Most in public relations know that sinking feeling. You get a call at 2 a.m. Your client has just made headline news after insulting a bouncer at a questionable watering hole and is now getting blamed for a nice, western-style bar brawl. Wait, is that just me?
Maybe this exact situation hasn’t happened to you, but you likely have your own story about a client who made the wrong decision. Now that the crisis is over, it’s possible that client is still paying for those same mistakes. The internet doesn’t forget.
Or does it? Through the miracles of science (and some clever PR professionals), online reputations are no longer as cemented in history as perhaps once thought. Enter the advent of reverse SEO. Think of it as SEO but, well, in reverse.
The concept has been around for about a decade, and elements have seeped into the lexicon of public relations professionals. Namely, reputation management has caught on. But while reverse SEO shares characteristics of reputation management, reverse SEO is more specific to search results that pop up for clients when specific keywords or phrases are used.
Can this methodology truly rewrite history and give clients a clean slate? The answer, as with so many things in life, is: yes and no. Let’s explore what reverse SEO is and how it can be applied. But first, how do you even know when you need to take action?
Eat an Appl… Keyword a Day
As with health, prevention is typically the most cost-effective option. Keeping fit throughout one’s life is generally considered the best way to mitigate the downside of aging. Of course, in life and PR this is not always possible. Whether it’s due to poor judgment or inadequate training, most clients eventually will encounter tricky PR issues. That’s what you, the communications professional, are there for. Clients, however, may not always recognize when these tricky moments are happening.
Reverse SEO shares characteristics with crisis management, especially when it comes to information gathering. However, instead of checking media outlets for stories about your client, you monitor social media chatter and keyword results instead.
Bad Things Lurk on Those Social Medias
1. Invest in a Monitoring Tool:Those seeking to harm a brand’s reputation frequently start off with complaints via social media. If a company is fortunate, the complaint will be made to the brand itself, either via a hashtag or posted on the company’s page. Sometimes this is not the case. Hashtags are easy to monitor. Non-hashtag complaints are a little more involved. Invest in a social-media-monitoring tool that can help you identify specific keywords and mentions, allowing you to check on your brand’s reputation without having to rely on people coming to you specifically with a complaint.
Eventually tools using artificial intelligence likely will be sophisticated enough to monitor social media text and visuals. It’s likely the various platforms will use them to monitor foul language and hate speech. Still, the need to oversee a brand’s reputation will remain.
What are they saying about us?
2. Keyword Alert: Just as you subscribe to GoogleAlerts or another service to check for mentions of your brand in the media, so too should you monitor certain keywords involving the brand. We’re not necessarily talking about the same keywords your brand wants to rank highly for. “Subway pedophile” is certainly not something the sandwich chain wants to rank highly for, but alas, a quick search lately doesn’t result in news reports of sleazebags and mass transportation. Keep your brand’s recent events in mind and try to get in the mind of those who dislike the company. What would they say about it? How would they refer to it?
Should I Just Apologize?
3. The Human Touch Works: You can forego the fancy technological approach and go with something a little more old-fashioned, too. A common source of negative publicity comes from unhappy customers. Businesses on Yelp, eBay, Amazon, or any other platform that includes a social reputation scoring system can attest to just how damaging several negative reviews in a row can be to a business. Thanks to social media, many of you have witnessed firsthand how out of control reputation management can become when negative experiences go viral.
Rather than attempting to divert attention, you may want to go after the source itself. Reach out to the offended party and find out what happened and how your brand can make things right. In your conversations, ask for concessions like removing negative public opinion. You’d be surprised how many people are willing to do so if they see they now have a voice and are heard. All of this may seem like something your brand’s legal team should do, but you’re better equipped to know what outcome will serve the brand’s reputation best.
Storm the Fort, Overwhelm its Defenses
4. Fight Back With Content:The most involved strategy is to try and overwhelm existing search results with favorable ones. Just as companies one-up one another for popular search terms, the same can be done for those that reveal unwanted links. In this case, the competition isn’t another company vying for “best car wash Las Vegas” but rather online articles, bloggers and whoever else has decided that your brand’s reputation is the story du jour. Create a plethora of consumables, from blogs to white papers, guest articles, backlinks, and even social media posts (use platforms that show up in results, like Google Plus and Twitter). While you won’t get rid of existing links, you can certainly increase the chances of certain search terms showing favorable results rather than negative ones. Combine this strategy with your usual SEO routine and you’ll slowly start getting results.
While you’re at it, check to see if there are other, related terms that are more frequently searched. Some of them may not yet have many negative associations, so now would be a good time to be proactive and enhance your brand’s SEO for those terms before others hijack them.
5. Speed Kills:Keep in mind that this is a slow, arduous, but effective process. This isn’t a tool for crisis management, but rather reducing exposure over time. Negative brand stories on reputable media sites likely will take up the top search results for quite some time just because search engines trust them. But you have the advantage. Stories die. Attention gets diverted. Eventually, media outlets stop reporting on the same issue, so the stories no longer benefit from additional exposure and renewed search rankings. Meanwhile, a continuous strategy on your part will eventually overcome old stories. Once you’ve secured the top five results, you’ve effectively captured 70% of all clicks.
As with most things worth doing in life, these processes take time. If only there were something you could do that was more direct.
A Foreign Solution
Enter Mario Costeja Gonzales, a Spaniard who auctioned off property after he ran into financial troubles in the late ’90s. He wasn’t very happy about that chapter of his life, so imagine his dismay when he discovered his financial issues were among the first search results that appeared when typing his name into a search engine. Determined to rid himself of evidence of past mistakes, Gonzales sued and eventually won. In 2014 the European Court of Justice agreed he should have the right to have information about his past financial troubles removed from search results. As a result, the EU’s attempts at pushing through data privacy laws were rewarded with a key component, a so-called “right to be forgotten” ruling.
Thanks, Europe, I knew I could count on you for a seemingly foreign solution.
Within two years, Google alone received nearly 400,000 requests for removing certain links—not to mention requests other search engines received—highlighting just how much public interest in such a service there seems to be.
Of course, this applies to European residents only and excludes companies and brands. The ruling may seem of limited benefit to U.S.-based PR pros unless they represent a European resident.
Could a similar law be enacted here in the States? It’s doubtful, at least for now. In the U.S., First Amendment concerns have trumped any serious attempts at creating the same ruling, but there are limited resources at your disposal. Google takes links down if they violate certain policies, namely if the content includes:
- violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act
- child pornography or promotes abuse
- sensitive, private information about individuals such as bank account numbers, credit card numbers, images of signatures
- sexually explicit images shared without the subject’s consent
Hopefully, your brand will never be in a position of needing help with that last one, but you never know. Nevertheless, the options are severely limited compared to what you can request to have removed in Europe.
Just Give Us What We Want!
In reality, the European Union’s “right to be forgotten” policy is what many people hope for when they think about the reverse SEO concept. The field is still relatively young, perhaps 10 years old, and there are some innovative ideas coming out of both established digital marketing companies and start-ups with fresh perspectives on the matter. For now, we’ll have to make do with other, less direct strategies. Whatever your approach, know that there are tools at your disposal, and with a dedicated approach, you can minimize harmful publicity and, eventually, relegate it to the shadows of second- and third-page results.
Editor’s Note:Learn about SEO from the global SEO leads at Cisco and Careerbuilder.com during our webinar: SEO Strategies That Will Help Your Messages Find The Right Audience, August 23, 1:30pm ET. For information, please visit: https://www.prnewsonline.com/webinars/seo-strategies-that-will-help-your-messages
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