Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of the SEO intelligence platform, keywordfupoleasercom, where we help you discover the questions people ask online and learn how to optimize your content for traffic and authority. I've been in SEO and online marketing for over 20 years and I'm here to share the wealth of knowledge, hints and tips I've amassed over that time. Hello and welcome back to SEO-Series Not that Hard. It's me here, ed Dawson, hosting, as always, and today I'm going to talk about why. Sometimes you just need to get the right person to talk to the right person. So this one.

If you've listened far back enough, you'd have heard an example where I was talking about a friend of mine who sells on Amazon and they were having real problems with negative reviews against their product, where they had a competitor deliberately buying their products online and leaving negative reviews for it. Now, he worked really hard to get these reviews removed as they came in, because you can report negative reviews and suspicious reviews via Amazon through their various support channels seller support channels and they will remove them. Sometimes Not always. Sometimes you have to keep requesting that this review is removed and it was taking up so much of his time. He was spending more time just dealing with fake negative reviews than he was trying to develop his business and trying to develop the products, and it was really hampering his sales because every time these reviews came in, it would obviously lower his star rating and the star rating on his products was all going below 4.5, which, if you know anything about this, as soon as you get below that, that's when you start to see the stars knock off, basically. And he get below that, that's when he started to see the stars knock off basically. And he didn't deserve it because his project was good, um, and just because there was a competitor with deeper products, it wasn't fair that this was happening and what he wanted to do was get arizona to take some actual, real action, and he spent months and months trying to find the right person to talk to to get this resolved. What he wanted was his product listings to be protected from negative reviews, so therefore people couldn't leave negative reviews and then automatically be allowed through.

And today he's been in touch because I've helped him sort of diagnose this problem and look at the data over the past few months to try and help him with his arguments and his cases for this and to try and pinpoint who the competitor was and we think we're pretty much sure who it was, but it's hard to prove at the moment. But anyway, he contacted me today to say that there'd been real movement, that he actually signed up for a account manager program with amazon. That's where, as seller, you can actually pay a fee to have a dedicated account manager, someone you can actually talk to. And he's got this on a free trial at the moment and he'd spoken to the account manager and he'd not. He was thinking he wasn't going to get anywhere with it. He wasn't really hopeful for it. But then today he contacted me to say they've actually done something, something's happened. They've, they've now protected my listings, which means these account, these reviews, can't be left for me anymore. But all my negative one star reviews and two star reviews have been removed. I've got all five stars back and my sales are flying. And he said you know, he said he said something that really resonated to me and that is.

It was just a matter of getting the right person to talk to the right person, and this can be incredibly frustrating when you have a problem. So I'll give you an example of what I've struggled, struggled with for probably more than six months, which I only recently managed to get solved for one of my sites. So the problem I've been having has not been with Amazon. This was with one of the major affiliate networks. Now, if you work as an affiliate, most of the time you'll be working through one of the affiliate networks, and this site was one of my sites in the telecoms sector in the UK. This was covering broadband and mobile telephones cell phones and there's two problems I got. One was with a provider we were working with in the mobile side who had an issue that we identified where often we were getting through sales with zero commission. And I questioned this back in 2024 and, um, you know, I got some response from the people at the affiliate network saying, yeah, we've identified an issue, for certain number of sales have been or they call them untracked. So we know there's a sale, they know there's a product, but they're coming through zero value because they're not being properly assigned. We've identified the problem, we'll get more money fixed, we'll get you paid up for for the sales that you've missed and we're talking like hundreds of sales here. Um, so this is potentially thousands in commission and we'll get it sorted so that the problem stops, so it doesn't keep happening, they'll all get allocated properly.

I thought this was brilliant. And then they just said, bear with us, we'll get it sorted. And then there was nothing happened, didn't hear anything. So a month later chased it up oh yeah, yeah, we'll get. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we're just waiting on something.

And then after that, every time I checked in with them to see what was going on, didn't get a single response about it at all, which is incredibly frustrating, especially when you still see the same problem coming through and more of these zero commission sales which aren't properly attributed. So that was the first issue I got. And then the fact that they'd gone non-responsive on me, which is, you know, I try calling, try emailing, try contacting people on LinkedIn nothing, no responses really incredibly frustrating. So I already wasn't in a fantastic mood with this affiliate network, even though you know they were doing the majority of the business for this, this website, these websites through them. So we're talking five figures worth of commissions every month and, you know, driving probably hundreds, if not more thousands of sales, hundreds of thousands of sales for their merchants every month, and, um, yeah. So I had that issue with them.

And then another issue came up now. This one was because where we got one provider that does mobile and broadband and about 18 months ago this provider had decided no longer to work with us for mobile because they were cracking down. They weren't going to work with um price comparison sites anymore, even though we weren't a price comparison site, and at the time I said, oh, this isn't you know, we're going to still work with you. It was like no, they won't work with you. Okay, fine, we'll leave it, but we still could work with them for broadband, bizarrely. So anyway, we were still on their mailing list because we were still pushing broadband for them and doing quite well at it.

Then, maybe four weeks ago, I got an email through from the account managers at the affiliate network who were looking after this. This network provider saying can, is there anything you can do to push the mobile side? We're looking for this provider to, you know, push traffic for mobile. And I thought, right, this is my chance to try and get noticed again, to try and say, look, we can really help. And so I actually did like an eight minute youtube video explaining why we thought we should work with them on the mobile side, while we weren't a price comparison site, while they've got other example sites that were very similar to what we're doing, who they are working with. So we didn't see whether any reason why they shouldn't work with us and we explained how we're still getting loads of traffic branded traffic for them onto our site and we were actually now sending it off to their competitors and that we would be able to drive probably 400,000 plus visitors per year to their mobile side.

And it was just kind of they weren't working with us and I replied to this account manager and copied in all the people that they copied in on the email, which included some people at the network themselves. And I waited and I could see because I shared this video privately unlisted on YouTube whether anyone watched the video, and I could see no one had. So then I emailed back and said just check it in that you got this, you know. Nice email, still nothing. So I tried ringing the number, leaving messages. The number never got answered, the messages never got returned. Still no one watched this video. And this went on for possibly two weeks.

Where I'm trying to chase it? Trying to chase it in any way, I'm trying to chase and I just felt like this is just impossible. I'm here trying to give them this opportunity. It's in their interest because we can drive so many sales that it wins for them as a company, it wins for the network provider, everybody wins. It meets all the criteria that have been set. Why is no one even taking the time to even watch the video that I've created? I don't even you know, let alone reply in any other way. Frustrating as hell, maddening. And I was just again coupled with the other issue we got with the other provider where they weren't responding to the issues that they acknowledged like six months, six or more months earlier. I was really, really, really annoyed.

Anyway, I was working out what my next thing to do was. I was also at the point of going to their, trying to go to their offices, which is down in london now where I live. To go to london is like it's a big day out because you know we have to. I have to get up early, get a train to get there for lunch, lunchtime. You know we're not close to London, so it's a real hassle to do that, but I was getting to that point where I had no other options on what to do and it was very early on a Sunday morning. I was at the National Ice Skating Arena in Nottingham with one of my daughters who's a really good ice skater. She'd gone to a very early morning session on this olympic sized ice rink and we got up early and we're driven. It's about an hour away from home, we're driven there and I was watching her and you know I would see this bigger reader on on the on the bleachers.

Um, just thinking about this mulling over this because it was it was what was burning a hole in the back of my head and, um, I just thought, well, maybe I should just go nuclear, maybe I just need to contact, try and contact, the ceo at this affiliate network to see if I can get anything out of them. And I was thinking they're probably not going to listen. All the reasons I could try and contact. But I've got out. My phone, got out linkedin, looked them up and sent them a connection message, just a connection. Didn't even put in it why I wanted to connect. I just thought I'll just see if they'll accept the connection and sent the connection. And then five minutes later my phone pings They've accepted the connection and I'm like this is early in the morning on a Sunday, because we had to be at Nottingham at seven, so this was probably about quarter to eight in the morning on a Sunday. This guy had accepted my connection and I thought, wow. I thought, right, okay, I'm not going to craft a message now. And also because I'd been chasing these other people, I thought they can't respond on a Sunday. You know, I'll give it till Monday, I'll give them Monday to respond. Monday came and went, no response. So I thought, right, that's it.

Tuesday morning I sat down and I crafted a message to this guy and said look, you know, I feel really bad that the first time I ever communicate with you is such a negative you know negative message. You know a negative, a negative meeting. Because this is the issue I've got. And I, you know, given the background, you know how we had broadband at KID at UK. We've been with this network, you know with various merchants for you know 20 plus years, all this, that and the other. And I just said these are the two problems I've got. You know the one where I'm just getting crickets they're not responding with a problem that's been acknowledged. And there's another one where they're asking for an opportunity and I'm I just cannot show this opportunity.

And I sent him a link to the video that I'd done and left it at that and he got back to me in less than a quarter of an hour and eight minutes of that quarter of an hour. He'd been watching the video because I saw the video being watched. And he got back to me and said this is completely unacceptable how you've been treated. I'm really, really sorry. This is not how we should be treating people. This is not how you know things should be done. I'm going to get onto this. This. I'll get someone. I'll get, I'll get people actioning this today. Um, and you know he just said send me all the, all the email chains that have been. You know, you've been, you've been communicating with the teams, with, and I'll get this sorted out. And so I sent him all those straight away, sent him all the email change and then, within an hour after that, I got one of his senior board onto me who said right, I'm going to sort this out, I'm your contact person. Then, within an hour after that, all the two teams would come back to me and I got all the problems resolved. This was Tuesday. I'd done this by the end of Thursday everything had been resolved, the problems with the first merchant which had been waiting on for months, sorted and, you know, a check on the way for the missing commissions, and we were back on board with the other provider on their mobile side, driving traffic and sales by the Friday.

And this is the thing where, if you get the right people talking to the right people, things can really happen. So what I'm not suggesting here is that you have to always go to the top okay, to get something done, because you know people at the very top are not going to. They're the wrong people to talk to if you haven't gone to the other channels first. This is the key thing, always try. You must always, always't gone to the other channels first. This is the key thing. Always try it. You must always, always, always go to the normal channels first, but if they're not working for you, don't give up. If anything, I'm frustrated at myself that it took me so long to get these things sorted, because now you know I've seen a good sort of 10% plus on the bottom line just for having the mobile side sorted out with this other provider, and you know that's my fault for taking so long to get back to them and, well, taking so long to find the right person.

So what's the takeaway here? Well, really, it's if you hit problems like this, where you're dealing with an organization where the normal channels aren't working for you, don't just give up. Okay, it's worth persevering, even if it takes months, even if it takes years in some cases, to find that right person and be creative. Okay, I have a friend who's creative. He paid to get an account manager, which not many people would even bother trying to do, and also, he never gave up, kept persevering with it and with mine. You know, I just tried every single channel, to the point of frustration that I then just thought right, I'm going to bypass the channels and find the right person and it's worth it. Okay, it's, it's so, so worth it. So, yeah, the moral of the story is keep going, don't be defeated, find the right person and you'll get things to happen. So that's it for today. So, until next time, keep optimizing, stay curious and remember seo is not that hard when you understand the basics.

Thanks for listening. It means a lot to me. This is where I get to remind you, where you can connect with me and my seo tools and services. You can find links to all the links I mentioned here in the show notes. Just remember, with all these places where I use my name, that Ed is spelled with two Ds. You can find me on LinkedIn and Blue Sky. Just search for Ed Dawson on both.

You can record a voice question to get answered on the podcast. The link is in the show notes. You can try our SEO intelligence platform Keywords People Use at keywordspeopleusecom, where we can help you discover the questions and keywords people are asking online, poster those questions and keywords into related groups so you know what content you need to build topical authority and finally, connect your Google Search Console account for your sites so we can crawl and understand your actual content, find what keywords you rank for and then help you optimise and continually refine your content and targeted, personalised advice to keep your traffic growing. If you're interested in learning more about me personally or looking for dedicated consulting advice, then visit wwweddawsoncom. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO Is Not that Hard.