Search Engine Reputation Management
What is search engine reputation management (SERM)?
SERM (Search Engine Reputation Management) involves managing your brand on search engines, and is particularly important as a modern search trend is for consumers to search for brand names rather than products and services. Most brands are fortunate enough to not be associated with negative content, but you never know when a chance bad review will inexplicably go viral and suddenly you have a reputation crisis on your hands. Search Reputation Management, but it's important to note that SERM differs from standard online reputation management, as it requires a different approach and skill-set to achieve results.
Why is Search Reputation Management important?
More consumers are using your brand to find your website. A study by Hitwise revealed that this activity, called branded or navigational search, accounts for 2 out of every 5 visits to a website. Further analysis of the top 2,000 UK search terms showed that branded or navigational search accounted for 88% of online traffic; that is 1,760 of the top 2,000 search phrases! In 2005 this figure was set at 68%, so it seems that the trend is set to stay.
You may think that if your website ranks well in Google it doesn't matter if people use your brand to find you. However, when it comes to branded search people don't only look at the top 2 or 3 results as they do with traditional search, instead they look at all the results on the first page to see if anything bad crops up. In Search Engine Reputation Management all 10 rankings on the first results page are important.
The internet is full of reviews, which is great for freedom of expression, but has the potential to create search reputation management nightmares. It's a well known fact that despite your best efforts, you can't please all of the people all of the time. At some point someone will write something that casts your brand in a less than favourable light. And, as consumers now rely heavily on peer reviews to help them make purchasing decisions, any negative publicity could send your target market straight into the arms of your competitors.
It doesn't even matter if you successfully dealt with the negative brand experience in the past, on the internet old news can come back to haunt you.
This is where SERM comes into play
Search Engine Reputation Management acts proactively to ensure that there is sufficient good news about your brand online to outweigh anything potentially damaging. Negativity without due cause is simply lost in a sea of positive brand mentions. And with SERM as a solid base, any unpleasantness that arises can be managed more quickly and effectively than an online PR campaign alone.
MediaVision is a pioneer in the field of SERM and already has a proven track record of effectively establishing brands within search engine results (see our case studies). Safeguard your brand's reputation with Search Reputation Management; contact MediaVision to find out how.