Spending money on SEO can be very valuable. SEO ROI can provide a huge payoff. But above and beyond SEO bringing new traffic to your website, it can do something for your reputation online as well.
2. Spending money on SEO can be very valuable. SEO ROI can provide a huge
payoff. But above and beyond SEO bringing new traffic to your website, it can do
something for your reputation online as well.
Smart investments can help your business grow. Smart
investments can also help your business sustain that
growth. Reputation management is a service more
companies than ever are investing in. A bad online
reputation could be the nail in the coffin for a struggling
company. And a bad online reputation could be
detrimental for businesses — small and large. People
use the web and the reviews posted by others to help
them narrow down lists of potential suppliers.
What will your customers find when they try to look you
up online?
Zero reputation can cost you customers as prospects
may not give you a chance because they don’t find
much feedback about you. But a bad reputation is even
worse than no reputation at all. A solid value statement and promise of excellence
will often convince people to give you a chance. But seeing a lot of bad reviews
could have terrible consequences for your business and turn off potential
customers as well as existing customers who could read a poor review and
develop enough of a distaste that they stop doing business with you. What can you
do about a bad review? Search suppression techniques fuelled by SEO (search
engine optimisation) could help. SEO can work to your advantage with bringing
website traffic in but SEO tactics can also help you with search suppression, too.
3. What is Search Suppression?
By strategically working at outranking bad reviews, you could do some damage
control and lower the chances of a review’s negative impact. If, for example, you
can outrank a bad review with good reviews, there’s more chance of prospective
customers seeing your 100 good reviews than the one bad one. Many companies
will enlist the help of an SEO company to try to help them get rid of bad reviews or
bad rep. While you can’t generally eliminate something from the search engine
results pages, you can, potentially, bury those results so that there are results
ahead of bad reviews. If people see both, they may still give you an opportunity —
especially if they believe you take bad feedback seriously. Because the average
searcher doesn’t search past the first page of Google results, your SEO company
could help you create optimized content that helps bad reviews slide off that highly
visible first page.
Is Search suppression Sneaky?
You might think that trying to suppress search engine optimisation results that you
don’t like is sneaky. But damage control is important and if you ethically execute a
search suppression campaign, you don’t have to be sneaky. You shouldn’t attempt
anything unethical but by leveraging proven marketing techniques and search
engine optimisation to optimise your reputation, you can limit potentially substantial
damage.
One bad review on a high ranking website could make it difficult for prospects to
see all the great reviews on another site so it might be prudent to work with an
SEO company who knows how to execute a reputation management strategy that
helps potential customers see the best of your company when they do their
research.
4. Will Reputation Management Efforts Cost You Rankings?
Because search engines such as Google don’t take too kindly to black hat SEO
efforts, some companies might be wondering if they are jeopardising their rankings
for reputation. But Google does recommend proactively working at publishing
information you want people to see via managing reputation through search
results on their blog. Current, useful, readable information could outrank a bad
review and give potential customers a broader picture of your company and your
service offerings.
Things to note:
There’s no way to predict how long SEO results are going to stay as is.
What’s #1 on the SERPs today may not be there tomorrow so actively
practise reputation management or hire someone to do it for you.
People could find bad reviews through a number of search phrases so your
optimisation strategy should include several key phrases and take multiple
search engines as well as social media into account.
Don’t only work to bury that bad review. Experts often suggest that you find a
way to acknowledge negativity about your company. You can use it to
demonstrate that you will take action to fix what’s wrong. Most people don’t
expect perfection or are, at the very least, forgiving when someone
demonstrates efforts to right a wrong. Yes, we can gloat at our
accomplishments but gleaning knowledge from our mistakes is a sign of
greatness. A reputation management specialist can help you find ways to
gather negative feedback and respond to it so that you demonstrate
5. customer service excellence to the person slagging you off as well as the
person that reads that review later on.
Need help with reputation management or SEO? Call us. Find us
at http://www.oracledigital.com.au.