There’s a marketing phrase that’s almost as old as the industry itself: ‘All news is good news.’ You see it in movies, with CEOs of huge corporations laughing gleefully over the free advertising some scandal has netted their company. On the Internet, though, not all news is good news. Bad news is, sadly, bad news… often very bad news.
The good news is that you can use your SEO strategy to squash bad news before it even happens. Reputation management can, and should, be a part of your
search engine optimisation strategy.
Reputation management involves managing aspects of the Internet to either cope with a reputation crisis after it occurs, or to take control of critical areas before anything happens. A lot of businesses choose the former path, thinking that nothing could ever happen to affect their reputation, but managing your reputation proactively is actually helpful to your site’s SEO, as well as being helpful to protecting your company’s image.
Proactive reputation management involves taking control of the top 10 spots in the SERPs for your brand keywords. This isn’t that difficult to do (relatively speaking), and it helps with off-page optimisation. In boosting the presence of your brand around the net, you can help generate inbound links for your site, which will ultimately benefit your PageRank and your Google rankings. Proactive reputation management can involve encouraging reviews, submitting to directories, creating blogs, operating a forum and similar moves.
Bad news can affect your online reputation indefinitely, unless you do something about it. Using your search engine optimisation strategy to manage your reputation and quelch bad press before it gets attention is a smart thing to do.
