Is Reverse SEO the Answer to Your Company’s Crisis?
Reverse SEO can be the answer to the negative criticism that businesses can attract through the internet.
With the power of publishing today, it is extremely easy for a critic to garner a wide audience – and this war of words can play out throughout a variety of mediums. In fact, today’s battlefields include message boards, social media sites and blogs. Companies that want to protect their image online should start by being proactive by adopting reverse SEO practices.
Keeping a pulse on the articles, blogs, messages boards and other traffic that relates to your brand is a good place to start. But, this can be a difficult, time consuming task. Google Alerts don’t catch everything – and it is extremely difficult to stay on top of something that you don’t know about.
Most people think of reverse SEO as only a defensive tactic, but it can be proactive too. If you fill your company’s site with useful content, and provide meaningful interactions and experiences for your followers via your blog and social media, you can easily build up an arsenal of good press that will push any bad press you might have down in the search results.
What impression is your brand giving?
The best way to get a feel for your current online reputation is to act like and uniformed searcher. When someone Googles your company’s name, what do they see? It’s proven that reviews draw people in, and these reviews don’t necessarily have to come from a trusted source. Think of it this way: when you are looking at a product online, what reviews hold the most weight for you? In most cases it’s the bad ones. In today’s age of social media, searchers are looking for unbiased opinions, and they are everywhere – on message boards, forums, blog and review sites to name a few.
If your company has already fallen prey to bad reviews, reverse SEO can still help. Internet marketing firms can help build SEO-rich content that can push bad reviews and bad press well below first page results in Google. Remember the vast majority of searchers do not go beyond the first page of the search engine results when doing research. In fact, a remarkable 53 percent of all click throughs from a search query go to the first organic listing, and the top five listings garner 85 percent of all clicks.
What can you do to be proactive?
- Start a blog and keep it updated – blogs give companies an opportunity to create high ranking keyword rich content on a regular basis.
- Respond to criticisms positively - stay on top of reviews and let your followers know you are listening. You company isn’t perfect all the time – be willing to admit where you are wrong and show that you will fix any hiccups that arise.
- Employ social media ranking tools – know the clout your critics hold and make sure high-ranking influencers are properly addressed.
ACTION STEP: Learn how you can protect your online reputation with reputation marketing
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