Finding customers will be a burden for you if your products/services have a negative online reputation. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or this was done on purpose by your competitors. Anyway, you won’t be able to avoid the consequences.
That’s why you need to pay attention to online reputation management.
Online reputation management is a strategy to create a suitable (positive) perception of a brand, its products, and services online. This strategy is used to make sure that potential buyers and your target audience see mostly positive reviews, articles in the mass media, and content on forums and blogs about your brand and services when they search for the experience of your clients on Google or Yandex. Monitoring mentions of your brand and any negative content that appears in search results or social media is the crucial task for you to do.
Does reputation management protect your online image?
Yes, you or the professionals remove negative content from the front page of Google and any other known niche-specific forums.
Online reputation management is not about hacking the system, nor is it about presenting bad services as perfect. It’s about actively building a positive brand image and ensuring that the occasional bad customer experience or occasional technical glitch isn’t used to smear your product.
Why is online reputation management important?
More than 60% of people believe what’s listed on the front pages of Google or among the first forum reviews, even if it’s not true. You ought to create positive content that someone who searches for your brand will see on the first page of the search queries. If you don’t, then you will always be one negative review away from the downfall of your company.
You should also keep an eye on review sites that are the most popular and reputable in your niche. If your rating is less than 4 stars, it is unlikely that most users will want to use your services.
What are negative search results in search engine results?
Reviews can easily make or break a sale for your product. That’s why it’s important that most searches are dominated by positive reviews.
Negative search results have a great impact on your brand. Here is the list of the most common types of content that show up in Google search queries that can contain negative information about your brand or services.
One of the biggest threats to your project is having reviews that are either negative or present your product as a second-best option.
Topics on forums such as Reddit or videos onYouTube often end up on the first page of Google for brand keywords. Similarly, negative. This is a major threat to the online reputation of many companies, as angry customers like to express their anger on such forums.
Opinions from bloggers or articles on trustworthy websites highlight your product’s worst features.
The most significant are customer reviews. They have a great impact on potential buyer’s decisions. Reviews tend to appear on the first page in the search queries having brand names and ratings.
Negative reputation campaigns. Sometimes competitors use blog networks to run coordinated negative reputation campaigns against their brands.
So, how do you remove negative search results on Goggle?
- The first step in online reputation management is to set up systems to actively monitor any reputation threats in the form of articles, negative brand mentions, customer reviews, or social media posts.
- Next, set up Google Alerts. Google Alerts send you email notifications every time it indexes a web page that mentions the keyword you want. Set up alerts for your brand name, competitors, and any other keywords closely related to your brand so you know when Google indexes something negative about you.
- Start with a simple Google search to see what appears by your brand name. Then look at related and suggested searches for your brand name. Use different modifiers in your search to find the most common suggested searches. Check the first page results for these keywords to make sure nothing negative has come up. As a result of your audit, you should have a list of keywords that show negative search results for your brand and that you would like to remove.
After the work is done, you should turn to content marketing to remove negative search results. Content marketing is one of the best ways to build trust in your brand and remove negative Google search results. When you publish high-quality content that is read and shared by thousands of people each month, negative content loses its impact. You can put negative keywords to your article so that your site shows up instead of negative results when someone searches for them. By doing so, you will increase traffic to your site.
Quality content + highly authoritative backlinks are a simple formula for ranking your site for any keyword.
But to create decent backlinks to your site, you need great content, connections to the right journalists, bloggers, and editors.
Invest in PR campaigns. Content marketing is a solid, long-term solution for reputation management. But it takes time to take effect, so it’s best to supplement it with PR campaigns.
Another important tip: Be careful how you respond to negative comments and messages. Even if you feel the urge to respond unprofessionally to the original comment. You shouldn’t if your ultimate goal is to remove the negative feedback about the company. As a last resort, you should explain your side of the story and respond to the criticism with evidence. That way, neutral readers and potential customers can at least get the full picture. By participating in the discussion of the topic, you help Google recognize the URL as relevant.
Don’t forget to encourage positive user feedback. Positive reviews and testimonials from satisfied customers help counter negative Google search results by boosting your profile on review sites. However, satisfied customers are less likely to voluntarily share reviews than unsatisfied ones. That’s why you need to encourage and incentivize your customers to publicly praise your brand at every opportunity. You can do this by running contests, offering discounts, or simply reminding satisfied customers to leave reviews.
So, the tips that were listed above can help you with negative content about you.
Then you can do all the work yourself or you can hire a team. The second option will lead you to your goal much faster and more effectively. Working on online reputation management yourself may seem like a cheaper option in the short term, but when you consider the opportunity cost and the high probability that you won’t be able to properly counter negative search results, working with professionals is still a cheaper option in the long run.
Link building requires prior relationships with site editors, content creators, and journalists. When editors get suggestions from their trusted content creators, whom they’ve known for years, getting highly authoritative links becomes much easier. Hodle has a proven base of journalists and editors over the years to help you present your business in a positive light.
Hodle’s experienced professionals have years of experience with a variety of reputation management tasks. They are also experts in SEO, online reputation management, and other important skills needed to protect your brand’s reputation. So instead of being distracted from your core business to solve negative reputation problems through trial and error, it’s wiser to hire professionals.