Most businesses opt for an Online Reputation Management (ORM) campaign after receiving some bad online publicity. Please know that if your ORM efforts are to be successful, you should adopt a proactive approach and not reactive.
SEO professionals will tell you that high-ranking pages with negative press tend to generate inbound links. These links further strengthen the pages’ positions. As a result, bad publicity becomes more difficult to suppress.
As opposed to reverse SEO, which is aimed at fighting adverse criticisms after they are posted, Online Reputation Management should rather be used as a preventive measure. By launching a campaign that controls the top organic positions, you can prevent negative publicity from gaining exposure in the first place.
You must safeguard your business from the machinations of unhappy customers, disgruntled employees, and unethical competitors.
Do not allow negative press to take root within the top search listings in major search engine results.
SEO experts opine “A lot of the bad press that targets companies (possibly even your own) is placed on websites that meet key ranking parameters in the search algorithms.”
This means the negative publicity can attain top positions and gain undue exposure. When people search for your company, they will view the bad press that could potentially damage your business reputation.
Reverse SEO may be defined as an ORM strategy that pushes negative publicity from the top search positions. By moving the bad press to lower pages, Online Reputation Management restricts its exposure and dampens its impact.
Like search engine marketing, online reputation management uses a systematic approach to protect your online reputation. You must identify the sites and pages that carry negative publicity about your company, and are ranking for important keywords. These keywords might include your company name or your brand or your products.
Analyze these sites and pages for their respective ranking authority. That will help you determine the effort and tools you’ll need to move them from the first page of listings of major search engines.
Use optimization tools such as press releases, a new network of competing sites and blogs, social media profiles, and social bookmarking programs. A search engine marketing professional will have these tools at his disposal.
Launch your online reputation management campaign before trouble strikes and the damage begins to acquire popularity in the search engines.