Commentary

Google Thyself

By Rob Key, President & CEO, Converseon

Not long ago, a global human resources company with operations in five countries suddenly found sales conversions dropping dramatically for apparently no reason. There had been no significant change in the competitive landscape. The advertising efforts continued at the same high pace as previously, and the sales team was working as diligently as ever. Company leadership was baffled, and understandably alarmed.

It was soon discovered that many potential prospects, having read an article or seen an advertisement, were heading online to search for references on the company via search engines. When searching under the company name, and some other close permutations, a number five listing in Google warned that the company's services were a "rip-off." The company's brand and reputation were being aggressively maligned online by a couple of former employees leading to the sales plunge.

The reason it was missed is that monitoring and managing the search engine results that impacted corporate brand reputation had fallen into the netherworld between brand/reputation management, corporate communications, and interactive marketing. The search marketing team was focused on driving traffic and rankings. Reputation was not even on their radar screen.

The company then understood what many other brand-sensitive companies are rapidly learning. With more than 4 billion searches conducted a month, natural (editorial) search engine listings have become a prominent source of information that can make - or break - a company's brand and strongly impact sales conversions. Search engines have become the primary information resource for consumers, reporters, investors, regulators, and business partners.

According to JupiterResearch, 90 percent of online users search the Internet for product and company information before they make a purchase. 91 percent percent of journalists say they use search engines to research articles, reports The Pew Research Center. And according to public relations firm, Burson-Marsteller, 84 percent of the group defined as e-fluentials - the group of the most influential "movers and shakers" who help shape opinions - have read product or service related messages on opinion Web sites in the past year. How do they find these Web sites? Search engines.

The top result pages under a company or product name have clearly become a highly influential new form of media, and the top rankings have become the new "digital front pages." Yet for many companies that otherwise spend substantial sums investing in their reputation and brand, they are often unpleasantly surprised when they "Google" themselves.

The reason? While the Web is an increasingly powerful channel to promote company goods and services or to build a community of interest, it also presents the unscrupulous or merely disgruntled with a powerful mechanism to damage a company's image online and offline.

Negative and inaccurate information, from articles to product reviews to grassroots sites created by disgruntled customers or employees, is often ranked prominently under company-branded keyword searches, making this information highly-visible and accessible to important company constituents. We estimate that there are currently more than 12,000 "protest sites" active, and that number is growing daily.

Unlike the offline media world, governed by an editorial team, highly-visible Web sites do not necessarily translate into credible sites, although search engine users tend to give more credence to high-ranking sites. Few realize that what Google itself disclaims in its terms of service: "The sites displayed... are developed by people over whom Google exercises no control. The search results that appear from Google's indices are indexed by Google's automated machinery and computers, and Google cannot and does not screen the sites..."

Concerned companies that believe they are being unfairly maligned generally have first turned to litigation. The problems of this approach are two-fold: first, many protest sites are often protected under "fair use." Secondly, protest sites often regard a lawsuit as free publicity.

So what to do? Some leading companies are quietly implementing an innovative solution called search engine reputation management, or SERMA for short. SERMA fuses the best of reputation management skills with search engine optimization. It is founded on a simple premise: according to research firm, Jupiter, 75 percent of search engine users never scroll beyond the first page of results. And it is very rare for a user to scroll past the top 20 (two pages) of search results listings. The critical battleground for reputation management is what appears in the top twenty listings under a relevant company searches.

By fusing advanced and highly ethical search engine optimization strategies together with other reputation management techniques, companies can, and should, dominate the top listings under their name. The benefits are two-fold: it provides a highly-visible forum to provide new and accurate information about a company. Second, and perhaps most importantly, it pushes negative listings off the "visibility cliff."

While the approach may sound simple enough, accomplishing it requires a highly nuanced understanding of advanced search marketing optimization, link building and reputation management. It must also bridge a company's marketing group - Web marketing, corporate communications, sales, content development, information technology -- that often work in conjunction with distinct objectives and goals. Further, it must be implemented carefully to ensure that it stays fully within the terms of service of Google and other engines. For example, the content must be diverse enough to meet search engine terms-of-service, which rightly frowns upon "spam-dexing," or the technique of optimizing essentially the same content over and over. It must also leverage third party partner content.

As for the human resources company, my company, Converseon, we implemented a SERMA program and within three months positive company links dominated the top twenty listings under "company x," "company x complaints," "company x references." The negative listing in Google was eventually "pushed out" of the top listings. The company's sales rebounded to pre-crisis levels. Search engine reputation management is not designed to be a panacea for poor or deceptive business practices. Instead, it should be used as a key element in a more holistic reputation management program that spans the organization and also gets to the root causes of the problem.

Clearly, now is the time for search marketing initiatives to begin to make reputation management as an objective. Indeed, their brand, their site conversions and their very reputation depends upon it.

Next story loading loading..