The more your business grows, the harder it is to please everyone. And that’s because accommodating everyone’s needs can be quite challenging and time-consuming.
So what do you do if you receive a bad review or a negative press release?
As one of the best marketing strategies for reputation management, reverse SEO can come to your rescue!
In this post we’ll be talking about:
- What the reverse SEO method is
- The differences between SEO reverse and negative SEO
- How to boost your SEO reputation with 7 modern marketing rules
After reading it, you’ll see that getting negative reviews is inevitable sometimes, but that doesn’t mean you’re stuck.
You can improve your brand’s online reputation and still be at the top of your internet SEO game.
First things first, here’s a thorough guide to SEO which you can turn to whenever you have questions about the basics of SEO practices.
So, What Is Reverse SEO And Why It Is So Important?
Reverse SEO stands for reverse search engine optimization. In short, it’s an online reputation management tactic that uses the same keywords to push down certain search rankings of a web page by intentionally optimizing other ones.
Usually, a reverse SEO marketing strategy takes place when you find a negative review or press release about your brand.
While you might think that a few bad criticisms won’t do your business any harm, a survey has shown that online customer reviews on the internet are very important.
According to it, 92% of consumers are less likely to use a business if they spot unfavorable rundowns. [1]
The most challenging part of getting a bad press release or a negative review is that they can’t be deleted. So you’ll have to work your way around them.
They’re right there, in the open, for everyone to see.
And this is exactly the reason why many leaders in the industry choose to boost their search engines’ reputation management. By having an impact on Google search results, reverse SEO can push down negative web pages and promote other ones that truly help your brand.
Are there any advantages to pushing down negative critiques?
After all, it’s not like you can delete those entries and people can still see them, right?
It’s a great approach to make those bad web pages rank lower by pushing them on page 2 of search results. It turns out that only 0.78% of Google searches click on something from the second page. [2]
So, if you suppress the damaging appraisals on the first page of Google Search, it’ll work great for your brand’s reputation!
Is Reverse SEO the Same Thing as Negative SEO?
In short – absolutely not! Believe it or not, it is quite the opposite as reverse SEO is actually a white hat SEO technique.
And while we’re at it, let’s see the differences between negative SEO and reverse SEO.
First of all, the optimization techniques and the goals are totally different.
For instance, negative SEO focuses on lowering your competitor’s search rankings intentionally by producing a lot of low-quality backlinks to them. Basically, you’re sabotaging their search ranking in your favor.
Even if negative SEO is not illegal, it’s a malicious practice.
However, reverse SEO aims to manage your brand’s damaged reputation. You don’t hurt other competitors on purpose and harm their search rankings.
Using the same keywords as the pages that portray you negatively, you create more positive or neutral pages that will rank better than negative criticisms.
With reverse SEO, the end goal is to create fresh and better pages that will outrank the negative ones because they’re simply optimized better. Surveys show that only 50% of consumers paid attention to reviews written in the past 2 weeks only. [3]
So even if you happen to discover bad reviews, creating newer and fresher pages will save your brand’s popularity.
Needless to say, negative SEO will get you Google Penalty since your main goal is to manipulate the search results on the Search Engine Results Page (SERPs) in your favor in an unethical way.
On the other hand, because reverse SEO is a white hat technique, you’ll be allowed to perform this strategy by search engines without being penalized.
How to Perform Reverse SEO? 7 Reverse SEO Strategies To Boost Your Online Reputation
Reverse SEO revolves around keywords research. And it’s not just strategy – any digital marketing strategy needs keyword research for their campaigns to perform at their fullest.
To perform a correct, complete reverse SEO strategy, you’ll have to research what specific or related keywords the negative reviews are ranking on.
Once you’ve found what people are searching to find those bad pages, you can start to create new content for exactly those keywords.
Last but not least, you’ll have to re-optimize your site too. You have to be sure that your website isn’t boring or even worse – ranking for the wrong keywords. Usually, at this part of the campaign, you’ll have to use different marketing skills and tools such as:
- SEO content writing
- Mobile SEO strategies
- Youtube SEO strategies
- Google marketing tools
- General SEO expert skills
Here are 7 strategies that’ll help you with reverse SEO and it’ll boost your brand’s popularity and suppress negative results!
1. Optimizing And Deoptimizing for Keyword Cannibalization
Once you start optimizing your new content to bury the negative critiques, you’ll have to be extra careful with the keywords you choose. Otherwise, you can risk having a lot of pages competing for the same spot in search rankings.
This is why, the best thing when you’re rethinking your keyword campaigns, you’ll have to make sure that your pages don’t cannibalize themselves. What does that mean?
When you have several pages that compete for the same keywords or phrase in Google, it’s usually called keyword cannibalization. As Ahrefs likes to put it – keyword cannibalization is a hot topic in the SEO world, but it can be easily solved using few simple methods. [4]
Basically, when you’re optimizing new content, pay attention to the other pages on your website as well. If necessary, remove and replace any keywords that don’t help your site rank better.
Tip:
Keyword research tools will make your job easier and faster at this stage of your campaign. Whether you choose free SEO tools or you decide to invest in some, the choice is yours!
2. Creating Various Business Listings
Local SEO is important because the customers in your area are the most likely to be converted into hot leads. For example, 42% of people who visit Yelp make a purchase the same day. [5]
Enrolling your brand in business listings will boost your online presence for the local community. That’s why you should take advantage of it and give your potential customers details about your business like:
- Attractive images
- Reviews and feedbacks
- Up-to-date information
- Brand’s strengths
This way, your business will be more reliable and professional.
Tip:
Enlisting your business on channels like Bing Places, Google My Business, Yahoo Localworks, Yelp, and NextDoor may help with your local business searchability.
3. Conducting Audits
Making sure that your business doesn’t go stale over time is essential if you want to attract new customers. Most of the time, conducting website audits is a great way to stay ahead of your competitors.
Besides, you can learn for free, a lot about what you need to improve at your business, what doesn’t need to be changed, and what kind of new ideas you can come up with.
Conducting audits can take a lot of time and requires a lot of knowledge about the process. If you need help, don’t hesitate to contact SEO specialists that can help you with it. As an established digital marketing agency, One Search Pro SEO agency Malaysia provides free website audits to make your brand stand out in a sea of competitors!
Tip:
Try to perform audits at least once per year. This way, you can have a proper grasp of your regular customers, what their needs are, what your competitors are doing, and how you can improve your business.
4. Social Sharing
Social media is one of the pillars of marketing strategies. In fact, 73% of marketers believe that social media has been effective for their businesses. [6]
Anytime you create new content, make sure you share it on your social media profiles too. Plus, you can use some of your keywords as hashtags on your published posts. The more you share your new content on social media, the more likely that people will engage with it.
This way, your new content will rank higher in the SERPs, and the negative review will be pushed down on Google’s second page of search results.
Tip:
Always interact with your audience on social media. Even if it’s a bad review, try to help them as soon and efficiently as possible. Chances are that every satisfied customer can spread the word about your business to at least 3 other potential leads.
5. Creating Microsites
If your website has hundreds of videos, guides, ebooks, published blogs, product reviews, landing pages, a microsite will act as a smaller website for your brand. Considering that the average attending span in the digital age is around 8 seconds, visitors are likely to leave your website quickly if they don’t like it. [7]
From this perspective, microsites make everything clear for your customers so they won’t feel overwhelmed by the amount of information or media they see on your website.
Tip:
You can use your microsite to:
- Promote an event
- Promote a new product
- Target a specific part of your audience
- Provide useful details about your company
- Talk about your brand’s story
6. Guest Blogging on External Sites
Knowing the difference between branding vs. marketing will help you a lot when you’re doing cold outreach campaigns.
Guest blogging is the perfect way to reach out to a wider, relevant audience that’s interested in hearing about your products.
By creating your author persona, you can quickly build strong relationships with your audience. Your business will be perceived as more trusty and potential leads will interact with your brand more.
Besides, guest blogging is the perfect way to get external links that rank better in the SERPs than negative online reviews.
Tip:
Instead of aggressively promoting your products or business, try and talk about something interesting that will captivate the audience. Consider talking in your blogs about something that is both useful for them and shows your expertise in the industry.
7. Link Building
Link building has some of the greatest benefits of social media marketing:
- It improves your credibility
- It increases your web traffic
- It helps network better with other business
- It boosts your SEO scores
No matter how you look at it, link building can help you rank high and make you stand out as an authority voice in your niche.
Guest blogging is a great link-building tactic that can give you both quality internal and external links. If done right, link building can boost your domain authority and make your brand trustworthy.
Tip:
Infographics can earn 178% more links than any other link-building tactic, [8] so try and implement them in your published articles as much as possible.
Wrapping Up on Reverse SEO
As you can see, when it comes to techniques considered black hat, reverse SEO is not an unethical practice. On the contrary, it can help you repair your internet online popularity.
After reading this guide, you can counter all those negative critiques that can break your brand.
What’s worth mentioning, here are a few reverse SEO alternatives you can try:
- Trademark the content on your website.
- Regularly update business information on your website so it’s correct and clear.
- Report those accounts that share confidential information such as a personal address, phone number, and so on.
- Report sites that engage in suspicious activities like using negative or black hat SEO against you.
Do you have any questions about reverse SEO? Our SEO Malaysia specialists are ready to answer everything you need to know!
As an SEO company Malaysia, One Search Pro also offers the best digital marketing Malaysia services. In one word, rest assured that only the best in the field will take care of your business!
Get in touch with us and let’s talk about how we can make your brand stand out by having the top SEO services Malaysia experts by your side!
