The more your business prospers, the harder it is to satisfy everyone. That’s because catering for everyone’s needs can be challenging and time-consuming.
So how do you move forward after receiving a bad review or a negative press release?
As one of the best marketing strategies for reputation management, reverse SEO can be your knight in shining armour.
In this article we’ll discuss:
- What exactly is the reverse SEO method?
- The differences between SEO reverse and negative SEO
- How to improve your SEO reputation with 7 contemporary marketing rules.
After reading this, you’ll understand it’s impossible to run away from negative reviews, but that doesn’t mean you’re doomed.
You can enhance your brand’s online reputation and still be at the top of your internet SEO game.
What Is Reverse SEO and Why Is It So Important?
Reverse SEO stands for reverse search engine optimization. Long story short, it’s an online reputation management tactic that harnesses the power of keywords to push down certain search rankings of a web page by intentionally optimising the others.
Usually, firms resort to a reverse SEO marketing strategy when a negative review or press release is published about their brand.
While you might think that a few bad criticisms won’t jeopardise your business, online customer reviews on the internet are indeed very important.
The most daunting part of getting a negative review or a bad press release is that they can’t be deleted or removed off of the internet. So you’ll have to figure out how to work your way around them.
They’re right there, for everyone to see.
And this is precisely the reason why many leaders in the industry choose to enhance their search engine’s reputation management. Being impactful on Google search results will have reverse SEO push down negative web pages and promote others that are truly helpful.
It’s brilliant to make those bad web pages rank lower by pushing them on page 2 of search results. After all, only the minority of Google searches refer to the second page.
In result, if you suppress the damaging appraisals on the first page of Google Search, it’ll do your brand’s reputation a favour.
Are Reverse SEO and Negative SEO the Same Thing?
No, they’re not! In fact, they’re quite the opposite as reverse SEO is actually a white hat SEO technique.
Firstly, the optimisation techniques and the goals are completely different. To exemplify, negative SEO emphasises lowering your competitor’s search rankings intentionally by creating tons of low-quality backlinks to them. To put simply, you’re sabotaging their search ranking in your favour.
Even if negative SEO is not illegal, it’s a malicious practice.
Reverse SEO on the other hand, aims to manage your brand’s damaged reputation. You don’t hurt other competitors on purpose and bring catastrophe to their search rankings.
Using the same keywords as the pages that portray you negatively, you produce more positive or neutral pages that’ll rank higher than negative criticisms.
With reverse SEO, the end goal is to create fresh and desirable content that will outrank those negative because the former are optimised better.
So even if you happen to encounter bad reviews, creating newer and fresher pages will help save your brand’s popularity.
All in all, negative SEO will get you a Google Penalty since your main purpose is to manipulate the search results on the Search Engine Results Page (SERPs) for your own good in an unethical way. Reverse SEO however, is a white hat technique that’ll not be penalised by Google.
How to Perform Reverse SEO? We’re Sharing 7 Reverse SEO Strategies to Instantly Boost Your Online Reputation
Reverse SEO has a lot to do with keyword research. As a matter of fact, any digital marketing strategy requires keyword research for their campaigns to perform at their maximum potential.
To perform a correct, complete reverse SEO strategy, you’ll have to research what specific or relevant keywords the negative reviews are ranking on.
Once you’ve pinpointed what people are searching for to find those bad pages, you can start to create new content for precisely those keywords.
Finally, you’ll have to re-optimise your site, too. Ensure that your website isn’t mundane or worse—ranking for the wrong keywords.
Below are 7 strategies that’ll benefit your reverse SEO, boost your brand’s popularity and suppress negative results!
1. Optimising and De-optimising for Keyword Cannibalisation
Once you start optimising your new content to bury the negative critiques, you’ll have to be extra vigilant 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 cannibalise 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 cannibalisation is a hot topic in the SEO world, but it can be ea