Online reviews are damaging my business? What can you do about online bad press or vindictive comments from ex employees? How can an online reputation management company like us help?
We have been approached many times from different companies on how we can help them combat negative comments about them on the internet. Most customers online research begins with a quick visit to Google, Yahoo or MSN to check out the credibility of a company or business. The customer may be about to spend a lot of money anything from £20.00 – £5000 upwards depending on the product. ‘Bad news travels a long way’ and can cost a company a lot of money in lost sales.
The first thing they will type in is the business name or website address. If anyone has banded about any negative press it will normally come up in Google’s auto complete feature. eg. “company name reviews” “domain name reviews” “company name scam” and so on…this is sometimes not favourable even if the comments or news aren’t actually about your business.
Here are some of the strategies we employ to manage and improve your online reputation:
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
The goal of SEO in a reputation management situation is to rank positively-charged information highly and to push negative information onto the secondary search engine results pages.
With the correct on page optimisation skills and aligning your pages with specific search terms, you may have some highly ranked pages with good page rank (PR) you can use and tweak for some of the negative search terms and write some positive copy to counter the negative stuff. Maybe link out from your website to other of your positive directory listings (type in your companty name and see what listings appear on the second page), drop some links to these pages to give them a push. If say a negative listing is coming up for your company name and the word scams, you could create some new content optimised for say ‘Company Name scams and how to avoid them’ and book mark this page.
Paid Search Campaign
One of the fastest ways to counter negative comments is to setup a paid search campaign (PPC) that positions the affected party’s message prominently within the top positions of the search engine’s result pages. This approach can be used to effectively combat negative organic and other negative paid search listings.
Social Media Implementation
Use social media to your advantage and create micro sites based on your company name. Create sub domains and host a blog and write fresh news articles – this is a great way of displacing 1st page results.
Create a network of layers using social bookmarking, web 2.0 sites, your own domains or sub domains and your main website.
- Flickr profile — http://www.flickr.com/
- LinkedIn profile — http://www.linkedin.com/
- MySpace profile and blog — http://www.myspace.com/
- Friendster profile — http://www.friendster.com/
- Yahoo profile — http://profiles.yahoo.com/
- Yahoo 360 page — http://360.yahoo.com/
- Bloglines blog — http://www.bloglines.com/blog/
- Typekey profile — http://www.sixapart.com/typekey/
- Blinklist page — http://www.blinklist.com/
- WordPress blog — http://wordpress.com/
- Blogger blog — http://www.blogger.com/
- LiveJournal page — http://www.livejournal.com/community/
- Geocities page — http://www.geocities.com/
- Fortunecity page — http://members.fortunecity.com/
- Tripod page — http://members.tripod.com/
- AOL Hometown page — http://hometown.aol.com/
- Freespaces page — http://freespaces.com/
- Squidoo lense – http://www.squidoo.com
Legal Action?
This is sometimes neccessary when diplomacy fails but the first port of call is to contact the review site or blogger and ask them to remove the damaging keywords or article. If this fails you may have a legal case to if they are using your brand name or trade mark in the wrong way.
Monitor Your Online Reputation
For reputation management purposes, you should configure Google Reader to send you alerts on the following keywords:
- Your business name.
- Your domain name.
- Any trademarks or branded terms you have that are closely identified with your business, such as the names of products or services you’ve created.
In today’s socially connected world wide web, customers are being influenced by what they see on line whether it be forums, review sites or blogs. Positive experiences establish trust and ultimately, influence purchases. By monitoring what is being said about your company or busienss, promoting positive attributes and actively addressing negative comments, Rankability can help manage your most valuable asset – your online reputation.
The success of our process depends on the skilled blending of marketing, writing, promotion, public relations and search engine optimisation skills. To work effectively, these steps need to be performed on an ongoing basis until the objectives are achieved. Unfortunately, depending upon the severity of the bad publicity, results can take many weeks to achieve. Call us now to find out how we can help you..!
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