← Grumpy SEO Guy
Grumpy SEO Guy
Everything You Need to Know to Run a Successful Reputation Management Campaign - Episode 08
00:17:55
Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:00]
Grumpy SEO Guy
This is grumpy SEO guy. Episode 8 everything you need to know to run a successful reputation management campaign. You're listening to Grumpy SEO Guy, the SEO podcast that doesn't waste your time with nonsense that doesn't work. I'm the Grumpy SEO Guy and I'm sharing with you the strategies that have helped me successfully run my SEO agency for the last 14 years. In this podcast, I'll be sharing my knowledge and experience, discussing tips and strategies, and trying to help you cut through the confusion that permeates this industry. If you listen to this podcast, you will know more about SEO than 99% of people on the planet. Ready? Let's get started. I'm the Grumpy SEO Guy. Let me tell you why I'm grumpy today. I'm grumpy today because there are so many misunderstandings about reputation management. You think people get confused about search engine optimization? Try to talk to them about reputation management. Don't worry, I'm going to tell you literally everything you need to know about reputation management in this episode. But before we do that, my lawyer tells me that I have to say this right now. A quick disclaimer before we get started. Everything I say here is based on my experience and opinion from 14 years in the industry. I don't officially know how Google or any other search engines work. Everything I say here is hypothetical and based on my experience, this podcast does not constitute advice or services. What worked for me may or may not work for you. Okay, back to the show. One note before we get started. This episode assumes that you know how to rank a website. If you don't know how to rank a website, you have no business doing reputation management. So if you're not familiar with building authority to rank a website, go back and listen to the previous episodes. But if you already know how to do it, then continue. So you've probably heard of reputation management. Reputation management is basically the same as search engine optimization. The only difference is instead of trying to rank one site, you're trying to rank nine or ten sites. Let me explain. Reputation management is usually necessary when somebody Googles themself or their company, and they see that the results might say some kind of harsh things about them. Okay, let me give you an example. Years ago, we had a client who was a Hollywood filmmaker, and when you Googled his name, there was a lot of bad stuff about him. Now, it's probably not who you're thinking of, and it's not somebody who's in jail right now, but it was a Hollywood movie producer and some people had said some pretty mean things about him. So if anyone ever googled this guy, that is what was on the first page. The first 10 results. It might have been more than 10, but we're just talking about the first page for now. The first 10 results were bad articles and criticism and all this stuff. And he didn't want anyone googling him and seeing that. So a reputation management campaign is what you would do to get rid of that. Now, I wanna clear up some misconceptions. So when you googled this guy's name, the first 10 results or whatever were all bad things. It goes without saying that you might not want people to see that. Like, for example, if somebody googles the name of your business and all they see are bad reviews, well, you're probably not going to get a lot of business, are you? Because all people are going to do is see these bad things. So you don't want that. Now, the biggest misconception about reputation management is that you can delete or remove the offending websites. You can't. I mean, you could, but you're not going to be able to look. How would you do that? You would have to, like, legally get them to take it down. That's probably not going to happen. You would have to hack their website. Yeah, that's probably not going to happen. Don't hack anyone's website, by the way. Like, even if you know how to hack someone's website, like, don't hack anyone's website. Okay. And you could always email them and ask, but yeah, like that's going to work. So what can you do? If you can't actually get the bad reviews or the bad content taken down, what can you do? Well, with normal search engine optimization, what you do is you try to get one website, your client's website, or, you know, your target website or your own website or whatever to the top of the search engines. With reputation management, you're doing that same thing, but you're doing it for nine or ten or more websites. So instead of trying to remove the offending website, what you're doing is pushing other good websites above that website. I'm going to tell you everything you need to know to run a successful reputation management campaign in this episode. So the first thing you have to do is you have to identify which websites are bad. And the only reason you need to do this is because you need to find out how many are you dealing with and where are they ranking. If the only bad website is like, in position 10 then that's probably not going to be much work. You just have to push one website up above it so that one goes down. If you've got 10 bad websites and all the websites on the first page are bad, well, that's gonna be a lot more work because then you're gonna have to push up at least 10 other websites to push those websites down. So basically what you're doing is you're doing SEO, but you're doing it for the websites that you want to take the place of the bad websites. Does that make sense? That's how reputation management works. If you understand that, you know how reputation management works. People don't understand that, though. They think it has to do with the other websites. It doesn't. You don't have any say in what someone else puts on. All you can do is push other websites above the negative websites. That's literally all you can do. So here's what you do. You need to pick at least 10 or, okay, look, I'm gonna say 10 for this episode, but it's however many you need. Look, if the bad website is in position 10, then you really only need to push one above it because then that would push that one down into position 11, and it wouldn't be on the first page anymore. But basically, as many websites as you want to have over the bad websites, that's how many websites you're going to need to use. I'm just going to say 10 for the sake of this episode. So what you need to do is you need to identify 10 websites that you're going to target. So this is a good point to tell you, generally speaking, a reputation management campaign will cost 10 times as much as a regular SEO campaign because you're not pushing one website to the top of the search engine, you're pushing 10 websites to the top of the search engine. So whatever you would normally do for one website, you have to do that for 10 websites. Okay, so let me just give you an example of how we would do this. In a case similar to the one that I described before, where we had a person who had some bad press on the Internet. So in this particular case, when you searched for this person's name, there were a lot of bad results on the first page. The solution to that is to get 10 other websites to rank above the bad press. Now, ideally, you want the first page of the search results to be only good things or neutral things. They don't have to be good things, they just have to be neutral. But the point is, you don't want the bad websites to appear up there. So here's what you do. Maybe the client has their own personal web page they want to use. That can be one of the sites that you use. That's no problem. In the case of, for example, a person's name, what I would do is, is I would make or find other websites on the Internet that rank for that name and I would focus my SEO efforts on those. Let's say the guy's name is Bob Smith. I'm literally just picking a name here. So you Google Bob Smith and there's all these bad results. Bob Smith is a liar. Next result. Bob Smith is a charlatan. Next result. Bob Smith stole my money, right? Like whatever, all this stuff. So what you need to do is you need to find 10 websites and rank them above that. It is totally possible to create brand new websites. Make sure you put them on different IP addresses and rank them for Bob Smith. You can just randomly make up people named Bob Smith. You can give them different biographies. You can just have them be random blogs from random people named Bob Smith. It does not matter at all. The point is you need some websites that are going to rank for Bob Smith that are not going to be bad. So they don't all have to be about this particular Bob Smith who is your client. Okay? Like I said, they can literally be for anybody named Bob Smith. Not even a problem. The point is, you need something else to rank that is not a harmful website. So what I would do, I'm going to assume in this case that the client Bob Smith, in this case has his own personal website. Okay? We're going to use that for one of the websites. Then we're going to create nine more websites and they're all going to be about a different Bob Smith or you can make them about the same Bob Smith. It doesn't matter. The point is you need websites with content about Bob Smith and relevance for a search for Bob Smith to rank. So you have these 10 websites, they're all in different IP addresses, remember? And basically you just run an SEO campaign on all of them. And the goal, which is not always possible, because it's possible that the bad websites have way more authority than you will be able to give to your new websites. It's totally possible. But the goal is to push as many of the bad websites down as possible. Just like with search engine optimization with reputation management, there are no guarantees of anything, okay? You can never ever guarantee a client that you will ever get them results, because that's not how SEO works, but that's how you do reputation management. A reputation management campaign is considered successful when all of the bad websites are off the first page of the search engines. So like I said, it might not be possible to get all of them off. You might be dealing with more authority than it's possible for you to build. Because it might be the case that a massive news outlet, for example, is one of the bad websites. It's very unlikely that you're going to be able to outrank them. I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm saying it's very unlikely that you'll be able to do it at least in a short amount of time. Okay? Remember, normal SEO takes three to six months or more. So your big reputation management campaign, where you're doing SEO on not one but 10 or more websites, is going to take a very long time too. Now, that's not to say that you can't do all 10 sites together. You should, obviously, but it's still going to take a while. Some other cases when you might need to use reputation management are. I already mentioned the example of a guy who has bad results when you search for his name, right? Maybe a company has some bad results, maybe a company has some bad reviews. You never know. Like, anybody can say whatever they want on the Internet, okay? And sometimes those websites will rank at the top of the search engines, and you need reputation management to get the bad stuff out of the way and the good stuff to replace it. Another time you might need to use reputation management is if somebody, okay, I literally had this happen to my friend. So one of my friends is a very smart entrepreneur. He's very successful, super cool guy. He has the same name as a serial murderer, okay? Like, it's not my friend, okay? Like, my friend is definitely not in jail and he's definitely not like a homicidal maniac, but there's somebody who has the same name as him, who is. And so when you Google my friend, what do you think shows up first? His website or a bunch of news articles about this murderer? It's the news articles about the murderer. So my friend is actually in a place where he doesn't need to rely on SEO. So he, like, he kind of doesn't care. He just mentioned it to me in passing one day. He's like, oh, yeah, you know, he's like, if you ever Google me, just FYI, that's not me. Like, maybe somebody has your name and they're a terrible person. Or coincidentally, maybe somebody has your name and they Have a totally different business. They're not a bad person. It's just if somebody Googles that person, it's just if somebody Googles you, they're gonna find that other person. Now, if your name is uncommon, it will be more likely that somebody else with the same name might rank for you, because there's not very many results for that uncommon name. But if your name is uncommon, that also makes it easier to rank for your own name, because you have less competition automatically. So if your name is like John Doe or like Bob Smith or like whatever, like some common name, there's probably a million results. At least if you search for any of those. But if your name is like something super uncommon, I don't have any uncommon name examples, but just, you know, select whatever you want as an uncommon name. It's gonna be much easier. Why? Because there's less competition for those keywords. Because ultimately, googling your name is the same as googling a keyword. It's all keywords. Okay. And as we will discuss in the episode where we talk about how to choose keywords, less competition almost always means you have an easier time ranking for something. So if you have a less common name, it means there's going to be less instances of it on the Internet, which means you will probably have less competition. But back to the topic of reputation management. I have had, in over a decade of working in SEO a very, very small number of reputation management clients. Most people honestly don't need it. And I can already tell that some people are going to strongly disagree with that. Well, every business needs reputation management. Okay, yeah, you're probably right. But look, if there's no obvious bad things about your name or your company when you Google it, you don't really need reputation management. I mean, you can be proactive about it. Ooh, we're going to talk about that in a second. Anyways, a very, very, very small percentage of our clients, like I'm talking, maybe 2% of our clients, have ever been interested in reputation management. And generally speaking, people are interested in it until they find out that it costs ten times as much. Well, why does it cost ten times as much? Well, because we're doing search engine optimization on 10 websites. We're not doing it on one website. Yeah, but no, sorry, it's ten websites at least. I mean, like I said, not always. If you got. If the bad website is in position 10, you really only need to push one site above it to get it off the first page. But you get the point. It's more expensive and people don't want to spend money unless they really, really, really need it, like our Hollywood director friend did. So anyway, okay, let's talk about being proactive. This is just a plan. You don't have to do anything this way. But we're gonna talk about it anyway. It might be smart to proactively do a reputation management campaign so that when somebody searches for your business or your name, at least 10 websites related to you show up on the first page. And that way, if somebody ever says something bad about you, there will be more competition for them and it will be harder for them to appear on the first page because you are already on the first page with 10 websites. Now, if you want a super preview about something we're going to talk about later. There's another aspect of SEO called fake competition. This is similar in concept to to reputation management. By the way, you can probably figure out what fake competition is from the name. Fake competition will blow your mind if you haven't heard of it. When I tell you about fake competition, you're gonna understand why a very small number of people make most of the money on the Internet. Okay. Fake competition is mind blowing. I've worked with some very experienced business owners who had never even heard of the concept of fake competition. And when I explained it to them, they were just like, holy cow, I want to do that. But we're gonna do an episode on fake competition. Cause fake competition is like pro level SEO. Okay, I'm gonna stop talking about it now. But anyways, that's really all you need to know about reputation management. So to basically just discuss everything again really quickly. Reputation management is necessary when you search for your name or your business or whatever, and there are negative or bad reviews or websites or basically just people saying stuff that you don't want them to say about your name or your company. This guy's a jerk. This guy is a liar. Like, you don't want people to see that stuff. So you can't get those websites to remove the content. Probably you probably shouldn't hack those websites. You can't probably get them legally taken down. So what's your other choice? Your other choice is to optimize enough websites to rank them above the bad websites and get the bad websites off the first page of the search engines. That's what reputation management is. That's how reputation management works. It's basically like 10 SEO campaigns in one. Because instead of targeting one website, you're targeting 10 websites. It takes just as long, if not longer than normal SEO because it's 10 websites, it's not one. And again, you could do them all at the same time. So you're going to start your link building to your target websites. That's totally fine. You can do them all at the same time. Make sure that you're smart about it. Don't build links from the same websites to the same websites. Remember all those things that I taught you when we were talking about how to build your own private blog portfolio? Just be smart about it. Don't copy anything. Don't duplicate any backlinks. Don't use the same IP addresses for your sites or for the sites that you're trying to rank if you're hosting them for the client. Because you might. Maybe they want you to build the websites for them. I don't know. But don't do anything dumb. Follow all the rules that we've talked about and you will have a successful SEO campaign as long as you're able to get more authority to your websites than the websites that you're trying to get rid of. A reputation management campaign is considered successful when the bad websites are not on the first page of the search engine. Because, like, honestly, people don't usually go past the first page of the search engines anyways. So if they're on the second page, like, who cares? I mean, probably not good. But you know, don't worry too much because every position that you want to push them down is another website you have to rank, which is why most people are satisfied with just not having them on the first page. So that's how it works when you get all the bad websites off the first page. It's a successful reputation management campaign and we talked about the reasons that you might need to do it, and we talked about how to do it, and I think this is pretty straightforward. So let me know if you have any questions about this and let me know what else you want me to talk about. Thanks for listening. Don't forget to subscribe. I hope this episode was helpful and if you have any questions or if there's anything that you want me to talk about on a future episode, you can email me at hello@grumpy SEO guy.com and I'll talk to you later. You're listening to Grumpy SEO Guy, the SEO podcast that doesn't waste your time with nonsense that doesn't work. Join us next Wednesday when we talk about common SEO scams and things you need to look out for.