Bad Reputation on Google and Search Engines?
Of course, if you have a bad reputation on Google or other search engines, it is not really the search engines that are too blame. The search engines are merely reporting on relevant pages related to your company. The real problem is that high-ranking web pages, forums, and blogs are making negative comments about your company – and these comments are made highly visible thanks to search engines.
According to eMarketing, 41% of customers use search engines when researching a product or company before making a purchase. This means that if search engine results show negative comments about your company, your bad reputation could be costing you more than 40% of your potential customers.
Search engines can be a very useful way to learn the state of your current online reputation. Running searches on your company name, on your products and brands, and on employee names can help you determine what potential customers see when they research you online. Running searches can also help pinpoint where negative comments about your business are coming from. Finally, many search engines – including Google – allow you to set up alerts. This free service allows you to get email notices whenever new comments or pages with specific keywords appear online.
If your search engine research reveals that your online reputation has taken a beating, you can often use search engines to bolster your reputation again. For example, you can try search engine optimizing your website. This ensures that when customers search for specific keywords, they will find your website first – not flame sites or blogs.
Another option is to add new online presences. Set up a company blog, participate in online forums, develop a sub-domain for your sites, create feeder sites, and set up social networking pages for your business. All of these will show up as separate search engine results and will help you gain control over your search engine reputation. This tactic will increase the number of high-ranking positive comments about you online. Hopefully, these will push the negative comments further down the search engine results listings. All of these can bring more traffic to your site and will generally be accepted as new sites and may outrank the older sites with negative information about your company.
Another good tactic to use is to submit articles to quality online publications in your industry. Target the publications that have high rankings. Your article will be bolstered up the search engine rankings by virtue of the publication’s search engine ranking, and you will be helping others by sharing your expertise.