As a business you need to make sure your brand is safe online. When you search for your business name in Google or any other search engine, you should have control of a majority of the listings that are displayed. If you don’t dominate the first page of the search engines for your brand name, then you are at risk!
Let me share my experience with reputation management.
When I was graduating college, I received an email from a local Fort Worth business owner. Her company provided medical billing software for a large number of companies throughout the country. Like with any other company, she was advertising and marketing her business services through a number of channels. This meant people were actively searching for her business name to research the company.
The problem was when you searched for her business name in Google.
When you searched for the business name in Google the first result was her business website, but the second result was from a website called ripoffreport.com.
It wasn’t that her company ripped someone off or provided bad services. It was actually a review from an employee that the owner terminated. The employee was mad they were fired, so they decided to go online and start submitting bad reviews about the company.
Ouch!
This was a big problem. When potential new clients searched for the business they would see these negative listings. This, without a doubt could result in a negative impact for new business.
The owner of the business wanted the negative results removed as fast as possible. The logical thing to do would be to contact the website and get the negative review removed. After a bit of research and reading on the Ripoff Report website, you actually can’t get the reviews deleted!
This is why online reputation management is so important for your business and brand.
In order to get this negative listing off the first page of Google, I had to start doing search engine optimization for web properties that I created for the business.
The goal here was to created blogs, social profiles, micro-sites, press releases, and any other web property possible. Once the properties were created, I had to get them to out rank the negative review site. This is where content marketing and off-page SEO tactics came into play.
If you have read my other posts, you should understand that Google tries its best to provide the most relevant results for the keywords people search for when using their search engine. Because of this, Google was listing the negative review site directly under the business website.
There were no other web properties online for Google to display when you searched for the business name. This needed to be fixed in order to get the negative listing off the first page of Google.
For the next few months, I registered and filled out as many social profiles as possible. I also created blogs on third-party sites like WordPress.com and anything else I could find. Submitting press releases and publishing unique content on a number of third-party websites was also key.
After the properties were created, I spent a majority of my time building backlinks to the new websites and social profiles.
Once Google indexed all the new web properties and profiles I created for the business, the result for the negative review site was moved to the third page of Google. Success!
Now when you search for the business name, you see press releases, videos, and popular social media profiles about the company. Potential customers no longer see a negative review right away.
In conclusion, I hope you now understand why it is important to do online reputation management for your business. Don’t wait until there is a negative review or something online that could tarnish your brand name.
Be proactive and start today! If you need any help or have any questions, feel free to contact me.