Here’s how to hit the sweet-spot where ORM and SEO meet

ORM (Online Reputation Management) is the process of safeguarding your online reputation, business image, and character. The internet has opened the doors for everyone to connect, interact, and share with one another. It has also opened the doors for everyone to voice dishonest opinions, discredit businesses, and to smear reputations online.

If someone wants to post negative comments online, it could be for a number of reasons, but the most popular one is if they had a bad experience with a brand, service or product. This also happens with competitors when they are trying to pull down their more successful counterparts so that they can take the lead. When this happens, the end result is usually a bad reputation and this could mean a loss of customers. Most people are not discerning enough to identify the truth behind all of the negative parts.

This is where Online Reputation Management plays a big role. ORM as a strategy can help you with the impact of negative comments taking place about you online. It is becoming more crucial for businesses to use ORM as an armor piece since they cannot control everything that is being said about them online. While ORM can not do anything about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) rankings of the negative comments, it can help you push down the negative comments on the search engine result pages.

Here are a couple of strategies you can use to start the ORM process.

Search Engine Optimisation
Use various SEO and digital marketing techniques to push down the negative results about your business from the search engine result pages. This is not an easy task and it requires an analysis of all the websites appearing in the top search listings.

Websites that have a high authority are usually more difficult to handle. The best way that I have found to remove the negative inputs is by adding lots of unique and fresh content or remarks to the negative comments. Just take notice that it will keep the topic in discussion but it will push the negative statements down. Even though this process takes a while and can be quite pricey, it might be worthwhile to do this to maintain your reputation.

Research
Always research the origination of the negative feedback and the person posting comment or statement. This will help you indicate whether this person is open for discussion regarding the topic and if you are able to defend the negative inputs. Never try to solve the problem by being abusive because usually the battle can be won with respect and courtesy. Don’t try to show down the person who made the negative comment because this can also rebound badly.

Black hat SEO
Never try to do anything black hat SEO related. Doing it can have a negative effect on your online reputation so try and avoid this at all costs. Black hat SEO is a couple of “under the table” SEO methods to gain quick rankings on the search engines. Even though this can get you a ranking quite quickly, search engines, especially Google, despises black hat SEO methods, and if they find out that you are practicing these methods on your website or any other online profile, remove your website or blog from their search results.

Social media marketing
Various social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter can help you build up your reputation because they are the ideal public platforms to build and restore the damage. The idea with social media marketing is to take all the positive comments and inputs so far ahead, pushing any negative comments down. This process should be down very cautiously, and should also be done very subtly.

I have found that on forums lots of negative comments and feedback get posted. It is very good idea to join these forums and then answer all the negative feedback about your brand once you have analysed and researched the negative input. Freedom online cannot be questioned, but it is very important to have others understand the negative comments and what it can do to your company’s online reputation.