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Search Engine Reputation Management
Protect Your Brand
When someone searches on Google or another search engine on your name or your company's name what do they find?
More and more often, prospective customers and clients are using search engines to research prospective business partners. If they find negative information or slanderous content about you or your business it could cost you a sale.
Our firm is experienced in helping to restore credibility and the "good name" reputation for firms who have fallen victim to slanderous postings on the internet. If you need to make sure that web searchers find the good stuff about your company, we can help.
Can we remove negative webpages from Google or other search engines?
No. At least, not likely. Google and other search engines search the web for content and rank the web pages they find according to which they feel are the most relevant. Only the search engines can choose to include or remove a web page that you do not own or control. At best, we can write to the owner of the website on which the negative content is posted and request that it be removed. It may or may not.
Rather, we seek to outrank the negative content with positive content. The truth is that the top 10 results for a search get the majority of the eyeballs. That means if website # 3 in Google is a negative one, our strategy will often be to get 8 other webpages ahead of it to bump it out of the top 10.
Why do the negative postings and websites rank so highly in Google?
Search engines attempt to rank the "best" pages that match your keyword search. To automate this, they define "best" as being two things: relevant and popular. The first piece - relevance - isn't terribly tough. Chances are you could write a page about your company in 30 minutes that would be quite relevant to a search on your company's name.
The tough part with online reputation management is the popularity piece. This is measured by the number (quantity) and type (quality and popularity) of those sites that link to your site. Now here is the unfortunate news: search engines basically mirror the offline world here. If it bleeds, it leads - is an expression that is often used. Basically, anything "interesting" or "funny" or "scandalous" or "terrible" or "hilarious", etc. is likely to be a website that attracts links to it from other websites. A site that is merely "accurate and informational" is not sexy, and as such it doesn't get many links from other sites and won't rank very well.
Think about it - why do people look at car wrecks? Why do they watch Jerry Springer? What does the news in Baltimore always lead with homicides and other terrible things rather than a nice story about the successful fundraising run by the local girl scout troop? Its because in our society things that are extreme - either good or bad - make the news. If Wal-Mart does something bad there are thousands of bloggers waiting to pounce and rip them to shreds. If Wal-Mart does something good to help sponsor an event in the local community - while that's nice - frankly nobody cares and no one will write about that on the blog, linking to the "nice story" on another website.
For this reason, negative and slanderous postings about an organization - even when they are in the vast minority - can often rank very high in search engines. If there are 1,000 pages about your company on the internet, and 999 of those are positive while only 1 is negative, if that negative page ranks in Google's top 5 or even top 10, its going to cause a huge impact on your firm's reputation and your bottom-line.
How do ethics come in to play with online name and brand reputation management?
We're a busy firm, so we don't need to beg for business. Online reputation management sometimes presents a fine line. We reserve the right to refuse to work with a firm for any reason - such as if we believe you are "in the wrong". Generally speaking, we only want to help repair reputations that were wrongly damaged and deserve to be repaired. We like to help the good guys, not the bad guys :)
Can you gaurantee anything here?
Not really, except that we'll work our hardest and we're darn good at what we do. We may not completely bury the bad stuff. But we can safely say that we'll turn the balance. If your "before" situation is 50% good and 50% bad when searching on your name, we'd expect it to be 80/20 or 90/10 good-to-bad when we are finished.
The whole objective here is NOT to remove the bad stuff, but rather to make sure the good stuff is seen too, preferably more prominently than the bad stuff.
