Before you begin creating sites and profiles as part of your online reputation management initiatives, take a step back and find sites/posts/news mentions that already mention the keywords you’re trying to rank for.
Keeping with the American Laser Centers example, I’ve decided to use them again for this post.
While negative posts may be ranking high for your name/company name/product, there may be quite a few positive mentions of your brand out there that haven’t been optimized for the keyword in question; to find them, you have to do a bit of digging.
The first step in finding positive mentions is to search the first 10 or so pages of Google, looking for positive or neutral mentions of a client’s keyword. LinkedIn company profiles that haven’t been optimized, old press releases, scholarship mentions on an .edu site, and splash pages from old promotions are all gems that can be re-purposed, optimized, and used as part of your online reputation management strategy.
Create an excel sheet of any positive mentions you find and include the PageRank, # of links to domain, and # of links to the page. You should constantly be adding results to this worksheet: since you don’t have control over the positive mentions you’re finding, you’ll need to keep in mind that some posts will be deleted/removed, won’t be optimized enough to ever outrank negative posts, or are updated to turn into negative mentions.
Tools For Finding Positive Mentions:
- Search engines
- Google News
- Steprep
- Soloseo
- Search operators
- Analytics
- Google Alerts
- Variety of online reputation management software tools (Trackur/Radian6/Brandwatch/StartPR/etc)
Tips and Tricks:
Below are a few search operators you can also use to help find positive mentions. The .edu and .gov search operators will find education or government sites that mention the keyword you are looking for. Both .edu and .gov sites tend to rank high in Google since they are (generally) trusted sites. For both the .edu and .gov search, I was able to find a plethora of links. For the .edu search, I found Alumni mentions of current American Laser Centers employees, scholarship mentions, graduation/job fair mentions, and case studies. The .gov search didn’t bring up as many positive results, but it’s always best practice to search.
The inurl and intitle search operators will bring up sites that have your keyword in the title or url of the domain, both of which will make your linkbuidling efforts more productive.
Find .edu mentions: american laser center site:.edu [http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1C1GGLS_enUS306US306&q="american+laser+centers"+site:.edu&aq=f&oq=&aqi=]
Find .gov mentions: american laser center site:.gov [http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1C1GGLS_enUS306US306&q="american+laser+centers"+site:.gov&aq=f&oq=&aqi=]
inurl:american laser centers [http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1C1GGLS_enUS306US306&q=inurl:"american+laser+centers"&aq=f&oq=&aqi=]
intitle:american laser centers [http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1C1GGLS_enUS306US306&q=intitle:"american+laser+centers"&aq=f&oq=&aqi=]
Deciding Which Mentions To Focus On First
Once you have a list of 10+ positive mentions, sort them by PageRank, whether the keyword is in the title, and how many links are pointing to the page that ranks and the domain of the site.
What to look for in posts:
- Keyword in title
- Keyword in URL
- Trusted Domain
I did a brief search for “American Laser Centers” on StepRep, Google News, and on the first 5 pages of Google to find the above 11 positive results. I also used the .edu and .gov search operators to find additional mentions. Depending on the PageRank of the results you find, whether they mention your keyword in the title, or how optimized the posts are, you may have to find many more results than 10.
Why Look For Positive Mentions?
Often times, reputation management clients come to me and assume that they need to create new web sites and landing pages and put extra money into the design and implementation of those sites in order to push down negative results. In most cases, however, you can leverage the effort that others have already put in to writing about your brand. Some of the results above, such as LinkedIn, entrepreneur.com, ltu.edu, facebook, and dailycandy can easily rank for the “American Laser Centers” keyword with the help of additional links to those pages. While owning domains related to your business and claiming profiles in your name is always a best practice to manage your online reputation and presence, positive results that have had time to age and that were created by an outside party can often rank high with a few links pointed towards them.
In the instances above, some of the positive mentions already have a fairly high PageRank, with some higher than the negative results that are currently ranking for the “American Laser Centers” keyword. By increasing the profile links from 0 to 10+ (in this case the negative results don’t have many links pointing to their pages, but in other scenarios, you may need hundreds to thousands of links to outrank a negative result), these positive mentions can most likely outrank the negative mentions.
Next Steps: Building Links To Positive Mentions
In the next few posts, we’ll focus on how to create links to already created positive mentions and explore the tools used to find those positive mentions.
If you can’t wait until the next posts, a few ways to build links to positive mentions include:
- Article Marketing
- Blog posts on sites that you own (with links to the positive mentions)
- Directories
- Profile creation
- Link wheels
- Emailing relevant sites that you think may find the link(s) useful
- Blog commenting (do-follow sites)
- Analyzing competitor links and/or sites that link to the domain already
ORM Suggestion (for those fixing negative results):
When looking for positive results that you will look to eventually push up in the rankings, keep an eye out for whether or not comments are allowed. If all of a sudden a post comes up and people that are watching you notice, they may leave negative comments on those sites.
Why is this controversial?
In most cases, I would recommend allowing open conversation, as would most social media consultants. In the case of fixing a companies online reputation management, however, I generally focus on fixing negative results and then encourage the company to be more proactive in their social media/online presence afterwards, encouraging feedback and online conversations with potential, current, and previous customers.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Positive mentions may be a more comfortable area for organizations to approach first, but we cannot forget about negative mentions. Not because these mentions should be pushed down. Rather, look at the negative mentions as an opportunity to receive feedback, trade perspectives, open a dialog and turn the negative commenter into a positive evangelist for your company. Online reputation management is about finding and seizing opportunity. Thank you for including us in your list of monitoring/listening tools.
Lauren Vargas
Community Manager at Radian6
@VargasL