Reputation Management through SEO

Reputation management is something that is becoming more and more important for businesses, especially in the online environment. There are a number of ways that you can protect the reputation of your brand, and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is just one of those ways.

To provide an example, a local restaurant owner types in the restaurant name in Google, and discovers that the top 3 links in the SERPs are actually negative reviews from customers that have posted on websites. Their own website actually appears much further down the page. The owner of the business was extremely worried by this, and didn’t want potential customers to see bad reviews in Google before they got to her website.  So how do you go about protecting your reputation in this way?

Well, the first step was to improve the SEO of the restaurant website by working with a reputable SEO company so that it was ranked #1 in Google.  Ranking for the restaurant name required only minor investment as the name of the restaurant wasn’t particularly competitive. This made sure that the restaurant appeared above the reviews. The second step involved creating a number of press releases that were posted on other local websites (which had a good page rank) that appeared above the reviews, pushing them down the rankings to the bottom of page 1.

The thing about reviews, is that they tend only to be written when a customer has had a bad experience. Rarely does a customer write a review about a good experience, but this can be changed. At the end of the meal, every customer was given a card and asked to write a review on the same specific website, and there were incentives for doing so. Adding a review resulted in a discount code for a free drink with their meal on their next visit. Although these reviews could have been good or bad, the restaurant was confident that a very high majority of their customers left satisified. Additionally, in order to claim their free drink they would be a returning visitor. It’s unlikely that they would write the review if they didn’t want to go back!  The reviews on the website, diluted the current negative reviews and also lowered their ranking to the bottom of page 2 in the SERPs, as Google favours ‘newer’ content in this format.

The final push to the campaign was actually building links for lower ranked websites. This may sound surprising, but by raising their position a few places it pushed the negative reviews down to the 3rd and 4th pages of the Google SERPs. Generally speaking, most users rarely go past the 2nd or 3rd page in the Google results, so this was seen as an acceptable result.

Hopefully this example shows how SEO can be used to manage reputations effectively. Don’t fall for classic mistakes, such as writing your own reviews or getting friends and family members to write them. If you do this and you’re found out, it can be even more damaging to your reputation.