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 easily solved using a few simple methods.
Basically, when you’re optimising new content, focus on the other pages on your website as well. If necessary, remove and replace any keywords that don’t help your site rank better.
2. Creating Different Business Listings
Local SEO is important because the customers in your area are the most likely to be converted into potential leads.
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 prospects the details about your business such as:
- Attractive images
- Reviews and feedbacks
- Up-to-date information
- Brand’s strengths
This way, your business will be more reliable and professional.
3. Conducting SEO Audits
Making sure that your business doesn’t go stale over time is necessary 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.
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 amongst the pillars of marketing strategies.
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.
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.
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.
You can use your microsite to promote an event, promote a new product, target a specific part of your audience, provide useful information about your company, convey your brand’s story and many more.
6. Guest Blogging on External Sites
Knowing the difference between branding and marketing will help you big time 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.
7. Link Building
Link building features 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.
To Sum Everything Up on Reverse SEO
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.
Should 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, Marketing Signal Lab 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!