- Building a positive and solid Brand Reputation is now one of the business and professional priorities: what are the “weapons” available to counteract a negative online reputation?
First of all, I would say that the best way to prevent negative reputation is to work well. Seriously, SEO is certainly a powerful weapon, if in the hands of true industry professionals: precisely this desire of specialization and excellence, we at Pro Web Consulting offer targeted services – we are a vertical SEO agency.
Social media, for example, are still little used by brands as a defense weapon: perhaps one of the first effective interventions was the recent one by Eni against the TV program Report.
Regarding SEO, on the other hand, through the optimization of the official website and the promotion of positive content on the brand in question, negative results can be confined to Google’s most remote pages – it’s just the first page that really matters. Numerically speaking, a compromised reputation can cause significant damage to your business. If 83% of network surfers claim to be influenced by online information, it is consequential that a brand reputation problem can have a huge impact on revenue and even on a company’s actions.
- Negative user comments on social networks or untrue content on Google’s first page: what are the risks of compromising the virtual image of a business?
We often tend to consider Social Media to be most problematical area due to the freedom of expression granted to users: in fact, influencers and viral content apart, a bad review on a service, brand or product, expressed on Facebook or Twitter remains limited to more or less the circle of friends and contacts of the subject.
Conversely, a negative result on the first page of Google will have a significant impact: a search engine reputation crisis has a significantly higher duration than any other media because nothing is completely deleted from the Web. In addition, if a crisis is born on another communication channel – TV, bad adv campaigns, etc. – online brand-name searches undergo a sudden rise, throwing the proverbial gasoline on the fire.
- The Right to be Forgotten is an important resource for requesting the removal of content that is considered harmful to the Web: what are the advantages and limitations of this tool?
The Right to be Forgotten is a tool made available by Google itself since May 2014: in practice, in the face of concrete documentation that witnesses the non-truthfulness of content on the Net, you can ask for de-indexing because damaging a company or single image.
In Italy alone, over 26,000 requests have been submitted to date, for a total of about 85,700 URLs requested for removal, of which little more than 30% have actually been de-indexed. Obviously, “removal” is not a term to take literally: the content remains visible on the Net, it is only excluded from the Google ranking.
The limits mainly concern the geographic dimension: first, the service only works on European search engines, not on Google.com. In addition, negative results are only “nationally” obscured: if I ask for a URL removal from google.it, this will still be visible if searched on google.fr. The Cnil, the French Privacy Guard, has also clashed with Google, just to overcome this limitation.
- What are the sectors that will benefit most from SEO in 2016? Why should we include SEO in your own Web Marketing strategy?
The reason is simple: first of all, about 50% of traffic to a website comes from organic searches. A good SEO strategy works on the organization, increasing visibility and, consequently, the economic return of any reality. In fact, SEO is transversal by business scope and type, both for e-commerce and content sites, both for B2B and B2C. An example is publishing: this field would seem to be experience a crisis because of the Web, but in the Web it is finding an anchor of salvation and thanks to SEO in particular, as we explained during our workshop at the IAB Forum of December, about the success story of Sale & Pepe.