Companies from large corporations to small businesses now compete to maximize their exposure on search engine results (Google, Yahoo/Bing & more ) and spend a lot of time, money and effort to maintain their search rankings via online marketing including media buying, search engine optimization (SEO ), paid search and content (blogs, video, images ). A top ranking can mean a lot of business flowing to them from visitors looking for products and services. A US government report projects Online /Ecommerce business just for the retail sector at beyond $200 billion for the fiscal year 2012.
A big portion of top results on search engines include user generated content like Facebook, Youtube, Yelp etc.. Part of this includes several review sites and blog type websites. Some of the sites focus on negative reviews or reports and are known as reputation attack pages/websites (including scamreports.com, ripoffreport.com & more ) can significantly damage a company’s revenues/bottom line, be a source of embarrassment and they can lose potential customers . These companies while posing as watch dogs or business accountability for the online reputation of a business or individual charge various fees which include monetary demands to pull down negative pages from such operations, which is nothing more than a type of extortion with no guarantees plus they have their own cumbersome sets of policies . There are genuine websites such as TripAdvisor, Better Business Bureau which give both sides an equal say and stay neutral, yet the number of websites that allow negative reputation reviews/reports are growing, search Engines have procedures to deal with removing these reports and give more authority to genuine review websites.
Tips to Reduce your Negative Reputation Reports Include:
One is to marginalize the negative reviews/info by creating a better online presence for your company. There are numbers of avenues you can follow that would not only lower negative reputation reports but in the long run give you better protection against future negative reviews/info.
- Create better, relevant and up to date content on your website pages, the online users are very much likely to give you a chance if they feel that perhaps the report was an anomaly rather than a regular issue. A positive move would be to set up a support area if you are a product or service provider so that the customer feels that he can get to you regarding any issues and get proper support. In long term this would further reduce the relevancy of the report pages in the calculation of your target audience.
- Your Social Media channels can be leveraged as your mouth piece to not only promote your services and products but to engage your customers with human factor thrown in the mix. Take control of the relevant names and link keywords on social media channels as it would allow you control what kind of content can be associated with your name. Social Media links are very highly regarded and good social engagement can do wonders for your brand and its online reputation.
- Use multimedia content, like audio and video to engage visitors in the multimedia sections of the Search engine catalogue, this would boost your search ranking in universal search also, Multimedia channels are an area which take too much time and effort so the even chances are that your content will be uncontested for position for you own name.
- Cater to mobile users, i.e. the people using smart phones, mobile internet devices for they are much more likely to go to your site directly to get what they need. The number of internet users using such devices has exploded ever since the devices are readily available and the trend for the same is expected to accelerate, be prepared for that.
- Business Listings, Reputable directly listings, Press releases, Paid Ad campaigns are some of the other options to relegate the undesired listing far down the search engine positioning.
One of the other ways is to look at the legal options you have to either convince or force the reporter (reporting party) and website to take down the report page, either by settlement or by legal suit to prove wrongdoing on their part. This is a time consuming and capital intensive recourse and must be followed only with proper legal consultation.
