The Art of SEO, 2nd Edition

SEO for Reputation Management

Since one’s own name—whether personal or corporate—is one’s identity, establishing and maintaining the reputation associated with that identity is generally of great interest.

Imagine that you search for your brand name in a search engine, and high up in the search results is a web page that is highly critical of your organization. Consider the search for Scientology shown in Figure 3-3.

Figure 3-3. Reputation management search example

SEO for reputation management is a process for neutralizing negative mentions of your name in the SERPs. In this type of SEO project, you would strive to occupy additional spots in the top 10 results to push the critical listing lower, and hopefully off the first page. You may accomplish this using social media, major media, bloggers, your own sites and subdomains, and various other tactics.

SEO enables this process through both content creation and promotion via link building. Although reputation management is among the most challenging of SEO tasks (primarily because you are optimizing many results for a query rather than one), demand for these types of services is rising as more and more companies become aware of the issue.

Here are some factors to think about when considering SEO for reputation management:

When to employ SEO for reputation management

If you’re trying to either protect your brand from negative results appearing ...