Compliance: Avoid hefty fines and penalties by staying compliant with the new rule.
Key Points of the Rule
Here are some of the main aspects of the new FTC rule:
No Fake Reviews: It’s illegal to post fake online reviews or pay someone to write a fake review.
Clear Disclosures: If you’re paying someone to write a review or endorse your product, it must be clearly disclosed.
Penalties: Businesses that violate these rules can face significant fines and penalties. Fines can exceed $50,000 per violation.
Staying on the right side of this rule is easier than you might think. Here are some tips:
Encourage Genuine Reviews: Ask your happy customers to leave honest reviews.
Avoid Paying for Reviews: Don’t pay for reviews or offer incentives in exchange for positive feedback.
Be Transparent: If you’re working with influencers or reviewers, make sure they disclose their relationship with your business.
Benefits of Genuine Reviews
Genuine reviews can do wonders for your business. Here’s how:
Build Credibility: Real reviews from real customers build trust and credibility.
Improve SEO: Search engines love fresh, authentic content, which can help improve your search rankings.
Learn From Customer Insights: Honest feedback from your customers can provide valuable insights into what you’re doing right and where you can improve.
What If You’ve Used Fake Reviews?
If you’ve used fake reviews in the past, don’t panic. Here’s what you can do:
Remove Them: Take down any fake reviews from your website and ask review platforms (like Google or Yelp) to do the same.
Apologize and Move Forward: If necessary, issue a public apology and commit to using only genuine reviews moving forward.
Educate Your Team: Make sure everyone in your business understands the importance of genuine reviews and the new FTC rule.
The Bottom Line
The new FTC rule on fake reviews and endorsements is a big step towards ensuring transparency and fairness in online reviews. As a small business owner, embracing this rule can help you build a stronger, more trustworthy relationship with your customers. Remember, honesty is the best policy, and genuine reviews are worth their weight in gold.
Stay compliant, encourage honest feedback, and watch your business thrive!
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Let’s explore how important online reviews are and why you should be actively monitoring and responding to them.
Online reviews are a fact of life
Like it or not, if you own a business you’re going to get online reviews. Some will be good, some will be bad, and some will fall somewhere in the middle.
Regardless of whether you do anything about them, potential customers will read them and most likely believe them. Odds are your own behavior supports that.
Customers look for reviews
Your star ranking on Google and elsewhere are seen by many potential customers. It’s critical for you to pay attention to them.
Moz recently reported that 96% of consumers read reviews at least occasionally. And BrightLocal found that 87% of consumers used Google reviews to evaluate local businesses last year.
Customers believe reviews
A survey by Website Builder found that 97% of consumers say the online reviews they read influence their purchasing decisions and 84% trust online reviews as much as recommendations from friends and family.
A survey of 8,153 U.S. consumers fielded in April 2023 reports that an astonishing 45% of consumers won’t purchase a product if there are no reviews available for it.
Search Engine Journal reported that 96% of customers look for negative reviews specifically. This figure was 85% back in 2018. That emphasizes why responding to a negative review in a positive way is so important.
You can learn from reviews
Staying aware of your online reviews can reveal weak spots in need of improvement.
Positive reviews may point out aspects of your business customers really appreciate. You can leverage that in what you stress in your social media and also your PR and advertising (if you do those things). Negative reviews can also teach you even more, pointing out things you can improve. Negative reviews also give you a chance to show off your responsiveness to customer concerns.
Moz reports that 90% of consumers are influenced by owner responses to reviews. And the above survey by BrightLocal revealed that 88% of customers are likely to use a business if they see it responds appropriately to reviews.
But most business owners are still not doing it!
Small businesses like yours are least likely to monitor and respond to reviews. Being one of the few to do this brings you two advantages:
Free advertising because you can create a favorable impression of your quality, professionalism, and customer service.
Free PR because your responses signal to others how you treat your customers.
The result of your responses is borne out by a study from Search Engine Land that showed businesses that respond to reviews convert 33% more customers than similar businesses that don’t.
We can hep automate the process for you
We can alert you every time a review shows up so you can quickly respond.
Our citation management plan not only gets you robust, perfectly consistent listings across the most important search engines, directories, maps and mobile apps, it also lets you know as soon as a new review appears for you.
That means that you can respond to those reviews immediately without having to repeatedly search across all the sites that may publish reviews about you. Think of the time that saves you!
Let’s explore the advantages of local listing management. That includes improving search engine rankings, increasing online visibility, attracting more customers, and building trust with potential clients. We’ll also provide practical tips on getting started with local listing management.
Effective local listing management can help you grow your business.
Main Benefits of Managed Citations
A successful strategy for managing local listings usually entails spreading precise and consistent business information across a wide variety of local search engines, directories, maps, mobile apps, and voice search platforms.
There are two ways to achieve this objective. You can either do it yourself or use professional citation management services. In my opinion, delegating your citation management is usually the most practical option.
Want to see how you’re doing right now? Run a free scan of a subset of our network.
Citation management manages more than just your NAP.
Having your name, address, and phone number (your NAP) found widely and consistently across the web is essential for your SEO.
But remember that customers will look for things beyond your NAP, like business hours, online reviews, photos, services offered, and more.
Professional citation management generates robust information about you across all platforms.
Time- and labor-intensive
Submitting significant amounts of business data to dozens of platforms and managing it can be impossibly exhausting of your time and attention.
But bad data out there in the wild can be very bad for your SEO, your visibility, and even your reputation.
Using high-quality citation management tools allows you to keep all data updated in one place so you only enter it once.
And you only need to update it in one place when things change. Keeping it in sync across the web is handled for you automatically.
Helping you reach the broadest possible audience
One significant advantage of our citation management service is the scores of places people can find reliable information about you.
To reach your customers across all types of platforms, you need an automated service. You can’t possibly manage all the listings we can create and support and still have time to run your business.
Managing citation changes
None of our businesses are stagnant. Things change. Addresses, services, holiday hours, and more need to be kept current everywhere.
With our citation management, you only need to worry about keeping one thing updated. We take care of the rest.
Maintain local listing NAP consistency
Bad data in business listings is damaging to you. First, to the impression it leaves with potential customers. Second with search engines, which need to trust that data to be willing to list you prominently.
We’ve seen accurate listings go bad with errant data from other sources. But our citation management alerts you to any potential changes and won’t let a change occur without your input.
Increased search visibility
Your citations across the web are a critical factor determining whether you show up in the Local 3-Pack listings.
It’s true that proximity to the searcher is an important factor in whether you show up next to that map. But your citations still exert a significant influence on that.
And while you can’t control where people are when they search for you, you can make sure your citations are helping you.
People are using voice search more than ever, using the Google Assistant on Android phones and Apple’s Siri on iPhones, or Microsoft Cortana and Amazon Alexa.
According to UpCity, half of US consumers used voice search daily last year, including 58% of consumers aged 25-34.
Manually getting yourself accurately listed for these voice assistants can be a challenge without our citation management services. That’s because they’re not normal websites. But we have connections to all of them right among our 80+ platforms.
GPS platforms are critical for brick-and-mortar businesses
People are on the move.
When they’re out and about and are looking for your storefront, do you show up in their GPS platform?
They may be using Google Maps, Apple Maps, Bing Maps, MapQuest, Waze, TomTom, Navmii, in-dash navigation, and more.
Trying to make sure you’re listed in all of them and that they stay correct is tough without an automated solution. We can manage and oversee your GPS listings so customers can always find you easily.
But how do you know when a new review shows up for you? You may monitor the big sources of reviews: Google, Facebook, Yelp. (Or you may not do that often.) But people review small businesses all over the place at sites like MerchantCircle, CitySearch, Trustpilot, DexKnows and many more.
With our citation management, the same connections that ensure your listings stay correct and consistent also monitor for reviews.
And whenever someone reviews you, we send you an email with a link so you can respond — promptly.
Manually checking for reviews at all these platforms is so difficult that I don’t know anyone who does it. And when a bad review goes unnoticed and isn’t replied to, consumers assume the review is accurate.
Make your own informed choice
Do you have the bandwidth to manage all of this in-house?
Or does a managed citation service with automation make more sense?
Understanding the connection between web design and search engine optimization is crucial. Web design determines the experience of your customers. At the same time, it helps search engines to better understand your website and rank it higher. That’s why we want to explore the impact web design has on SEO.
Website structure improves crawlability and indexation
When discussing web design, we must consider more than just the website’s aesthetics. Website structure includes the correct position of elements and the structure and hierarchy of pages. It’s important to design a well-structured website if you wish to improve Google rankings. That substantially improves the crawlability and indexation of the pages.
Improved user experience reduces the bounce rate
Reduce your bounce rate by improving the web design and user experience.
Let’s consider how many websites there are today. Each website has a unique design, aiming to provide value to its clients.
However, some websites fail to do so. Users who visit a website that doesn’t deliver a smooth customer experience will quickly leave the page. This increases the page’s bounce rate, and that hurts your search rankings. If you use web design to make the user experience better, that will also benefit your SEO.
Understanding these SEO basics is crucial to help your small business grow. It’ll help you better understand the impact web design has on SEO and how you can use that to your advantage.
Good web design improves the loading speed
Another way to reduce the bounce rate through web design is to ensure the website loads quickly. A well-designed website won’t be overcrowded with unnecessary bells and whistles. Often we see websites that use too many sliders, pop-ups, or ads that slow down the page speed.
Your web design should be crisp and clean. It should focus only on customer value. Once you accomplish that, the pages should load faster. There are also a number of technical solutions to a page that’s too slow, like condensing CSS, caching, and other things your web designer is familiar with.
The importance of mobile-friendly web design
It is no secret that Google values mobile-friendly websites since more than half of all searches are done from phones. If your website isn’t responsive to mobile devices, you have less chance of competing well against other websites: Google will tend to rank them higher.
Even if customers find your website, they may still be discouraged by the lack of responsiveness. That can also affect the bounce rate and your overall SEO ranking. In other words, don’t overlook the importance of mobile-friendly web design to ranking well on search engines..
Social media in web design
Add social media share buttons on your website to help the visitors share your content.
An underused social media technique in web design is adding social media “share buttons” on your website. Sharing website content on social media is very important. Allowing users to more easily share your content can improve the visibility of your website and provide more organic traffic.
If you add “share” social media buttons in addition to the more common “follow” buttons on your website, you’re making it possible for your clients to share content on their social media profiles. See the floating share buttons on the left side if this blog for an example of this technique in practice. By improving website visibility through this strategy, you may also improve your search engine ranking.
Internal link optimization
Link building is one of the most important SEO strategies you can use. When it comes to internal links, they can play a big part in the website’s aesthetics. Just think of a web page stuffed with links so much that they distract the user from the flow of information on your page. Too many links will have users quickly switching pages, which is not a good practice. We also recommend having your links open in a new browser tab instead of permanently directing users away from your page.
Properly placed links will add value to your users and connect pages on your website. Both parts are essential for on-page SEO. You want to address key parts of your website holistically and make sure that they all contribute to search engine ratings.
Website accessibility
Another essential element of web design is website accessibility. It’s important that you allow all users to equally experience your website. Those who suffer from various disabilities may not be able to perceive traditional web design like everyone else.
Website accessibility is now a standard in quality web design. You want to ensure that all pages are equally accessible to all of your customers. This not only improves the customer experience but also may increase search ratings.
In some countries, your business might even be legally prosecuted if it’s not accessible. Some claim that website accessibility is as crucial as responsiveness to mobile devices. It’s one of the Google ranking factors.
Web design consistency
Link building is an essential element of web design that greatly impacts SEO.
A website is just a part of your business. It is one platform that works together with other elements to create a brand image. You should show consistency across all website pages and across other business materials like brochures and stationery.
If each page is designed in a different style, that can cause confusion. What you want is to create a familiar feeling for your customers. No matter what page they visit, they should be able to predict where each element is. Web design should make your customers feel at home.
Websites that follow the practice of consistent web design will create a personal connection with your customers. That can affect their brand image and indirectly positively affect SEO.
Website navigation affects user experience
Another web design element that significantly affects user experience is website navigation. Visitors should be able to quickly navigate your website without too many issues or questions. Just like with other elements, web navigation should also be consistent across all pages, including your blog.
The idea is to help users have a smooth experience and find all the information they need as quickly as possible. Website navigation also has an impact on SEO. It’s a part of website structure, and it helps search engines to better understand your website.
The impact web design has on SEO – explained!
We hope that you now understand the impact web design has on SEO and that you see how important the connection between the two really is. Ensure your web design is always straightforward and aligned with the latest trends and your business goals. Remember to introduce new changes to your website from time to time. It is crucial to provide a fresh experience to your customers and ensure a high-ranking position. A good way to assure fresh content is to have a blog, for example.
About the Author
Marcus Johnson is a seasoned web designer specializing in visually appealing and user-friendly web design. He wants to share his knowledge of web design and SEO with the help of his passion for writing.
Where you show up in Google search results is determined by an algorithm that evaluates many characteristics of your website. Those characteristics, or ranking factors — both positive and negative — affect how visible you will be in search results.
Google’s ranking algorithm is reported to contain more than 200 SEO ranking factors, each with its own weight or level of importance.
Nobody knows all of the Google ranking factors, but experience gives us a really good sense of which are the most important.
Categories of Google ranking factors
There are three groups of ranking factors that are important to understand.
Technical ranking factors tend to be mostly managed by your web designer. They have to do with your website’s level of performance and what I refer to as Google-friendliness. These are typically site-wide factors rather than factors relating to individual pages on your site.
On-page ranking factors are typically controlled by you and relate directly to the content of your web pages and keyword optimization.
Off-page ranking factors are things you have somewhat less control over because they’re not on your website. These typically relate to your authority or importance on the web, based largely on backlinks.
Here is what I considered to be the top 10 positive Google ranking factors today. This list isn’t in any kind of priority order for a couple of reasons. First, it would be pretentious to claim that I know which of these factors are more important than which others. Secondly, good SEO is a function of many small techniques that support each other. No one of them is critically essential to good rankings — it’s the sum total of all of them that matters.
Mobile phones now account for more than half of all searches done. As a result, it’s essential that your website be mobile-friendly. I typically recommend ensuring your website is “responsive” which means that its display varies depending upon the device connecting to your site. That ensures that the same information is available regardless of the platform your visitor may be using.
2) Security (SSL and HTTPS)
Whether or not your website is secure is a ranking factor at Google. Beyond that, many browsers will show a “Not Secure” warning in the address bar when someone arrives on your website. Some website plug-ins actually display a warning page instead of the page on your site, encouraging people not to visit your site. Many people mistake the “not secure” warning as meeting your website is dangerous or may load viruses on your computer. The result is a certain portion of the people trying to visit your site abandoning it, costing you business.
To be secure you need to arrange to have an SSL certificate and your URL needs to begin with HTTPS instead of the insecure HTTP.
High-quality content is essential. It has a big effect on whether people stay to read it or bounce away (which Google sees as a negative ranking factor. Readability is a critical part of quality content. Another is customer focus; it’s important to focus on what’s in it for your reader/customer. That means focusing on benefits to the customer rather than features of your product or service.
Keyword relevance is also essential here. Your page has to show search engines that it’s all about your target keywords. That means having your keywords and related words and phrases in your content enough to make sure Google easily understands what your page is all about. But avoid keyword stuffing as that detracts from the quality of your content.
5) Headings and meta tags
Having keywords in headings and sub-headings gives them some extra weight with search engines and helps readers navigate your content efficiently. For that to happen, they need to be coded within heading tags to search engines can tell they’re headings.
While meta tags are not visible on the page, two items in the HTML code of your page are very important: the page title and the description tag. The page title isn’t a heading on your page, but it acts as the headline for your listing in all search engines. So it’s a critical place to include your keywords. Google says keywords in your meta description tag don’t influence your ranking, but since this description often ends up in your search listings it has a direct impact on how likely a searcher is to click on your listing.
6) Image keyword optimization
Every image on your page provides two or three places to put your keyword phrases in front of the search engines without keyword stuffing your text content.
The image filename is most obvious. An image filename of img183572x6.jpg tells Google nothing. But one that’s got a keyword in it (like nj-real-estate-lawyer.jpg) can really help.
Alternate text is text describing the image for visually impaired visitors who have their computers read the page out loud. It’s a great place to show your keywords to Google.
And if an image acts as a clickable link to someplace else, a title attribute generates a little text box that pops up when the user hovers their mouse over the image. It’s meant to tell the user what’s at the other end of the link if they click it, and is another place you may be able to use a keyword.
7) URL structure
Your URL structure helps you in three ways.
It improves the user experience of your listings in Google:
Links can sometimes serve as their own clickable text of a link.
Here’s an example from Moz:
8) Schema code
Schema markup is a common short term for structured data, named after Schema.org, the website for structured data markup. It’s sometimes called structured data markup and it tells the search engines exactly what kind of information is on your website. It’s totally in the HTML code behind your website and doesn’t affect what visitors see on your site. If you’re a local service area business, it can be especially helpful to identify your location and service area for local searches.
You can easily check out your own schema code in this schema code validator. If it shows you don’t have schema code, it’s time to fix that.
Page and Domain Authority strongly impact your rankings. These are metrics developed by the folks at Moz that attempt to predict how well a given website will show up in search results. It’s based largely on the number and quality of other websites that link to you and is designed to correlate with Google’s internal PageRank scoring.
10) Local prominence
Prominence refers to how widely across the web you’re listed with a correct and consistent NAP (name, address, phone). It’s particularly important for small businesses to show up in local search results and in the Google Local 3-Pack. These listings are often called citations and citation management deserves ongoing attention from small local businesses. But don’t be misled by many of the common misconceptions about citations that are floating around.
Feel free to use our free tool to check on several dozen top citation sources to see how your own prominence looks.
Bottom Line
None of these are absolutely essential. But none of them can be ignored either. Where you rank is the result of all of these things (and more). Just do your best with as many of these as you can.
How’s your experience been with these issues? What other factors do you think deserve to be included? Start a discussion below.
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