Reverse Search Engine Optimization – Your Friend in Any Attack

You have probably heard of search engine optimization (SEO), but have you heard of reverse SEO? And if so, do you know why an online reputation management company uses it? Basically online reputation management is about making sure you look good on Yahoo, Bing, Google, and the various social media pages. The first page of results on all those sites should show nothing but positive things.

Some States to Know about

A Cornell University study recently showed that:

• 56% of people only click on Google’s first result.
• Just 13% of people click on the second result.

Clearly, an online presence is now not only about being on that first page, it is about being the first two results.

Let’s look at this practically. You are a new restaurant in Dallas, and a food critic from the Dallas Morning News visited you and didn’t like what they ate. Food lovers follow what they say like a hawk, and they share it around. You are a new business, with only a tiny internet presence. So what do you think will show up on the search engine when people look up your name? Indeed, the first six or so results will all be about that negative review.

Now, you know that SEO is there to get you to the first place on Google, so what is reverse SEO and how does it benefit you?

Understanding Reverse SEO

We know that 90% of people never go past Google’s first page, and that just 2% of people go as far as the third page or more. So what reverse SEO does, is get certain pages to that third page. However, this is hard, because the pages that you want to push back to that third page are likely not to be pages you own. This is where reverse SEO comes in, something that you should really leave to the professionals.

They will start by looking at how big your problem is, namely how many negative reviews there are and how easy they are to find. From there, they will help to defend your business, so that those who read those reviews do not automatically accept them as truths. Going back to the restaurant, it may be easy to get very angry at the reviewer. Instead, you can turn it into a positive. Tell the reviewer that you are very sorry about the experience and would love to make it up to them, for instance by offering them a free meal.

Next, reverse SEO is about starting a blog on your site and updating it daily. What this does, is create numerous individual posts, each of which will require a place on the Google search results. Optimize them properly, and they will fill the first page, automatically pushing the page with the bad review, the one that doesn’t belong to you, backwards. This is a lot of work, because you need to update your blog at least once per day. However, do it properly and you will find that you have completely mitigated the potential damage caused by that single scathing complaint.