Ethical Virus

Ethical spam

Consumers expect companies to respect boundaries. That allows them to live happy and meaningful lives without intrusion from companies that want them to "buy right now."

Spam Violates Ethical Boundaries

When people get spam mail, email or blog comments, do they rush to click on the websites or buy the items advertised? Probably not. The reasons are a complex mix of changing expectations and higher ethical standards for business:

A barrage of unwanted information violates the boundary of respect for people's time and space.
Sustainability is important, and fat envelopes with unwanted offers use up natural resources.
Spam signifies that the organization is willing to do whatever it takes to get your business, making savvy consumers wonder "What else are they doing that isn't good?"
Spam senders conveniently ignore information and privacy boundaries  – they do not honor people's right to seek out the information they want, instead pushing the information they want people to have. The privacy boundary is also a major issue in the discussion about technology-enabled smart marketing based on what people have viewed in the past.

Spam Creates a False Sense of Urgency

The spam that I see is generally for optional luxury goods. With these goods, the sender is trying to create a need and not fulfill one. Lauren Bloom describes how that can make us feel in The Ethics of Spam: "There's something sadly dehumanizing about all that in-your-face advertising.  If I'm really a valued customer, why are you pushing me to buy things I don't want or need?"

Responsible Selling is Respectful

I realized when thinking about this problem, that I've never seen spam from a human rights organization. Why not? Perhaps companies that work based on positive ethical values care about their reputations, and realize that spam is not responsible.  Maybe they realize that people are less likely to buy from spammers. Responsible selling requires a respectful approach. As ethical expectations have increased, so have consumer reactions and legal penalties.

How does spam inform us? Perhaps it is a red flag – not telling us to "purchase this product right now" but telling us that a company has questionable ethics.

Anyone with online business interests, especially small to medium enterprises, will likely be aware that Google is continually updating their algorithms to improve the quality of their search results.

SEO, as a result, has become a bit of a dirty word with many webmasters shying away from it entirely for fear of being slapped with a penalty and losing valuable organic traffic. But that doesn't have to be the case.

Entrepreneurs can still create a high-quality user experience on their site using ethical SEO strategies, while avoiding practices that may end up doing more harm than good.

Here is how to do it:

Focus on the user. Google wants everyone to focus on providing a great user experience.

So before each and every change you make to a site, ask yourself this: Does this change make things better or worse for my visitors?

Related: Sending Out an SOS: How to Avoid SEO Disaster

In SEO terms, the happier people are with your site, the more likely it is that Google will give your page rankings a boost, and the more traffic you'll get.

There are a number of algorithmic updates tasked with measuring the user experience directly. A good example is the page layout algorithm that penalizes sites with too many ads above the fold.

It makes sense to enforce a limit on the amount of advertising that can be crammed into the top of a page because otherwise visitors end up having to search for the content they want, which can be infuriating.

Improve technical and structural SEO. Many businesses are not reaching their full potential because of unnecessary technical issues that they may not even be aware of -- even if Google is.

Even seemingly small technical issues can lead to large losses in traffic. Many smaller sites tend to have bad performance, leading to slow server response times and page load times. In addition, many business owners don't have sufficient technical understanding to ensure that their sites return the correct server response codes.

Make sure you understand your web platform and that Google is crawling and indexing it correctly.

The answer is to treat SEO and Google like the icing on the cake. Build your business on the strength of relationships and face-to-face networking and marketing (or at the very least via social media).

It takes a long time to do things like this but those companies that build their own authority and influence are the ones that ultimately do well in Google.