We have been fairly busy recently helping clients who, through no fault of their own, have attracted some bad press on the internet.  If your business is in the unenviable position of having “bad press” about its goods, services or people you need to do something about it.

You need to deal with the problem and the best way to do this is to try and flood the internet with Good News and positive messages about your business which will hopefully push the ‘bad stuff’ so far down the search rankings that it will have little or no impact on your business.  This post aims to give you a few pointers on how to do it

1. Domain Names:

If things are really bad you might need to consider changing the domain name of your website.  There could well be available domain names that can help you represent your products and services. You can even consider some sort of abbreviation or add-on to your existing domain name and also create new micro-sites and new landing pages to promote your business.

2. Link Building

Good Quality, relevant inbound links will really help all aspects of your search engine ranking.  Genuine Link Building is ‘White Hat’ i.e. ethical SEO, and we would say all businesses wanting to generate business from their website should consider Link Building as an integral part of their internet marketing strategy.

The objective is to dominate the first two or three pages of the search results for your main keywords or keyword phrases e.g. your business name! To achieve this you will likely need many good quality inbound links.  Why only the first two or three pages?  Because very few people bother to go beyond the first two or three pages of the search results anyway!

3. Online Reputation Management Strategy

As with any other business risk, you need to have a plan in place should a disgruntled customer or former employee ‘bad mouth’ your business online.  Even if the ‘bad news’ makes the headlines, if your brand is strong enough it will recover or may not be too badly affected by it.  Having an Online Reputation Management (ORM) strategy in place will enable you to continually build your brand reputation online and also build trust and reinforce the credibility of your business.

Businesses which already have a strong online brand are much less vulnerable to adverse search engine entries than those with little or no online reputation.  Even if someone does issue a bad message about your business it will be one message amongst a ‘sea of good news’.  If there is no good news about your business to start with the situation is more serious.

WSIIMS can help you to create and implement an Online Reputation Management Strategy.

Read more about all the WSIIMS  Digital Marketing services that can help maintain a positive online reputation for your business.