SEM Blog: Website Marketing Blog

Defending Your Brand Through SEO

Posted by Bryan at June 13th, 2008

Some companies have the misfortunate of unsatisfied customers who just love to post online in a very negative tone. Whether there post is in your comments section of your site or on a review site, some of these posts can be powerful enough to hit the top ten spots on Google for your keywords or for your company. This can be a dissaster for a company who is not prepared, but by taking a few quick steps, you can make sure that you have any situations like this that arise completely under control.

The first thing you should do is set up a Google Alert for your company name. Set it to as it happens so that you can keep up to date and thwart anything that happens as it does. This can be overwhelming, so you may want to set up a secondary email for this project, but make sure to keep it checking very often.

Once your companies name pops up, stop by and check on what was said. If it’s negative, figure out what the issue is. Can you solve it? Has it already been solved? And most importantly, can you prove any of that? Once you figure out your answer to those questions, it’s time to address that person directly on the board.

Your goal here is to make the situation better. If you’ve fixed it, show everyone how you did and offer even more support or more free things. If you haven’t, do so, and provide contact info so it can get done quickly. If you can’t prove your company already did something, don’t fight it, give in, this site could bring all your hard work down.

The speediness of your post coupled with the proper tone can defuse a hairy situation and also give you a really good public relations image as this page gains more steam from the search engines or even just from the community already there. Having a bad post about your site on the front page can be instant death if not handled correct.

An alternative method, yet harder and still leaving holes, is to simply build up a blog for your site to out power those top 10 and just hope nobody goes further back. Not the greatest idea, but if you just can’t budge on helping those people, it’s better than telling them off.