ORM or online reputation management is perhaps the least talked about part of digital marketing. To many professionals in the field, ORM is too theoretical in literature to warrant any real discussion. Unlike SEO or AdWords, there isn’t really a well-known process or strategy that can be used in ORM.
This brings is to a challenge every marketer dreads to face. Consumer brands often get caught up in negative mentions. While negative mentions are an inescapable part of being in a consumer market, if these mentions harm the growth of a brand, this can be a serious problem.
On paper, this is an ORM problem. However, since most SEOs and digital marketing professionals do not give ORM much weight, this problem becomes uniquely difficult to overcome.
Even in top digital marketing institutes, one would find a lot of focus given to building a website for high search traffic but not enough to keep it within the good graces of the audience.
In this article, we try and provide a solution as to how ORM can be applied to turn negatively perceived brands into being neutral.
What Does a Negatively Perceived Brand Look Like?
If you search your company name on Google and more than two results are from a news website talking about your company in a bad light, your brand will be negatively perceived.
Google is a great indicator of where brand perception scales are. If a mere search of a brand on Google yields two or more websites talking badly about the brand, it is time to ring the alarm bells.
How to Overcome this Problem?
The first step is to strive to resolve the issue which is causing these negative mentions to appear in the first place. The next step is neutralizing these negative mentions with positive ones.
For instance, let’s say the website talking negatively about your brand has 10,000 daily visitors. To neutralize this, approach a website with more daily visitors and ask them if they can publish a positive-worded blog post or article about the brand. Most websites these days charge a flat rate for guest posts like these.
This has to be complemented by a series of positively mentioned blog posts and articles across various different platforms that force Google to take notice and push positive mentions above negative ones.
Optimize Relevant Pages
When you search for a famous person or brand on Google, you don’t just see the name of their official website. They often have a Wikipedia page and a list of social media accounts as well. All these results are relevant to the query being searched, which in this case, is the name of the brand itself.
Thus, after neutralizing negative mentions with positive ones, the next step is optimizing other relevant pages on the website such as ‘About Us’, ‘Team’, and ‘Company History’. These pages are relevant to the search query and can be useful in pushing back any negative mentions you get.
In Conclusion
ORM can often be all talk and no action. In this article, we clearly showed the practical use of ORM in turning a brand with negative mentions into a positive one.
About the Author – Ravikant Agarwal is a veteran in ORM and SEO with a decade of experience practicing both. He writes guest posts for top training institutes like DelhiCourses, known best for its digital marketing training in Delhi.
