A couple of weeks ago I published a blog post titled “Can SEO help with online reputation management?” on the role SEO plays with your online reputation and another one that I have published last year “Online reputation management and SEO“. This is a follow-up blog posts outlying the importance of SEO and how it can protect your reputation online.
In most cases, it takes a couple of years of consistent client interactions and customer service to earn a positive reputation for your brand. In these tough economic times it is not easy to earn the trust of customers from an online community or from a local consumer base. In this digital age, did you know that it can only take 140 characters in a minute or less for your trust to be lost? For this reason, it is important that you create an online reputation management (ORM) process that works hand in hand with your SEO campaign for your business.
If your name has been slandered online, you might be able to regain a good reputation in a few days, but with the managing of an effective online reputation management strategy, you will be able to maintain your good reputation online without any problems. An online reputation management campaign consists of various digital marketing solutions that will assist you in maintaining, monitoring, and creating the positive reputation of your business or brand.
Online you will find many reputation management agencies that can provide you with an online reputation management strategy and all the other digital marketing solutions that works with it such as search engine optimization (SEO). The approach of combining SEO and online reputation management can help you with your reputation and credibility online.
Find below a couple of tips on how you should approach online reputation management with SEO.
Search engine optimization
If there’s a couple of negative comments and feedback about you using targeted keywords and these are shown on the first page of the search engine results when searching for your company, it is very important to have an effective SEO strategy to promote all the positive aspects of your business. This can help you get first page rankings on the top search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
Promote your business
One of the easiest methods of pushing down negative feedback on the search engines about your business is to promote your website through other websites and micro sites that are found in searches for the keywords you are targeting in your industry. By promoting your website on other websites, these websites will have the capacity of gaining keyword rankings on the search engines. Once you have an adequate amount of positive results for the industry specific keywords related to your industry on the search engines, a negative result can be pushed down results.
You cannot remove all the negative feedback
It is a common fact that you cannot remove all the negative feedback and links on the search engines, but with an effective online reputation management strategy, you can push them down the search engine result pages so that they are not seen by potential customers searching for your business or any services that you offer. With the right ORM strategy, you can promote a positive image for your business and brand.
Anton, it is certainly very important for brands to manage negative feedback effectively. I think it is vital to engage with the source of the complaint as early as possible to ascertain how it may be possible to make a corrective action or in the worst case at least prevent a repeat with either the same complaint source or a new customer. Brands that accept responsibility quickly without blame are appreciated by customers. A thought provoking post!
Thanks. I agree with you Zoe, but it all depends on the nature of the complaint.
Managing customer feedback is one thing – but what do you do with website theft. A company we know had its whole site lifted and copied by a Chinese company. Getting your reputation back then can be hard.
In that case it can be hard. Can I assist in any way? Was the website translated to “Chinese”?
Theft can be reported via Google Webmaster Tool, not assure if the content is copied in different language will be reported or not but you can find out more about Google’s Duplicate Content Reporting here http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/10/raising-awareness-of-cross-domain-url.html.
Thanks for that link. Your own duplicate content can also be harmful to your own website. Have a look at “Canonical URL’s”