Reverse SEO is the biggest part of your overall online reputation management (ORM) program, or at least it should be. But what exactly is reverse SEO, and how do you make it work for you when it comes to reputation management?

Negative publicity and product reviews are plaguing companies that rely on their online sales these days. So it’s no surprise that many of these companies are looking for ways to manage their online reputations. What this boils down to for most is setting up a reverse SEO campaign.

How reverse SEO works is simple. But first, you need to understand the negative content and reviews, and why they are so powerful in the first place. The search engines rank content using specific criteria, or their algorithms to be more exact, in order to deliver pertinent results to their users searching for a specific keyword or phrase. There are literally hundreds of different things in these algorithms, such as the content itself, where it is linked, how often it is updated, etc.

These factors fit well with many of the review sites and forums, because they are content rich websites that are frequently updated. Ultimately the end result is that any negative press they have about you or your company is going to rapidly rank well in the first page of the search results.

Even worse, this content is extremely hard to move in the search results, which is what we are trying to do when it comes to using reverse SEO techniques. However, do not confuse reverse SEO with Google bowling. They are two distinctly different things, and we here at WRM do not practice Google bowling at all, primarily because it is a blackhat technique, but beyond that it doesn’t work anymore either. With reverse SEO we are going to make other content pages rank better for the same terms the negative terms rank for. In effect pushing them down in the rankings, though we are never actually doing anything with the negative review page itself.

What we will do with a reverse SEO campaign is analyze the negative reviews or press release and see what factors are actually helping the page rank as well as it ranks. Then the objective is to simply start creating better content and optimizing it in such a way that it outranks the negative review.

Sounds simple, right?

But its not as simple as it sounds, and our techniques have come as a result of years of experience working in the search engine optimization field. Our extensive work in this area is how we have devised our ORM techniques, and as a result we have helped scores of clients cleanup their online reputations.

When is the best time to start a reverse SEO or ORM campaign? Well, long before you need one of course. More and more companies are using proactive online reputation management these days because in the end it’s much easier and far more cost effective. Think of it this way, if a problem ever were to arise, you would already own the first few pages of the search results. The time to act is before you have a problem, so if your company is considering a proactive campaign, you need to go ahead and make the leap.

If it’s already too late for a proactive ORM campaign and your are being attacked online by bad press and negative reviews and comments, call us immediately at 800-818-6286. We can help. Call us today and let us show you how.