Where To Start Search Engine Reputation Management?

Search engine reputation management is the process of monitoring and taking action against how your brand or company appears in the search engine result. It can be tricky to know where to start with rep-management projects, so I have put together a nice little checklist to get you start -

Is your site SEO optimised?

Before you focus on removing or adding results to Google look at your own site first. You could very easily push down negative results by just optimising your site to display better in Google. Subpages could start ranking below the homepage, automatically giving you the top 2 or 3 spots in the SERPS.

Are there any positive sites in the SERPs about your company/brand?

Why bother creating unnatural reviews or fan sites when someone has already done it for you. If you fire a couple of links their way from your domain you can help improve their rankings, which in turn improves your reputation in the SERPs.

What about the negative sites about your company/brand?

You may get bad press from time to time, but it is how you deal with it which is very important. Instead of trying to bury these results you should be openly communicating with the sites and offering support or advice on the situation. If there are some old sites ranking for your brand name which contain some out of date negative information why not contact them telling them about how things have changed/new procedures in place? Ask them if they would like to revisit the subjects in a new blog post/news article. By doing this you are essentially getting a positive result listing in place of a negative one.

People will be searching for your brand name for two reasons; to get to your website or to do research on you. Later users will understand that not everyone will have something positive to say, so a few negative results amongst the positive are okay.

Exact match domains

Are you seeing a lot of negative searches for your brand name ('SEO Consult kicked my dog', for example)? A good way to deal with these is to create an exact match domain).If the authority of your domain is strong then you should start ranking high for these bad search terms, which gives you the option to address the situation/give your official opinion to the user before they read it on some blog somewhere. Plus, it makes you look like you are working toward making things better instead of ignoring the situation until it goes away.

Let me know in the comments below if you think there is anything else people should be doing to ensure that their reputation management projects are going smoothly.