Every business comes across a bump on the information highway now and then. Having a piece of bad news circulating around the net is unfortunate, having it circulate at the top of searches for your key terms is even worse. A smart company will have methods in place to manage these unlucky situations.

Reputation management isn’t just for large corporations, and it’s not only for questionable operators either. The internet is full of chatter on all possible subjects, some of which affect innocent businesses. If someone snaps a photo of a member of your staff misbehaving, it affects your reputation. If someone posts their complaint to an article site at the same time they’re posting it to you, it affects your reputation. Similar scenarios can happen to any business today, and any of them can damage revenue.

Stories don’t have to be true to affect your business adversely. It is well said that there are no editors on the internet. A business can get a bad reputation without having committed any meaningful error. A negative story about a firm can be created by a competitor.

The difficulty that most businesses don’t anticipate is that bad news travels just as far as good news in search engine results pages. The search engines have an understandable desire to show diverse results within SERPs. This has resulted in a policy of showing only a few results from the same domain within the results pages. The answer many SEO professionals would recommend is to have some form of control over the first ten results for a client’s brand name. This can be difficult, but ultimately provides rewards far beyond reputation management.

In order to occupy those slots, your business either needs to do a lot of work in distributing articles and press releases, nurturing press links and generally making friends that can be called upon in a time of need, or you can do a little groundwork and maintenance. The second option provides a full-time backup plan for your reputation that won’t see you scrambling whenever there’s bad press.

Your reputation management can be a part of your general off-page search engine optimisation strategy, and you can talk to us at SEO Consult about your off-page SEO options. Some moves you might want to consider include:

Twitter: Creating and maintaining a Twitter micro-blog can have many benefits for your business, not least the ability to answer negative publicity on your own terms.

Wikipedia: A Wikipedia page is quickly becoming a must for any business with a more-than-local reputation. Note that Wikipedia entries may only be made for fittingly noteworthy subjects, and any entry that is too obviously part of a marketing campaign will be removed. It is worth posting a strictly objective and honest account of your business if you are noteworthy, as it gives you control over one more top-ten spot in the SERPs.

Facebook, MySpace, and other social media: Creating profiles on these sites puts you in touch with your industry’s community as well as giving you another spot in the top ten.

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