Jacob Mills from Concentric Marketing
gives us some SEO tips for reputation management that help companies fight negative publicity. In this post he tells us how to improve your online rputation.
Manage a company’s online reputation with a few easy-to-follow SEO tips. Whether its it’s the owner or CEO who is the victim of online slander, or an entire insurance agency or company thats fighting negative publicity, there are some easy steps for damage control.
In the old days, insurance companies provided media training to public-facing board members and senior-level members of staff. Today, traditional media training continues, but with a twist: its focused on managing reputations and developing media training geared towards online customers using SEO (search engine optimization) reputation management tools.
Fight Negative Publicity
Online reputation management tools are useful when fighting negative publicity for something thats surfaced from the past or a current problem thats receiving negative attention online or in the media. In the past, a story might be run on the news that negatively affected an insurance agent’s reputation, then after a while the story died out, becoming yesterdays news. With the Internet, solid online media training and reputation management tips are needed to fight negative publicity, because the stories never really go away – theyre on the Web forever.
Online Reputation Management Tools Improve Public Perceptions
SEO and reputation management tools help because they push the bad publicity back in Google results. Instead of the showing up on page one of Google results, negative press, negative comments in forums and customer complaints are moved to later pages in Google. And, studies show that most people only look at page one results, few people click through to page two results, and even fewer people click through to page three search engine results or beyond.
Online Media Training Ideas
Dont get into an online war of words with someone whos trying to make trouble for you. It makes you look bad, and worse, it makes you look guilty. There will always be unhappy customers- disappointing people is the downside of working in insurance or in any industry. Ignore online comments in forums or on websites, or file them away for when the company hires a reputation management agency.
Negative publicity about a company online shouldn’t throw employees into a panic. There are many options for fighting back with reputation management tools. And, its inevitable that something negative will be printed online about almost every company at some point in time. Accept it, and decide if the company needs SEO reputation management to correct the damage thats been done.