The key part to online reputation management is dealing with negative reviews. These comments and opinions are posted by customers who are not happy with your company or brand. Digging deeper, you may find that many of these reviews are probably being written by your ex-employees to vent their anger! These negative reviews hurt the brand or the company because internet users who check for your brand through search engines come across these reviews. They are influenced by these reviews into thinking negatively about your brand. So, the job of the online reputation management team is to flush out these reviews from search engines.
Like every initiative taken through search engines, removing negative reviews from the search results will take considerable time. It depends on how properly you are optimizing your website and other web links through appropriate keywords. The aim is that users must not come across the negative reviews through search results. Instead, you are going to provide them with positive content by flushing out the negative content with targeted SEO work. Optimize your website with a wide range of keywords so that searchers can never find those negative review web links. Use different keywords for the separate internal web pages of your website.
The next step is to inject fresh content into the SEO steam every single day! The content that you write must have a clever use of keywords to bypass the sentinels of Google. Your content must not spam but come across like informative articles and blog posts. The purpose of these write-ups is not limited to pushing down negative content in the SERP results. Readers must also find your content interesting to read. That way they will be hooked to what you want them to read rather than look around on their own. Give them quality content that reflects your brand in a positive light. You will achieve twin purposes without breaking into a sweat!
Diversification is another key ingredient to block out negative reviews from the search engine stream. You have to publish articles and blogs in a variety of platforms. You have to take part in forum discussions and comment on other blogs and websites. Make use of social bookmarking sites like Digg and Delicious. Using the social media networks will also come in handy because search engines pay a lot of attention to these platforms. Use Stumble Upon as a tool to reach out to new users who are not part of your online consumer circle. The more you spread out your influence the better will be the chances of your brand grabbing all the search engine slots. There will hardly be any space for negative web links to surface!
Other than these steps, you can use the traditional and time-tested methods that bring in SEO results quicker. Use link building judiciously. As mentioned earlier, bagging all the top slots in the SERP results for your company or brand is an uphill task that will take more than its fair share of time. You have to keep working at it!
