Oh no! Someone is bad mouthing you in the Search Engine Results Page
Back in the dark old days before a few bright chaps at CERN decided to stick leads from one computer into the back of another, a complaining customer had few outlets for their rage.
The chances are, they’d moan to their friends, which would mean that you could kiss goodbye to getting any business from them.
If you were lucky they might ring up your product support line, which mean you’d at least get the chance to listen to their gripes and try and help them out.
The worst case scenario would be if they made it onto trading standards, or even ‘Watchdog’. Few businesses can survive a mauling from those two attack dogs.
Thanks to the Internet – and Web 2.0 especially – a complainer has a whole arsenal at their disposal. They can moan on their Facebook or Twitter, give you a terrible score on a review site, and start ranting on a blog or a forum.
Not only do these negative comments get read by visitors to those sites, they also have a strong chance to show up in the Search Engine Results pages (SERPs) when people are searching using your brand keywords.
Someone searching for your brand is most likely of all searchers to end up buying from you. They are, that is, until they see some bad reviews in the SERPs before they’ve even clicked onto your website!
As we mentioned before, Search Engines are currently engaged in the ‘Real Time’ arms race. They’re giving increased coverage to forum comments, blog posts and social network activity. Google themselves have boosted reviews up their own SERPs. All this means that bad comments are more likely than ever to appear in the SERPs when people are searching for your brand.
So that’s it. Game over. There’s nothing you can do about a poor review ranking highly for your brand, is there?
You bet there is. In the next post, we’ll show you how to take control of the whole 1st page of the SERPs for your own brand searches.
Tags: complaints, SEO, Social Media
This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 13th, 2009 at 1:58 pm and is filed under Search Engines, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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