Have you been the victim of comment defamation? Review web sites can be the downfall of your business if you aren’t pro-active in tackling your online reputation head on. These are the sort of businesses that get caught out when something goes wrong, and a wave of negative online comments make their mark on the first page of Google.
If a visitor is interested in one of your products they may initially search Google or another SE for your business name and the bad review will normally show up in the search results.This is going to put off the majority of yor customers if the news is prevalant enough, and may be swayed from your website indefinitely.
Comments can arise from upset ex-employees, your competitors blogging on forums with fictitious comments or a legitimate upset customer who has gone on all review site and posted the same damning article. You can affect these bad reviews and build links to your website, therefore pushing down the bad review listings.
Why do these review sites rank well? Because they are more relevant for that keyword “Your business name or URL” than all other pages listed in the search results, and because they have user generated content which the search engines like, as these pages are regularly being updated with new content.
So how do you counter these poor reviews? You need to be aggessive in your approach especially if you have a domain name and company name that is keyword rich, as the competition for the first page exposure will be more difficult. (eg.lets say you have a domain with the word ‘contact lenses’ in it.
How can online marketing companies help you inprove your online reputation?
Here are some of the strategies we employ to manage and improve your online reputation:
1.) Prompt some of your customers to write a review on your company and counter some of the bad comments on the review sites.
2.) Use some well ranked pages of your domain and tweak them and optimise them for your company name inlcuding some customer reviews.
3.) Use subdomains – these are relatvely easy to rank well for your company name.
4.) Carry out a major link building campaign to increase the rankings of your internal pages for the search terms, yourcompanyname, yourcompanyname reviews and www.domainname.com
5.) Create 300 – 500 word article and optimise for your company name and publish to article sites.
6.) Seek out well optimised online directories. Search on other company names and see where they have been registered in directory sites that rank them on the 1st or 2nd page of the SERPS. Register with these directories (not review sites) and drop some links to this page and watch the page rise in the rankings.
Make sure that you use your URL or your business name in the titles and descriptions
7.) Paid Search Campaign (PPC) can be a very quick action to initially fire fight until your organic results are dominant and pushing down the poor comments. Creating a PPC account takes only minutes.
8.) Social Media Implementation -Create profiles with web 2.0 sites
MySpace profile and blog — http://www.myspace.com/
Friendster profile — http://www.friendster.com/
Squidoo lense – http://www.squidoo.com
9.) The legal Approach.
This is sometimes neccessary when diplomacy fails but the first thing to do is to contact the review site or blogger and ask them to remove the damaging keywords or article. If this doesn’t work you may have a legal case if they are using your brand name or trade mark in the wrong way. Just forcing them to remove your company name from their title tag will cause their rankings to drop for your company name search, and may help your cause.
For further expert advice on online reputation management, get in contact with www.rankability.co.uk and find out how we can help your business.