Our Trials with Reputation Management
In the first week of March, on a Sunday evening I got a call from Ajay, the president of GMR Transcription. It was not a friendly call. As per him a single post by a transcriptionist on scam.com was costing GMR Transcription both in terms of reputation and money. He posed a simple question-If we can get pages on number one why cannot we remove scam.com from the listing" A reputation management company was asking for $10,000 and a years' time. In a moment of total recklessness I told him I could do it in 3 months and for $3000. (You have to be raving mad to make a stupid commitment like that!) Monday morning at the table I just wished I owned scam.com and Google. But I did not so I set down to plan and strategize. I am lucky about that, the other unlucky ones in office actually work hard for me. PROBLEM: Type GMR Transcription (auto suggest comes up) and the listing causing pain came at #2 right above the fold. Aw, that hurt. . I knew they were there at that rank for the past 3 months but never got around to actually working on it. Research into analytics showed 105 visits in a week from that search phrase. Did it matter? Of course it did; 400 brand searches for a small company. Now I know why Ajay was annoyed. So here's what I did. Strategy 1: Find listings that are below scam.com and find the ones that we own like Twitter, Facebook, Slideshare. Work on them. Strategy 2: Build the brand better. Start building brand keywords. Strategy 3: There's a blog on the site, find out why it's not popular and work on it. Strategy 4: Work on inner pages on the site. RESULT: The irritant listing is now at #10. There is 3% rise in visits via brand name CONCLUSION: Mission accomplished at halfway mark and just $231 spent. ANALYSIS: Why we could do it? We were lucky. Most listings after #2 were owned by us. We just worked on them. You may not be as lucky and a brand reputation can easily be made or destroyed. We had the basics right and hence with focus could partially rectify listing results.
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