Normally I would say that focusing on negativity is not the way to approach business. However, depending on your industry, you may not be able to avoid it entirely. For instance, I work for a company whose business is highly dependent of the reputation in the marketplace. This makes susceptibility to negativity campaigns very high. There have been negative “PR” attacks on our company with words such as scam or fraud or other such things.
So, in this kind of business, we cannot simply avoid negativity. It’s unfortunate, but if it’s avoided entirely, it leaves potential clients thinking what they’re reading is true. The way to combat this, therefore, is to start optimizing toward negative keywords as well as your “sell-able” keywords. After a little investigating, I determined one of the best ways of doing this is through a blog.
A blog allows you to get a domain that contains the negative keyword, then add content that has nothing to do with your corporate focus of selling, but add content to the blogosphere that can directly combat the negativity you’re experiencing. Additionally, blogs tend to get indexed and ranked very quickly (which also means they can lose rank very quickly). As a case study, the blog I built a 2 weeks ago, through directory submission and keyword optimization, now control of the top 10 results in Google for the negative keyword we targeted. Why? Because we targeted it specifically.
What’s the impact going to be? We’ll see. Our sales team has spoken with several potential clients who pulled out at the “eleventh-hour” citing some of what they saw online. Over the next couple month we’ll see how targeting the negative keywords has impacted the bottom line of our business, and I’ll provide some analysis at that point.
