Controlling the SERPs in Your Favor

Interesting post today on the 10e20 blog:

Marketing a Celebrity Online – Part 1

As the story goes, a certain celebrity wasn’t happy with a negative blog post which was appearing prominently in the Google SERPs on a query for the guy’s name. And so the job was/is to bury that listing and replace it with more favorable pages.

Now, I’m not trying to suggest that there’s a direct correlation between this and a typical small business SEO project, but there are some underlying principles involved that are universal to all companies — big or small. Because no matter what size company you are, with blogging still on the rise and with social media growing rapidly, people will be talking about you and they may not be saying nice things.

And so, while the circumstances will differ from a small business situation to this celebrity example, the theories are still true:

• Make sure your own site/pages — the stuff you can control — is fully optimized. Your official business site should almost always rank at the top of the SERPs for your company name.
• Identify (or create) pages you want to rank highly, such as informational articles, positive profile pages, etc.
• If those pages are on your site, acquire inbound links.
• If those favorable pages are on other sites, link to them to help them rank higher.
• Use social media (including blogs) to raise positive awareness and build links.

So, even if celebrity SEO doesn’t sound like it has anything to do with your small business, I’d still suggest you read the article from a tactical perspective and you should find some takeaways.