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So we’ve been talking to our clients for about a year now about a what we call Proactive Reputation Management (PRM), and even built out a consulting practice around it. Here are the main 4 components of Proactive Reputation Management (PRM): 1) Be Proactive:

OK, this one may seem kind of obvious. But don’t wait until there’s a problem in the SERPS (search engine results pages) for your company’s brand or products. Yes, some day, someone will get a serious mad-on about one of your products. Or customer service. Or maybe really realy dislike a particular executive. So plan ahead of time how your corporate site, blogs, friendly review sites, and non-corporate information resources can dominate the first page of the engines’ results.

2) Content: Start By Organizing Reputation Management Efforts Around How You’re Found Now

1. By Brand: Optimize your site for very specific key phrases based on how your company is found currently.  Don’t know how you’re found currently? Look in your log files, Google Analytics, or other similar traffic analysis tools.
2. By Product Line or Service Category: see above. Just make sure there’s plenty of content about each of your major product lines, not only on your main site, but on any additional domains and blogs dealing with them.
3. By Individual Product:see above, again. If you have hundreds, or even thousands of SKUs, you may need to produce hundreds, or even thousands of pages of new content on your main site, on blogs, or on product review sites.

3) Organize Your Reputation Management Efforts Around How You Will Be Found in the Future

Just because no one is finding you under Product XYZ does not mean a negative review on another site, which will be found in the future, would not affect sales.  Be proactive and generate content (and get others to generate content) around products where you don’t rank yet.

4) Link Building: Be Paranoid About Managing Your Online Reputation

Check on your rankings for the top 100 brand and product terms regularly. If you notice a significant movement upwards by a site, make sure its a friendly one. If its not, go back to Steps 1,2, and 3 - and generate more relevant, fresh content. The, start building links judiciously to the sites that could push any undesirable sites down.

Now rinse. And repeat.

Of course, the above is easier said than done. Proactive reputation management is the exact opposite of checkers. Instead of thinking about search as a 1 or 2-move series of actions and reactions, you really need to acquire a “chess” or even “go” mindset. Go, sometimes called weiqi , is a 4000 year old Chinese strategy game where players thing 10, 20, 30 moves ahead of what is actually happening on the board. Come to think of it, I may write another post on Go, Chess, and search strategy. Then again, that may be a bit too revealing.