What Is Reverse SEO and When Is It Useful?

In this fast-paced digital world, standing out from the crowd has never been more challenging. Businesses are constantly vying for attention on consumer’s timelines and trying to drive traffic towards their websites, and one of the most effective digital marketing methods is through search engine optimisation (known as SEO). In this article, we will be focusing on reverse SEO.

When was the last time you Googled your business? In an ideal world, those top results would be linking back to your website, while everything below it will be packed with positive news stories about how great your company is.

However, this is not always the case and, instead, businesses might find that googling their brand reveals a host of negative reviews or stories, which is where Reverse SEO comes in.

What is reverse SEO?

Reverse SEO, also known as suppression, is a form of reputation management that effectively helps to push these negative links and results down the results page. To do this, it requires businesses to optimise other pages with the same keywords, seeing them rise above those negative pages.

Reverse SEO should be an essential part of any company’s digital marketing strategy. It’s really a no-brainer when you consider that:

• 91% of adults use search engines to gain information.
• 65% of online users perceive the position a company ranks on search results as a sign of trustworthiness.
• 90% of people don’t go beyond the first page of search results.

Unless a review specifically breaks the guidelines set out by Google, then it is not possible to get them removed. This can be incredibly damaging, with research showing that just one negative review or article on the first page of Google can see businesses potentially losing 22% of their business!  

Reverse SEO helps to reduce the impact of negative reviews or articles by reducing their visibility to potential customers. When you consider that more than 90% of people don’t go beyond the first page of Google’s search results, the farther the undesired content moves down, the less likely it is that someone will find it.

How to undertake reverse SEO

Effective search engine optimisation requires multiple factors coming together. These factors include areas such as website design, use of alt tags and images, etc.

The most important factor nowadays, however, is high-quality written content. Google’s new BERT algorithm analyses the quality of the copywriting when determining where a website ranks. (This applies to all language versions of your website, by the way, so make sure you’ve got an expert copywriter in your corner for each language).

These factors are exactly the same for reverse SEO, so if you are noticing negative reviews and articles are impacting your business, then here is what you should do:

Identify the keywords

Unlike traditional SEO, where you are attempting to establish what related terms people are searching for in order to drive them towards your site, with reverse SEO, you need to instead rank using the keywords from the sites you are trying to suppress. For example, if searching your company name brings up bad reviews, then focus on optimising your website to rank for that instead.

Create new content

When it comes to digital marketing, the cliché that content is king is 100% true. However, you need to ensure that you are utilising the very highest quality content possible, that has been written by copywriters fluent in the same language as the negative articles you are looking to remove.

This content can take the form of new blogs on your site or optimised subpages targeting specific products or services that you offer, which might be referred to in those negative articles. Equally, reverse SEO is not just about optimising your website. You can also tailor your social media channels, particularly Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, as these appear in search results too.

Re-optimise your site

SEO requires regular auditing and updating, so if you find your site is no longer ranking as highly as it once did and negative sites are appearing instead, then consider re-optimising your site to ensure it meets all current SEO tactics.

High-quality copywriting is the backbone of any SEO strategy, so if you are looking to provide multi-language options or you need expert Spanish copywriting, get in touch with us at Crisol Translation Services today and find out how we can help you through our localisation and SEO translation services.