SEO for Reputation Management

SEO-REPUTATION-MANAGEMENT — This person could ruin your reputation online

One of the hot issues in SEO circles this year has been the area of online reputation management.

Like it or not, customers, clients, competitors and crazies can make slanderous and anonymous comments about us and our businesses online without much fear of detection or retribution.

Gathering enough evidence of malicious intent and then doing something with that evidence can be an expensive and time consuming process. Especially if you are dealing with a behemoth like Google who gets thousands of complaints about unflattering reviews each day.

The trouble with product and service review web sites and business directories is because of their size, age and popularity, they rank really well in Google.

So for example, if someone does a search in Google for yourcompanyname, up the top of the search engine results will be sites like Truelocal, productreviewscom.au, Yelp and Hotfrog, depending on the industry category.

One way to protect your brand online is make sure that if someone searches on your company name the first 10 or so search results create a good, or at least neutral, impression.

The process is:

Register at all the free directories you can think of. Here’s a list of the ones we have used. Some of them may apply to your business.
Be consistent with your business information. Company name, address and business details should be consistent across all directories. Note that Google Places does pull data from sites like Truelocal.
Once you have added your business details to all the relevant directories you can find, build some links into those directories to improve their rankings in the search engines.