If you have ever observed how different a beach appears after a storm? Sand sculptures are swept away, and the beach is covered with algae and garbage.
Following a business crisis, a brand’s search landscape faces a similar destiny. Positive social media profiles, articles, and reviews might be removed and replaced with harmful ones. While some unfavorable pieces may go away with the media hysteria, others may haunt your brand’s reputation by sticking on Google’s first page.
It’s critical to confront bad articles front on rather than hoping they’ll go away on their own. Damaged material that appears on the first page of your brand’s search results may have a wide-ranging influence on company income.
- Negative publicity may put off potential clients seeking for information about your company.
- Existing or future commercial relationships might be jeopardized if other firms sever links with your brand.
- Funding – If lenders think that your firm is at danger, they may restrict your access to funds or impose a higher interest rate.
- Employee retention – When a brand’s reputation suffers, employee turnover and hiring costs rise.
- Market capitalization – The stock price of a firm may decline as investors seek safer assets.
While most crisis recovery plans have several precise phases, digital marketing and SEO will have the most impact.
Understanding how Google works is essential for understanding why bad information dominates a brand’s search results after a crisis and how to recover. To find the most relevant web sites for each search query, Google’s algorithm employs hundreds of ranking signals. Topical relevance is one such indication.
Search engines leverage topical relevance to establish links between previously unrelated topics through repetition. As a result, if hundreds of stories linking the brand to the incident have just been published, Google may begin to prefer information concerning a business disaster.
Instead, promote favorable stories about your company with paid content such as sponsored posts and earned media such as press releases. Starbucks recently employed this tactic to change the narrative of their brand away from racial bias training and toward eliminating plastic straws.
SEO is time-consuming and expensive, so your marketing team may think you’re crazy if you advise spending SEO resources on websites you don’t own. However, the harsh reality is that reputation management is ineffective without a search engine optimization component.
Publishing heaps of fantastic content is only part of the game; now you must develop your search landscape using SEO best practices.
Social networks score well for branded search queries, but in order to give the appropriate signals to Google, they must be properly set up and maintained active. Complete your profiles properly, including contact information, addresses, and, most importantly, a description that includes the name of your organization. You should also link to these accounts from the homepage of your website, blogs, and other trustworthy websites.
Hopefully, your digital marketing campaign resulted in some fantastic brand mentions. Determine which references you want to rank on Google’s first page, then promote these articles on social media to enhance visibility and develop high-quality backlinks to them. If you have editorial control over the content, ask the publication to incorporate your brand name in the headline of the piece to assist enhance ranks.
The two engines that drive an efficient reputation management plan are SEO and digital marketing. If you’re wise, you won’t wait until your firm is in trouble to start applying them. By taking a proactive approach to brand protection, you can create the finest beach for luring new clients.
