Summary: Before commenting on negative feedback, assess whether this might bring the feedback to the top of the rankings. Always deal with complaints but sometimes go direct. Create other content to push negative reviews down and out of the search engine rankings.
So you’ve got a bit of time to spend on reputation management – what can you do to get some fast results?
First off, Google and other search engines are pretty good at matching up people searching for your company name with your actual company website. You don’t have to try too hard to get ranked for your company name, unless it’s something terribly generic like ‘fish shop’. The advantage of this is you can also get other material ranked pretty quickly using your company name as the target keyword, and this should be your short term reputation management strategy.
Your strategy might include:
- Development of the official website of your company, aiming for the top spot.
- A press page on your official site, linking to any positive coverage on the web of your company. Remember though, that each link you give on a page dilutes the passable page rank. If you have a passable page rank, it makes more sense to create a press section with links to individual pages and do a short write up about each piece of coverage on its own page and then link from that with a single link.
- Optionally, one or two other sites owned by your company. For example, if your company is Joe Brown Consulting, you could have joebrownconsulting.com as your main website and then joebrownhelp.com as a help site linking back to your main site, and joebrownreviews.com as a review site linking back to your main site. There’s no harm in this as long as the content on each site is unique. With these sites, assuming your company name is relatively unique (again, not ‘pet shop’ for example) you should be able to fill up the top three slots (i.e. the ones that get most of search engine users’ attention). Don’t go too crazy on domains like this though as it’ll be clear to Google that they’re all owned by you, plus you’ll have to divide your resources and maintain these other sites too.
- An official company blog, hosted on another site – share industry news, resources, tips, advice and freebies, and link back to your site (Angel SEO has a blog like this – see SEO Nottingham).
- Articles on industry specific websites. You need to remember that you’re targeted your company name as a keyword so it might be, for example, ‘How Joe Brown Consulting started their business with £10’.
- A LinkedIn profile for you or your directors, featuring the Company name (great to show people the calibre of people they’re dealing with too).
- A Facebook page for your company (great for getting customer feedback too).
- Other social networking profiles for your company (look at the typical user profile for the network and compare to your customer profile to decide if it would be worthwhile maintaining such a page).
Where you see negative reviews about your website or company online, be cautious how you treat them. Sometimes you need to address a client’s complaint and it’s a great opportunity to show that you offer good customer service and take complaints seriously. Other times you may find that commenting on the post draws more attention to it and raises it up in the rankings. There’s no hard and fast formula as to what you should do but look at other complaints on the site in question, look at how other companies have responded and look at whether this has increased the exposure of the post. It might be a better strategy to create your own content that pushes these negative reviews down the rankings.
Don’t forget, however, if you don’t deal with a genuine complaint, that person could keep posting material. So deal with them direct if you don’t intend to deal with them through their review. Often customers will post an update to their review anyway with a positive remark on how you’ve handled the complaint – assuming you’ve handled it well!
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