Salvage Your Image and Save Your Business: Search Engine Reputation Management

The Web gives businesses the power to grow exponentially. It also gives customers the power to destroy it overnight. An angry customer or client can find many, many places to post his or her opinion about your business. Right or wrong, that information never goes away.

One problem is that even if your angry customer only posts in a single location, it can still be spread rapidly to other web sites via RSS feeds and manual human intervention.

The first step in search engine reputation management is to try and make your dis-satisfied customers happy. Do they have real reasons to be unhappy? If so, fix the problems.

OK, so you've worked out whatever the problem was between you and your customers. Problem solved right? WRONG! There are still those web pages with the bad reviews.

You can do nothing, which is what most businesses do, or you can take steps to reduce the likelihood of those pages being seen.

The strategy is to create web pages that the search engines will position above the pages that contain the negative content. Most of the traffic for any particular keyword goes to the top five results, and certainly to the results on the first page. If you can push the negative content to the second pages of results of beyond, far fewer people will see those pages.

So now the question is how do you go about creating content that ranks higher than web pages that contain negative reviews of your business. Here are the basic steps:

1. Step number one is to get as good an idea as you can what search terms people are using that are bringing back web pages that contain negative content. To do this, first check your stats. This will tell you keywords that are leading people to your web site. Then use Google Alerts so that you will know when a web page appears that references your business.

2. The second step is to build web pages specifically optimized for those keywords. The first place to build those pages is on your own site. Create pages that are named using the exact keywords, that contain the keywords in the title, and that use the keywords in the copy in bold and in a header.

3. Now post content on "authority" sites, such as popular social networking sites, that is also optimized for your target keywords. These pages will probably rank quicker than the pages on your own site.

4. Now do some article marketing, directory submission, social bookmarking, and various other strategies to give some "link juice" to the pages you created in the steps above. This will help those pages rank faster and higher.

If you follow the steps above, you can greatly clean up your online reputation. Unfortunately, it is a great amount of work. The typical business owner is too busy to sit around doing research and building web pages. For that reason, it is probably a good investment just to hire a company already experienced in the steps involved in search engine reputation management. Firms like Work Media already have tools and strategies in place to accomplish these tasks much quicker, so it may make sense for your business to pay to have it done rather than try to do it all yourself.