Save Your Business Reputation in the Search Engines

The Web gives disgruntled customers the power to destroy your business. Right or wrong, negative information about you or your business never goes away. Thanks to data distribution technologies such as RSS (just a form of XML), negative information posted in a single location can be spread to hundreds or thousands of other sites instantly. One bad review can be disastrous.

The first step in fixing your search engine reputation is to try and make your customers happy. Do they have real reasons to be unhappy? If so, fix the problems.

The problem is that even if you fix the problem that is causing your customers to be angry, those web pages that contain bad reviews still exist, damaging your reputation. So what do you do? You can hope that potential customers don't find the web pages that contain the negative information, or you can take action and make it a lot less likely that most people will find those pages.

Research has shown that the top five search results on a typical search engines results page receive a far greater share of the traffic than lower ranked results. Results on page two and beyond receive much less traffic. Therefore, if the web pages that contain the negative information about your business are ranked much lower than other web pages about your business, many fewer people will find those web pages. So what do you need to do? Very simply, you have to push those negative pages below the first page of results.

So how exactly do you go about building web pages that will rank favorably enough to push down the web pages with the negative comments? In a nutshell, it works like this:

1. Step number one is to get as good an idea as you can what search terms people are using that are bringing back web pages that contain negative content. Check your stats. This will tell you keywords that are leading people to your web site. Then use Google Alerts so that you will know when a web page appears that references your business.

2. Then start building pages on your own web site that are optimized for your target keywords. Follow the basic rules: name the pages with the keywords, and use the keywords in the page titles, page headers, and in the copy in bold.

3. After building the pages on your own site, you should build pages on other sites that Google considers to be "authority" sites, such as popular social networking sites. Google tends to rank such pages highly, so they will probably rank faster than your own pages. Make sure to optimize your social networking pages for the same or very similar keywords used in step 2.

4. Now do some article marketing, directory submission, social bookmarking, and various other strategies to give some "link juice" to the pages you created in the steps above. This will help those pages rank faster and higher.

That's all there is to search engine reputation management. Easy, right? Uh...no. The fact is that it is a heck of a lot of work. You can do it, but you might save yourself a lot of time and frustration by hiring a search engine optimization firm to do it for you. Companies well trained in the search engine optimization field will have tools and strategies to see results much quicker.
Search engine optimization for the purpose of improving your online reputation is serious business that should be performed by serious companies with a lot of experience. Contact Nashville environmental marketing firm Ecorich.com to get started cleaning up your reputation today.