Loading ...Reputation management is something that every business should concern itself with, whether it’s big business or a small, local business. The internet has made word-of-mouth a global thing. Where once a disgruntled customer’s complaints were restricted to their circle of friends, now their bad review can be accessed by anyone searching using your company’s keywords.
Managing the negative comments about your business around the net can be a part of your search engine optimisation plan. Although the search engines usually consider any mention a positive one, it’s better for the long-term health of your business to quash bad publicity when it comes up. Regardless of the precautions you take, there will always be times when negative feedback on your business features somewhere around the net. When that happens, you need an emergency publicity plan.
Your plan, minus the publicity
Despite the way it sounds, your emergency publicity plan shouldn’t involve masses of publicity. Generally what you want to do with negative press is answer it and bury it. Your SEO campaign can help you to do the latter, and you can talk to us at SEO Consult Australia about taking control of the top ten spots for your business keywords through SEO.
Plot your plan on a flow chart
It’s a good idea to design a flow chart that gives you options whenever you come across a piece of bad press. It should ask the following questions.
- Are they a serious threat? This is the first question to ask, as a negative answer may mean you don’t need to do anything. Gauging the seriousness of the threat to your reputation is a matter of judging how visible the complaint is. Are they an influential blogger, or a backwater commentator? If the person offering the comment is without influence, or the site featuring the comment is unimportant, you may not need to answer it. If they are likely to pop up in the search results, however, then you need to deal with it.
- Is their criticism based on fact, or emotion? On the surface of things, emotional criticism might seem like a better scenario, but it’s ultimately unanswerable. Someone emotionally invested in their criticism is hard to argue with. Fact-based criticism can be argued against or resolved. If the comment is based on emotion, you may have no other option than to use your search engine optimization campaign to bury it.
- Can the comment be countered? This is the final question for your emergency plan. If you’ve assessed the situation and decided that the comment needs to be answered, you need to know how you’re going to answer it. If the comment can be answered on the site on which it featured, the solution is fairly simple. Sometimes, however, this may not be an option. In such a case, it may be necessary to find another forum for your answer and discover ways to link the debate together for visibility.
A planned answer is also necessary in these cases. It’s a good idea to stick to facts, remain friendly, and resolve things amicably if you can.
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Tags: Keywords, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO, SEO campaign, SEO Consult Australia
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