Mark Hammond has had years of experience writing articles for the search engine industry. He now joins the 1st Place Design team where is able to access inside knowledge on the workings of one of Australia's most successful search marketing companies.
Remember the childhood game of “Chinese whispers”? One person used to whisper something and the words would get passed down a chain of people, just to get concocted into an entirely new phrase most of the time. Yes, it was funny to observe the change of words, but imagine if the same were to happen with the reputation of your company.
Remember the childhood game of “Chinese whispers”? One person used to whisper something and the words would get passed down a chain of people, just to get concocted into an entirely new phrase most of the time. Yes, it was funny to observe the change of words, but imagine if the same were to happen with the reputation of your company. Reputation is said to be everything in the business world. Building your brand’s reputation is a calculated and difficult task, which can take months or even years at end and can use up millions of dollars. Remember, a bad reputation of your company not only influences a company’s sales and corporate image, but it also poses regulatory problems, declining stock prices, branding issues, inferiority of offerings, the list goes on…
There can be a lot of people who can have issues with your firm and publicize negative information about you on the Internet like upset bloggers, unhappy customers, sly competitors or displeased employees. Tactics are increasingly being used by individuals and companies to guard their reputations from getting damaged by harmful content, made known to users through search engine queries. This practice is better known as Search Engine Reputation Management (SERM), which essentially deals with dominating search engine results with your brand name. SERM involves both SEO and SEM, that is, we can regulate search results making use of optimization as well as marketing to maintain a brand’s reputation on the web.
The best part about SERM is that not only do you get to position your brand the way you want it, but you are also able to attract the right kind of traffic who will actually be interested in buying your products. The strategy to do this is even simple; you just need to replace the wrong, offensive search listings with positive, favorable content. You may start with scanning your own website for misleading, non-optimized pages and try to leverage it using publicity tactics like issuing press releases, for ranking higher than your protesting competitors.
Optimizing your related affiliate content sources will also help you achieve your goals faster. Certain important elements of your company like its products and key executives, as well as content related to them like blogs, forums and standard search results, need to be monitored on a regular basis. To conduct monitoring, it would help to create custom RSS feeds based on keyword searches like Feedster and Technorati as well as social media via tags like keotag.com and tagbulb.com. Build profile pages on authority websites like Kiva.org, lenses on Squidoo and a Blogger account, to gain higher ranks faster. But remember to use your company’s name in the URL and title, even if you choose not to focus too much on the content. After doing all this, you need to ‘index’ the various profile pages, lenses, blogs etc. to make it search engine friendly.
These are just a few of the many SERM tactics and they sure do work wonders. You can search online for various other comprehensive resources for protecting your company’s precious reputation.