Regardless of the type of business you own, your online reputation is critical to your overall success. When you get bad online reviews, or negative news is published online about your brand, negative information can pop up in the search engine and cause you to quickly lose a significant amount of business. Worst-case scenario, it can literally destroy a brand. At the same time, it is not possible to prevent anything negative from being published with search engine reputation management.
There are several ways an experienced search engine reputation management company will work to protect your brand from negative publicity. Here are three of the services that will help your brand maintain a positive image and grow accordingly.
1. Monitor content about your brand.
An online reputation management company will monitor any mention of your brand name online, which means that you can be immediately aware if there is negative information spreading about your company. This service will include monitoring Yelp reviews, web reviews, press releases, articles, news briefs, and anything else published or shared online. Your online presence includes what you directly publish, as well as what others publish about you. They will focus on your brand name and the keywords commonly used to search for your services or products to be aware of any negative information being shared.
News works in cycles, which will be good for your brand because bad information can usually be buried fairly quickly. However, once something is published online, it can be difficult or even impossible to eliminate it. The quicker the information is discovered, the easier it will be to get rid over, cover, or otherwise mitigate. Monitoring content about your brand is a significantly helpful service, and the larger your brand is, the more important the service will become.
2. Combat negative content with with positive SEO tools.
Your online reputation management company can utilize various strategies to bury information you don’t want to be spread by putting out a substantial amount of positive articles and information about your brand. They will utilize blogs, positive content, press releases, social media accounts, LinkedIn profiles and posts, and positive customer feedback to ensure that the top search engine results pages (SERPs) will all be full of positive information when people search for your brand. You can use information you already have available or, if you have no content, you can have information created for reputation management. You can have human interest pieces done on you personally or your brand to increase the positive coverage of your brand. It is important to highlight even the smallest aspect of your brand if it puts you in a positive light.
3. Build solid links.
A critical part of SEO is inbound and outbound links. These are links that connect related and reputable websites. It creates a mutually beneficial relationship between websites. Having high-quality links to and from other reputable websites will increase search ranking on the positive articles and information that will help to bury any bad information that you don’t want on the first page of your search results. A reputation management company can work to create those backlinks and monitor improvements to your search rankings.
An important aspect of reputation management has positive information to distribute to social media and other online outlets. You can work with your management company to have positive content created, and you can also work with local content writers and reporters. You can make positive moves as a company and make sure that online news sources cover those positive moves. The more good information that is readily available, the easier it will be for your reputation management company to make sure it is distributed across multiple channels.