Think about it, how many years do you spend on building a positive reputation? How much effort do you put in that makes you look respectable professional? Do you know how much time it will take to ruin all that? Only a few minutes when someone is going to publish a negative news article about you. 

If you keep this thing in mind, you will be very careful while publishing something online or doing something that will cost you years of effort. As a professional, you simply can’t bear such a huge loss. SEO in reputation management has the same role as it has in ranking any business online. A good SEO strategy can help you repair your reputation or save it in the first place. 

Millions of dollars are spent on SEO to improve search engine rankings every year and this number is continuously increasing. When it comes to reputation management, SEO has the same role and in this case, you have to spend money to restore your reputation. In 2022, every business has to take online presence seriously otherwise, they can’t survive. You have to represent your brand on almost all the major social platforms and you have to focus on organic reach to sustain your business. 

We have hundreds of examples of how a bad review or a news article can damage your reputation and cost you the business. We will get a bit technical as well so you can get a good grip on how SEO can help you in reputation management and why you must understand it when facing such a disaster. 

How does SEO affect rankings?

You will find various ranking factors for a specific link. If your negative link is ranking on the first page of search results, then there are countless factors involved. First of all, when it comes to reputation management and SEO, there is always a keyword involved that is usually your name or brand name. 

There could be various possibilities of a high ranked search result and some of them could be: 

  • Good Domain Authority
  • Lengthy Content
  • Number of sites linking to the article
  • News Blurp

If you have never worked on improving your online reputation in the past, then a negative can easily rank higher with the targeted keyword. In such a situation, you will have to walk towards damage control (building an online reputation from scratch). 

For individuals, there’s one positive thing which is a low competition keyword unless you have a very common name. If you have a common name, then the process of reputation repair will become a bit tough. 

If you have a slightly unique name (keyword), then it will become a bit easy for you to create a strategy and start improving your online reputation. Either way, once your reputation is damaged, you will have to play a long-term game which is suppressing the negative results with the help of SEO. 

To understand how negatives are ranked, and how SEO plays its role in search engine rankings, we will walk you through the basics of SEO and its use in reputation management. 

The basics of SEO

If your reputation as an individual is tampered with, and you don’t have enough knowledge of how it works, then this guide is surely going to help you a lot. We will make sure that the SEO section remains intact with reputation management so you don’t feel distracted at any point. 

A negative search result appearing on the first page of the search engine has good SEO or at least has good domain authority so Google or any search engine recognizes it as a valid or authentic information source. The factors in play are listed below and these are the factors that you will target as well while building a counter-strategy. 

On-Page SEO factors

On-Page SEO is a practice of optimizing your website’s pages and posts. When you wish to rank better for a certain keyword on the search engine, you will have to optimize your website or web page first. It’s all about how you are approaching a certain keyword. 

There’s a big list of things and we are going to mention all the important ones. Whenever you are publishing something or targeting a specific keyword, you will have to focus on optimizing your web page first which includes your content, titles, headings, images, and much more. Let’s take a look at the list of On-Page SEO factors to understand how it is done. 

Title tags

Whenever you are trying to rank something on a search engine, you have to build a hierarchy. If you are publishing something, the titles and tags hold great value. You will have to optimize your content by giving it the right title. 

You will have to use your keywords in titles and tags so the search engine recognizes what you are targeting. There are countless tools that help when creating an attractive title. However, if it’s a news article, then the news itself is a bombshell that will drop on you. 

In most cases, people find themselves in a conspiracy or fraud and those links can rank high because of the intensity of the event or news. However, when you are trying to counter such negative news or article about yourself, then you will have to do it in an old-school style and you will have to focus on optimizing your titles and tags. 

Content

Content is what ranks in true meaning. Whether it’s a news article or a review of something, content is what makes links rank high in search engines. An article with poor content won’t rank at all. Moreover, even if it is ranking because of the low competition of keywords, it can be pushed down by using a good strategy easily. 

However, if the negative link has lengthy and informative content explaining the scenario or event, then you may not get an easy chance of suppressing that one. You will have to work on creating high-quality content and you will have to optimize it properly to get a good search engine ranking. 

Image Optimization

Next in line is image optimization. Images hold a great deal these days and a well-optimized image can surely help you rank well. When it comes to reputation management, images are a great way to improve online reputation. 

If you are optimizing your images, you are surely going to rank better in the search engine results. Whenever you are publishing new content, you need to create or add a unique image and optimize the title and alt-tags of the images to rank better in the search engine. 

Meta Description

Now meta description is always a part of your main content. However, search engine requires a snippet of text that can be seen right under every link on search engines. You will have to use the right text that is appealing to the readers and contains your targeted keywords at the same time. 

Make sure to have the right meta description that is equally good for people and search engine algorithms so you can rank your content better in search engine results. 

Content/keyword cannibalization

This is something you must understand and it often happens to people who are desperate about clearing their negative search results. 

If you have been optimizing a specific keyword on multiple pages of your website, then you are playing a tug of war with yourself. You will be in competition with yourself if you are over-optimizing a keyword or targeting the same keyword at different places on your website. 

To avoid it, use variations and make sure that your content is unique. It is important to avoid overusing your keyword on multiple pages or posts of the same website. 

User engagement

Above all, you must focus on user engagement. Search engines, these days, can’t be fed with poorly written good SEO content. They are too smart for that and you must provide value when you are generating content. The content should focus on user engagement and that is the only way to improve your search engine rankings. 

Off-Page SEO factors

Off-Page SEO is different than On-Page SEO and it clearly states that there is something required outside your inner circle to improve search engine rankings. Off-Page SEO is all about the activities and events happening away from your website. 

Even if you are practicing good On-Page SEO tactics, you will still require to work on Off-Page SEO to improve your reputation. 

Let’s discuss a few off-page SEO techniques that you can use to improve search engine rankings. 

Creating good backlinks to improve domain authority

First of all, you need to improve your domain authority. To improve domain authority, you must focus on creating good backlinks for your website. You can always reach out to the related authoritative sites and ask for collaboration. 

Above all, you need to focus on creating high-quality content so people can link to your content. That’s the best and foremost, the only way to build natural and organic backlinks. Make sure to share value when generating content and focus on user engagement so you can improve the chances of getting good links to your website. 

Social Media Marketing

Your next best bet on improving off-page SEO is social media marketing. As we said earlier off-page SEO is everything that is happening away from your website. That means you will have to use marketing efforts to improve your website’s authority. You can use different social media platforms to extend your online presence and improve organic reach. Platforms that you must consider using to promote your content include: 

  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • YouTube
  • Instagram

If you are focusing more on promoting your content using social media platforms, you will get better reach and you will be able to bring in more traffic to your website. Not only that, when it comes to improving online reputation, these social media platforms become extremely vital. 

Guest Content

Now that you are aware of what off-page SEO is and how you can do that, you should try out guest posting. If you are creating content for other sites as a guest, then it will help you improve your reputation as an author. Apart from that, when you are doing guest posting, you will be able to generate quality and authoritative backlinks for your website. 

To do guest posting, you must create a checklist that we are going to share later so you can get maximum reach and improve the domain authority of your website. 

How negatives rank and how to push them out of the first page of Google

So back to the real thing. How do negatives rank and how you can get rid of them? Well, if there is a negative link about you online, then it must be there for a reason and now you know the story and know that your reputation is damaged. Surely it is difficult for you to own it but you have to in order to move forward and do something about it. 

These negative search results are generated and ranked on the first page because they usually are news sites with very high domain authority. Secondly, you have never done online reputation management and hence there is room for others to rank with the keyword (Your name). 

Most negatives are generated because of news, event, activity that defames you. These articles don’t go out of the search results easily unless you do something about it. 

Now, you will have to create a counter-strategy and launch a complete reputation management campaign that will help you rank better than those negatives. That is the only way to push them down. Remember, when it comes to online reputation management, SEO is your only hope and it is the only strategy that works on a long-term basis. 

Here, we are going to discuss a few things that will help you push those negatives out of the first page of Google or any other search engine. 

Using negative keywords to your advantage

You are already ranking high with some keywords, right? So, it is better to use that to your advantage. Now you are going to note down all those keywords you are ranking with. 

You will now have to launch your reputation management campaign using those keywords that are ranking with negative information. In this case, you are already aware of the keywords that you will have to target. It becomes a lot easier for you when you already know what you should do to push those negatives down. 

After taking note of all those keywords, you will then create a strategy that includes creating positive information and content about yourself and publishing it. 

Creating better and more useful content to eliminate negatives

At the second stage, you will have to start creating content. Make sure to launch a personal website. Your name is going to be the domain name and you can start generating positive content. Make sure to create positive and lengthy content. Publish your biographies on different platforms including your website. 

Create articles that are related to your field and become a blogger. Optimize your keyword (Your Name). We have talked about on-site SEO. Use that and target your keyword. Your website should rank for that specific keyword. Keep generating positive content and you will start noticing the results. 

Using Social Media to your advantage

Social media is going to play a huge role. Almost 55% of traffic to different blogs and videos is redirected by different social media platforms. In this era, you don’t only have to rely on organic search. You can use the power of social media that is helping thousands of businesses and individuals already. 

All you have to do is to create your professional profiles on different social media platforms and then optimize them for the keywords that you have collected already. Keep updating those social media profiles on monthly basis and keep targeting that keyword that is ranking with negative search results. 

Guest Posting (Again) 

This is something that you can do after a few months. There are lots of websites that allow guest posting. If you have been generating good content, then you can surely reach out to those websites. You can find websites and blogs that are related to your field of interest. You can pitch them blog ideas and you will be able to create a strong reputation base by publishing articles to those websites. 

Guest posting is always going to help you improve your reputation. If you think that this is something that is going to take a lot of your time (which it is), then you can reach out to a reputation management agency that will help you do all that for you. 

How soon can you get results? 

If your negatives are already ranking high and you have just started a reputation management campaign, then you should keep 6-8 months in mind. Yes, reputation management is no joke and it will take time to push your negatives down. 

Ideally, no one can give guarantees when it comes to time. It always going to depend on the number of negatives and how strong they are. Even if you are talking to a reputation management consultant, you will only hear that they can try and they will only give you an estimated time frame. 

If you are doing an extremely good job with managing your reputation, then you can get quick results within 6 months. However, it all depends on how much effort you or your reputation management team is putting into it. 

To get your reputation score and reputation analysis, get in touch with our reputation management expert today and we will share all the analysis with you as soon as possible. 

Published On: January 26th, 2022 / Categories: Online Reputation Management, SEO / Tags: , , /

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