SEO Tactics For Reputation Management
EQUTE — John McCarthy has an interesting case study over at Adotas about a company that was about to get hit with an “SEO bomb.”
McCarthy said that he got a call from a public relations agency at the end of the day Friday, and had to deliver them some bad news.
The agency told him that a very negative and very true story about fraud at a local company was about to hit the local press — they needed some SEO reputation management immediately.
The public relations agency asked how fast we could implement an SEO reputation management campaign to suppress the pending negative news stories in the search engines. I responded that technically we could start today but the reality is it was too late – as the damage was already done.
– McCarthy wrote
He said all they could do now was try to push the bad press down far enough that people wouldn’t see it right away.
He wrote about creating a three-tiered approach to getting the company ranked high in search engines.
- Tier 1 consists of the company’s own web sites and content. These would be SEO optimized like none other with a keyword pushing and link building campaign. Ideally, these sites would be easy to get to the top spots on Google since the company has complete control over the properties.
- Tier 2 consists of third parties that paint the company in a positive light. This might consist of past press, TV web site write-ups, press releases, etc. These would be more difficult to rank since the SEO optimizers wouldn’t have control over the content, but they could still be part of a link building campaign and could be well placed in the organic rankings.
- Tier 3 consists of Web assets that don’t yet exist. These basically are used as filler to fill in the top 10 on Google or Yahoo (Bing). These are just as easy as Tier 1 sites to optimize, but there is significant work just getting it on the Internet and indexed.
McCarthy’s example had three client-owned sites and five positive third-party sites; which meant that they had to create two Tier 3 sites/articles to fill out the rankings.
His first step was to take inventory of the Web assets, second was optimizing. But the public relations company was surprised how long it would take.
“Months?” cried out the representative from the public relations agency.
“Yes, months,” I responded. “Depending upon the number and intensity of the negative mentions.”
“Worse yet,” I stated “it will be expensive. My team will need to drop what they are doing today and spend the weekend performing the inventory analysis. Once they find positive mention assets, they need to immediately start promoting those assets while simultaneously developing the actual SEO reputation management campaign in parallel.”
McCarthy said it would have been much easier to deal with the fallout had the company thought about their online reputation beforehand — especially before proceeding with illegal practices worth an article in the press.
If the company already had the top 10 rankings on Google, they could simply spot optimize and push the bad press off the front page. But starting from scratch is a Promethean task when going up against the Internet media from the get go.
McCarthy’s ill-fated client said it best.
“I guess the old idiom applies to SEO reputation management. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
