How to deal with critics online
Many more people are becoming truly aware of the potential of the Internet and the power that the Search Engines have over our daily lives. If you work in marketing or are responsible for raising the profile of your business you will have probably moved well beyond the basic need to have a website – even beyond the need to make it work hard for you.
Many people now are really quite au fait with the need to have a website that is built with the search engines in mind and that has been optimised to maximise the opportunities for increased profile with key search engine terms. MAXX has many years of experience of doing just that for its clients and has a track record of good results to show for it.
However, there is a new way in which this knowledge and understanding of how the search engines work is becoming increasingly beneficial for businesses, and high profile individuals – SERM or Search Engine Reputation Management.
Recently, businesses have recognised the benefit of counteracting bad press with good feedback via the search engines. Even the most scrupulous of companies will have struggled with a disgruntled employee or client at some point in their corporate life, but it only takes one of them to mention you on a popular blog or message board to drag your name through the mud, damaging your reputation, deterring your prospects and hurting your profits.
Pretty much anyone with a computer can do this to you if they feel like it. Since there are already more than 100 million blogs out there, and countless forums, it is becoming a problem for a lot of businesses that people searching the likes of Google and YouTube for their products are finding content that is damaging to their brands.
Managing reputation
SERM is about using online marketing skills to improve your reputation online. It shares with SEO (search engine optimisation) the practice of shouting louder than your detractors, using keywords and metatags to get your promotional messages ranked higher than other people’s negative comments, and making them easier to find. So instead of learning how your sales team left someone on hold for half an hour before cutting them off, they might read about how great your products and services are and how people are happy that you exist.
Clearly more than just a buzzword, SERM supports proven SEO techniques with marketing common sense to achieve better results. in the long term. If you want to find out more about SERM, or just want to try SEO to push your detractors’ comments onto the second page of Google listings, please give us a call.
Jackie Blaker
Operations Director, MAXX Design Limited
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