Since Lord Google can easily find any needle in any haystack, if you’re brand name gets tarnished and into the cache of the “foreverbot”, you MUST do something about it, or it will negatively effect your ability to land new clients.
This post will use the example of a company that a friend of mine (Adam Phillips) works for, American Business Systems, Medical Billing Business, and what he’s doing to rebuild his online reputation.
Background
Adam was distraught one day when he saw G’s auto-suggest feature included the word “scam” after his company’s name. WTF?!?!
Step 1) Assess the Situation
Clicking to see the results, he found several negative sites, starting with a post on the Rip-Off report. Crap!
He also found a handful of angry posts on blogs.
Step 2) Make Amends
On the blogs, Adam started leaving comments (like the one below) that politely & directly addressed the statements made by the blog authors and other commenters. When his company screwed up (negative interaction with customer service personnel, out-of-date materials, etc.), he admitted it and talked about what they had done to fix it.
For RipOffReport, Adam joined the Corporate Advocacy Program and had them do an investigation, which led to the following update on the page:
Brief sidenote: Adam figured out that the author of this RipOff report was a disgruntled *prospect* (ie. not a customer) who just didn’t like the franchised medical billing system they were selling. She didn’t like the product, the price of the system, or basically anything else about them. In fact, Adam remembers personally speaking to this woman on the phone and her being very mad-at-the-world. He basically had to tell her, “I’m sorry, I don’t think we should be in business together. Best of luck to you.” and ended the discussion.
Step 3) Fight Back With The Facts
Realizing there was probably no way to ever get american business systems llc scam removed from G’s auto-suggest, he figured he’d better get his own version of the story to rank as highly as he could.
So he…
- Bought the domain name absystemsllcscam.com. (the domain with the exact words was already taken by someone else…bummer.)
- Signed up for a Weebly account. (Weebly, as you may recall, is my favorite tool for non-geeks to quickly and easily build simple websites.)
- Put up a homepage that presented his side of the story using a “What They Say”, “What We Say” format which presents both sides of the argument.
- Used the exact keyword phrase several times throughout the page, including (and most importantly) the Page Title and <h1> tags to rank as highly as he could.
In just a few weeks, this new site was listed 7th.
In Summary…
It stands to reason that if your company sells a crap product, you will eventually be found out and there will be basically zero way to rebuild your online reputation because so many of your customers will be talking about how full of crap you are and warning prospects away.
But in Adam’s case, I know what they sell, I know it’s expensive (about $20K), and I know clients don’t fall into your lap the day after you complete training. It is HARD WORK to land a doctor as a client. Does that mean that everyone who attempts their own medical billing business in the future will fail? Of course not!
Therefore, it’s NOT a crap product.
And these handful of disgruntled *prospects* that have been scaring off legitimate future customers. Painful!
So I’m glad to see Adam actively working to rebuild his online reputation in an honest, authentic, and effective way.
What Else Can Be Done?
Do you have any other tips for helping to rebuild one’s online reputation?
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Good Post Patrick. One thing I’d do if I was Adam is add the modifiers (scam, compliant, etc) to his site. No one should be ranked higher for your company name than you – even with modifiers. So within the site he can use things like “don’t fall for opportunities that scam you” etc.
All my efforts would be to improve the ranking of my company name with these modifiers. I really like the Weebly site idea as well.
i had an attack from rip off report and an disgruntalded tenant even built a website throwing dirt about our business. i loaded my site with good testimonials and real people who love doing business with us. it is important to be real. in business people will report negative even if it is false. jealousy is deffinately something that comes to mind. people hate to see others succeed when they are suffering.