Online reputation management is growing more and more important as businesses start to move more of their branding online. So what do you do when some negative blog post or hater’s website is mucking up your corner of the SERPS? You can’t make the post disappear, but you can push it off the front page. Here are a few of my favorite strategies:
- Use your exisiting site – Create a good, unique content-rich page on your own site geared towards the keywords you’re trying to do damage control on. Make sure that the keywords are also in the URL. Also, if needs be, address the issue that the negative result is talking about and rebut it.
- Build a site – Buy a domain with the keyword(s) that you’re trying to do reputation management for in it and then seed the site with positive content like how tos and tutorials, or use it to address the concern created by the negative result(s).
- Use free content as a tool – Farm good content out to content sites with a good link profile. This could be everything from sending articles to major article sites to doing guest posts for bloggers who will accept them. Bloggers are an especially great target for this because many of them like the break that guest posts offer them.
- Mobilize your foot soldiers – Ask affiliates and other friendlies to post nice things (reviews, endorsements, etc.) geared towards terms you’re trying to do reputation management for. Your best affiliates are especially likely to do so, because it gives them another chance to sell your product.
- Help others help you – Build links to others with existing positive content who are already ranking on the terms you’re doing reputation management for.
This is by no means exhaustive, it’s just a few of my own favorite strategies. Good luck!
Great tips for online reputation management. With all the free content creation platforms out there it is getting easier to create content to fill up the slots in the search results.