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How to Protect and Defend Your Online Reputation

Your online reputation is one of your
biggest assets. In this day and age
information about you and your company
can spread like wide fire, and can
have disastrous negative commercial
impacts. SEOsynovation has over 10 years
experience in online marketing and
reputation management and
can help you protect and defend your
online reputation.
What is Online Reputation Management?
Online Reputation Management or ORM is the practice of consistent research
and analysis of ones personal, professional or industry reputation as
represented by content across all online media. This includes also search
engine image protection (SEIP). The entire process is sometimes referred to
as search engine reputation management (SERM). An effective strategy is to:
1. Participate in discussions to build trust
2. Engage the community to build trust
3. Communicate to understanding your trust

If you type in your name or your company name in a search engine and
something negative above you is shown in the search engine results page,
you may need our help.
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The search engine results page may list negative comments that may be
damaging your personal career, your customers perception of your company
or your family.
What SEO Synovation Do
We have successfully helped
clients repair and build their
online reputations.
SEOsynovation specialises in
replacing negative information
about you or your company
with positive information.

Our methods ensure when people search for your name or your company
name in a search engine they only see positive comments about you. This is
what we call SEO CounterMeasures (SEO-CM).
What Are SEO CounterMeasures (SEO-CM)?
SEO-CM are decoy strategies effectively designed to prevent attacks from
destroying a target -

you.

SEO-CM can employ Reactive Measures,

deployed for known threats or Preventive Measures, designed to prevent a

lock-on your industry, company, family or personal reputation. Both
target the notions of concealment,
alteration and deviation of your
online reputation.
How much at risk is your ORM.

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SEO CounterMeasure -Reactive Measures
These measures are directed at a known threat already locked into you, your
family, company or industry. They are based upon the tactics of imitation of
your positive profile, augmentation of your positive profile and reduction
and defence of your negative profile. These measures can be online and
offline strategies or a combination of the two to achieve the desired goals.
Reactive measures mostly include a cleanup phase repairing the damage
after a negative attack. The type of intervention can also employ tactics to
limit exposure of the attack,
SEO CounterMeasure Preventive Measures
These measures are directed at consolidating your brand, company name,
family and personal images. These measures are used as decoys at future
negativism by creating a number of domains and a number of blogs, using a
number of platforms.
We create deep links from these blogs, domains and other websites overtime
in order to promote positive and neutral comments. Our goal is not to
promote the websites we build but to promote other sites that link to us
thereby increasing the positive footprint of your website, brand, and family
or person. We promote positive listings with real content over time.
Google resources cannot actively store all web content online. It technically
archives material, but it is always available, and we can use this to reactivate
deep, positive and archived links on our newly created blogs. This will
increase the popularity of your website.
Another important strategy we employ here at SEO Synovation is the tactic of
Inoculation. We create online features (websites, blogs and reactivation of
links) that shield you from attacks. In order to do this we combine all our
tactics to prevent any list from being seen on the web.
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Online Reputation Management Goals (ORM)
There are a number of beneficial effects of
an ORM project. Using search engine
optimisation techniques, improving your
online reputation increases your company's
online popularity and spreads your
company/brand name on the Internet in an
optimal and beneficial way. You website
achieves higher rankings.
Online reputation management is of great importance for any business. The
views of your customers on social networks, blogs and forums will determine
the success of your business.
With our services on Reputation Management, Internet and Social Media
Monitoring you control everything that is said about you and your business
on the web.
Careful monitoring of online reputation, both on the web and in social
media, is a crucial step in improving the brand reputation and corporate
image on the internet.
Creating Google alerts using
names, combinations and
misspelled names is essential.
Monitoring social media chatter
on Twitter and other media
channels is of paramount
importance.

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A project combining:
web monitoring,
internet communication campaigns,
media communication campaigns on social networks,
search engine optimisation of your marketing material
search engine optimisation on video, articles, blogs and forums
Provides
control of your reputation on the Web,
direct feedback of the state your reputation
Safeguards and reinforces your customers vision of your company.

How We Do Reputation Management Case Study

Background - For obvious reasons there are no branding, company or
individual names associated with this actual case study. The client was
promoting a known household product using telemarketing to capture
appointments for representative to apply door-to-door selling techniques.
On inserting the name of the product, Google returned 40 negative
comments on the first four pages starting from position six.
Online reputations are volatile. Negative news or inaccurate information
spreads easily across the internet channels and deeply influences and impact
opinions about your company, your brand and you personally.

The opinion of others matter in

the current economy. Bad
publicity whether fai, just or
unjust damages your brand.
Confronting issues helps.

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Strategy To protect and rescue the client online reputation we adopted our
strategy called SEO CounterMeasures and are of two approaches
(a) Reactive Measures, deployed for known threats
(b) Preventive Measures, designed to prevent a lock-on the clients
industry, company, family and personal reputation.
The gravity of the negativity forced us to adopt a combination of the two
approaches. Implicit in these two approaches is monitoring internet
interaction and social media comments across these internet channels:
i.

Blogger

ii.

YouTube

iii.

RSS

iv.

Word Press

v.

Flickr

vi.

Digg

vii.

MySpace

viii.

Facebook

ix.

Twitter

We quickly discovered the gravity of the clients digital defence as nonexistent.

a. The digital presence was unstable and unable to
withstand a crisis
b. The client was unable to tell its story on the first page
due mainly to the volume of negativity
c. The clients credentials were too weak.
d. The client had not leveraged NEW MEDIA to reinforce
its brand, your company and you personally

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Our Approach we set about creating real content websites and real content
blogs, engaging with the blogging community, and linking to them. We
contacted past customers who had bought the clients products and found
that the product was excellent but the after sales service was poor. This
encouraged the client to beef up its after sales services and change its
selling methods and to publicise the facts.
We then set about letting the world know of these improvements. Through
the blogs and other websites we had created, we reactivated old deep
archived links and linked to them.
We engaged in offsite activities.
1. Press releases in local newspapers in areas most disgruntled.
2. We wrote articles to defend our clients new approach
3. We engaged in social media Twitter and Face book
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Over a concentrated period of 4 months, we managed to achieve success in
suppressing half of the 40 negative comments to pages beyond the third
page, but we needed to step up the process to suppress the other half.
We instigated a campaign to optimise his existing websites well over 30
and some were active but dormant. Using search engine optimisation
techniques, website re-design to modernise the look and employing
bloggers to engage, monitor and communicate in social medi, we began to
see an improvement in the search engine results page.
The newly optimised websites were achieving good ranking and the bloggers
were working full time engaging in useful conversation.
Four months into the project we began to re-focus on keywords other than
the keywords associated with the company or brand name. Our initial
analyse had identified a group of fifty keywords but we now, four months
after the start of the project, broaden our search and discovered a group of
150 associated keywords and began to optimise our websites (well over 60
at this point in time) using content silo-ing skills.
After nine months, there were no negative comments appearing in the first
25 positions in the search engine results page. After 12 months none
appeared.
What We Learned From This Project
Searchers behaviour People read the search engine results in a form of F
SHAPE PATTERN. From top to bottom left to right. But as they get further
down the page they read less from left to right then an F Shape pattern.
From independent research we learned that 89% of searchers click entries on
the first page and 5% of searchers never go beyond the second page.

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Monitoring and Analysing Search Engine Results we began monitoring
search engine results on a weekly basis, by keyword phrase and by search
engines and we developed this criteria for monitoring listings::
By Sentiment
i-

Very positive

ii-

Positive

iii-

Neutral

iv-

Unrelated

v-

Negative

vi-

Very negative

By Type of Listing
i-

Organic

ii-

Assets properties

iii-

Listing promoted with links

iv-

Social media Networks

By Search Engines in Italy

i-

Google

ii-

Bing

iii-

Yahoo

iv-

AOL

v-

Abacho

vi-

Altavista

vii-

Ask

viii-

Excite

ix-

Lycos

x-

Tiscali

xi-

Virgilio

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By Position
i-

In each search engine

ii-

On a weekly basis

By listing/by whom name of website URL

We compared and tracked the results of each weekly report. We monitored
changes in sentiment, position in search engine results over time and we
tracked social media chatter.
How did we do it we adopted three major strategies:
a. Management of the results on the three pages for keywords selected
b. Crisis management - we positioned brand messages on the first three
pages
c. We implemented a Clutter Campaign by generating a diversity of
results on the first three pages for selected keywords
We broke the project down into distinct phases:

the issues to monitor,

the goals to achieve,

the websites to create,

the social media chatter to monitor,

the definition of solutions,

implementation of solutions,

and the monitoring and tracking.

A Typical Project Timetable takes 12 months:

What Companies Can Learn
SEO Synovation encourages businesses of all sizes to get involved in
managing their company's reputation management from the inception date
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of the companys website before costly negative comments are made. We
cite 4 reasons why managing companys reputations are important to avert
negative comments that may damage profitability:
1. More and more internet users search the internet for information.
2. More and more internet users go to the web to review products they
intend to purchase.
3. The opinion of others has a profound influence on your profitability
and your business reputation.
4. More and more purchases are made via the internet
We at SEO Synovation, are a search engine optimisation (SEO) and interactive
web marketing agency based in the UK, Italy and the Netherlands, have
recently expanded our reputation management offering by introducing
SpyRepMan as hundreds of companies seek an international footprint of
their standing.
We reiterate the importance of making a good first impression when it
comes to influencing consumers on the web and offers companies five
sound reasons why professional reputation management is a must for all
businesses looking to dominate the online market. The following tips have
been compiled by our CEO Vincent Sandford.
1.

Most companys management teams from multi-national

corporations to start-up firms are embracing reputation management
to insulate themselves from the potential damaging effects of a poor
reputation.

2.
It is highly recommended that website owners catch up with the
efforts of their competitors to avoid seeming disinterested in how
their company is portrayed within search engines, product reviews,
forums and so on.
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3.

Once businesses have left a positive or negative footprint on the web

it's incredibly difficult to alter or remove it and negative mistakes
are very easy to make. One reckless public relations handling can
potentially put off hundreds internet users and searchers for the
companys products. Professional reputation management
consultants will conceal and eliminate the chance of internet users
seeing the negative footprint by promoting positive comments
through social media, forums, blogs, directories and link building
techniques.

4.

Contemporary, web-savvy consumers know what to expect from

online companies. If they are disappointed by the information or
opinion they find on a certain brand, they will immediately click away,
and this could negatively impact a firm's online success.

5.

The accessibility and real-time nature of the web makes it much

easier for disgruntled customers, ex-employees or envious rivals to
instigate a negative-comment campaign against a company.
Companies need to be monitor web news channels, blogs and
opinion websites by being quickly alerted to any comment and be
prepared to act accordingly to manage the situation correctly without
resorting to desperate measures.

Employing a specialist reputation management company to control an

online footprint brings a fresh perspective to the campaign. Business owners
often have little time to devote to the time consuming operations of
monitoring the web as they are intimately involved in running a business on
a day to day basis.

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On the other hand an outside interactive web marketing agency and online
marketer will be able to think of new and innovative ways to promote a
product or service and shield a business from damaging feedback.
SEO Synovations aim is to bring effective yet affordable online marketing
services to small and medium sized companies from all industries and
backgrounds to augment the core marketing message of the company.
In additional to offering Reputation Management services the company offers
a range of other services including:
Customer Relational Management Solutions,
Web Based fully integrated Solutions,
SEO Search Engine Optimisation,
Pay Per Click account management,
Social Media Marketing
Website Creation,
Website Redesign
Contact us for more information.
The END

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