When operating a business or brand online, maintaining long-term goodwill and reputation is definitely a challenge especially with all the fierce competition. The best way of-course is to be simply awesome at what you’re doing and always keep up with the word of positivity through SEO strategies. Still, there may be times that your business or brand may receive bad reviews for which a counter strategy is definitely needed and ‘reverse SEO’ is the answer. Let’s find out more!
About Reverse SEO
‘Reverse SEO’ is simply a reputation management strategy that works by dropping down search rankings of a particular website or its pages by optimising others against the similar target keyword. The strategy is mostly executed either by dedicated reputation management companies or perhaps full-service digital marketing agencies offering online PR building, reputation building and reverse SEO as part of its service. When carefully and strategically executed, it can bring down negative reviews and all online content that’s against a service or company in exchange for redeveloping credibility and trust.
For reverse SEO companies in Dubai to work effectively, it takes time so clients need to be extremely patient whereas there’s also a possibility that a particular strategy violates search engine policies thus preventing the bad or negative results.
Reverse vs. Negative SEO – The Difference
Most people usually confuse reverse SEO with negative but both are very different whereas optimisation techniques for both also vary. Reverse SEO is all about building and optimising positive websites and pages to counter all the negative reviews about a particular business or brand whereas negative SEO includes mass production of lower-quality backlinks against a competitor’s website which is to lower the search engine ranking.
However, negative SEO is restricted by search engines as a legal policy that no competitor can harm each other by negative means just to lower the ranking. In-case any business is engaged in negative SEO and caught by search engines, it wouldn’t only lower the ranking but may also restrict your overall online operations and seize the website. On the contrary, reverse SEO is considered legal and allowed by search engines.
Reverse SEO – Best Practices & Strategies
Like normal SEO marketing pratices, reverse SEO also employs a strategy before being executed. Here’s what you need to know!
Identify Keywords with Bad Review
Reverse SEO begins by identifying negative reviews that appear on top of the SERPs. The strategies executed by the digital marketing agency in Dubai is to make a website or a page rank higher. A list of keywords is then created that are actually causing the issue whereas other factors are also evaluated that results in a website’s negative ranking and review. It can be inappropriate backlinking, problem with the website’s structure, unoptimized areas, design issues. Once all the crucial problems are highlighted, the next step is to;
Optimise Miscellaneous Websites for Negative Keywords
Creation and optimisation of more neutral or positive websites happens in this particular step to legally bring down and bury all the negative reviews and reputation. The process is time taking mostly because all these websites are unaffiliated with your business or brand. The goal is only to raise the bar with positive keywords and websites against negative.
All such keywords are also used creatively on your website, only if they’re relevant and fits well to one or more of your services. Social media profiles are also optimised using the keywords as a means to boost performance and website related elements.
Building Backlinks
Even negative reviews and keywords can be put to good use which is quite the same as reverse engineering. Backlinks are simply redirection links to another website mostly with negative reviews where SEOs would replace them against all the positive features of your website. It works in two ways: first is that backlinking is one of the most common SEO practices to organically boost a website’s ranking and give it more authority. Second is to hijack these backlinks in order to further drive down all the negative reviews and keywords.
Reverse SEO Alternatives
All the strategies as listed above are professional practices to legally bring down negative reviews and regain your worth in the online market. Still, just like the regular SEO, reverse SEO is time taking and doing anything rash like finding shortcuts may prove damaging whereas it also increases the chances of the page to get de-indexed, meaning completely removing it from the online universe. There are a few actions that goes against search engine guidelines or policies that you should refrain from practicing. These are:
- Any personal or confidential information that might be appearing in search results like contact number, home address and more.
- Brand or trademark violation which is like another website or business that’s already using the trademark which you copied without claiming any rights.
- Details of your business and services as appearing on major search engines as well as on your website is incorrect that can penalise it permanently or temporarily.
- A website found engaged in any suspicious or illegal activity like negative SEO. Because the practice is restricted by Google and other search engines, it can result in blocking or penalising a website either temporarily or permanently.
These are just a few things to bring down negative reviews using reverse SEO. The above also provide best strategies to execute and have your website or page to regain its reputation.