SEO teams work hard to ensure that the reputation of their clients is maintained positively at least in the online world. Now, PR teams too need to work with SEOs to make sure that negative results do not lower the perception of their clients and their brands.
Here are a few tips for improved Search Engine Reputation Management.
As a SEO, you need to ensure that you have activated Google Alerts to alert you for any mention of your product names, brands, and employees on the internet. In addition, monitoring social media websites is equally important in current times since disgruntled employees or customers may take this route to post negative comments or reviews.
You can opt for tools such as Social Mention that can help keep a check on several social media websites. These tools can help curtail any problem that could be published on any website that ranks in your SERPs. You may also require other tools to monitor such negative comments or remarks on a larger scale and will need to act instantly to negate their adverse effects.
Your SEO team needs to work together with your PR team to leverage the most out of positive events or developments that occur during the course of your business. For instance, whenever you address the public at any conference, win any award, or sponsor an event or charity, you should ensure that these positive actions receive a lot more attention from visitors.
Such activities can help build some serious brand equity especially when your SEO and PR team complement each other to extract the most out of each source of information or activities. You should understand that even IPOs and stock quotes that receive media coverage can affect rankings in a positive or negative manner.
All the while, you will also need to work hard to ensure that no negative results are present on the top 10 results of major search engines such as Google, Bing, etc. You need to optimize all pages present on your various domains as well as by directing links to such pages. If there is a negative comment on a website with very high level of authority then you need to use that very same domain with the negative result to add links or add positive comments to push down the site from its first page ranking.
Another method to remove negative comments that are blatant lies can be to use services of websites such as chillingeffects.org, which provide a legal route to get the offending remarks removed. Another way is to locate the website with the negative comment and try to work out a solution to get it removed. Continuous monitoring and prompt action can ensure that no negative results creep up on the top result page.
In addition, you also need to ensure that your result page is too strong for any one negative comment or remark to make it to the first page. You can begin by creating several business profiles on different domains with high authority, engage other authors to write about you and your business, and make several profiles on different social media sites. Additionally, you should create different websites for your business, and ensure that your local search, video, and AdWords results are highly optimized so as to have more SERP control. In such a situation, a rogue negative result may pierce your results, but will quickly fall back in no time.
On the other hand, you should avoid getting tempted to use negative PR to push down any competitor since this strategy not only makes for unethical SEO and PR, but could well be used by your competitors to push you down too.
You should remember that PR does have an element of SEO within their activities and enabling both teams to work seamlessly in tandem could help achieve ideal online search engine reputation management.