Listen, none of my clients would want me to show you how I’ve helped them with their search engine reputations.
Why? Because they don’t want anyone to know they had a reputation problem in the first place!
And that’s fine, right? Because often these problems are undeserved. Sometimes a newspaper decides to write something with a negative slant just because they think it will get more attention, or its a slow news day. Or some guy with a blog goes nuts… not so much because of your company as because he’s under-medicated.
Search Engine Reputation Problems Look Like…
When you Google your brand or your name, is there anything undeservedly negative in the top ten results? If so, you have an SEO reputation problem.
Big corporations sometimes find disgruntled customers or past employees devoting a huge amount of time and effort to creating websites or blogs to attack them. For example, Wal-Mart has to deal with walmartsucks.org. But fortunately, that website is now on the third page of Google results for the search “walmart”.
How Can We Fix Your SEO Reputation Problem?
Often, we can control the top ten results for your brand quite easily. In part, this is achieved by having a broad social footprint- if you have a Facebook page, a Twitter profile, etc. then many of the top ten will be just listings of where people can find you online. And you control the content of those pages. What I do is help you create more of these, if you need more, and ensure that these listings beat all the negative press or blogs that might otherwise show up in the top 10.
Who Can’t We Help?
If you deserve your negative reputation and don’t change your ways, it may be hard to help you. If your budget for fixing the reputation problem isn’t proportional to the power of the negative listings, we won’t have enough steam to change it.
Or, as in one unfortunate case I know of, if you anger a very powerful blogger and some blackhat SEO’s who then direct tens of thousands of links to the negative blog post to ensure it always stays in the top ten, it may be difficult or impossible to fix. In that case, it took about a year for the negative post to fall to the second page of its own accord.