Serm articles. Types of Search Engine Reputation Management. Where to write new reviews

General provisions

SEReputation.ru (hereinafter referred to as “SEReputation”, “we”, “us” or “our”) is committed to protecting the privacy of the personal information of customers who can be identified in any way and who visit the SEReputation.ru website ( hereinafter referred to as the “Site”) and use its services (hereinafter referred to as the “Services”). Amendments to this Privacy Policy will be posted on the Site and/or Services and will be effective immediately upon posting. Your continued use of the Services following the posting of any changes to the Privacy Policy constitutes your acceptance of those changes.

Consent to collection and use of information

When you join us as a user of our Services, we ask for personal information that will be used to activate your Account, providing you with the Services, interacting with you about the status of your Account, and for other purposes set out in this Privacy Policy. Your name, company name, address, phone number, address Email, credit card information and certain other information about you may be required by us to initially provide access to the Services, or must be provided during the use of the Services. You will also be asked to create a personal password that will become part of your Account.

By providing personal information to us, and thereby retaining our ability to provide services to you, you voluntarily agree to the collection, use and disclosure of such personal information as specified in this Privacy Policy. Without limiting the foregoing, we may seek your consent from time to time as we collect, use or disclose your personal information in specific circumstances. Sometimes your consent will be implied through your interactions with us if the purpose for collecting, using or disclosing the information is obvious and you voluntarily provide this information.

We may use your personal information or Account data for the following purposes:

To provide you with the Services and to improve the quality of the Site and Services,
To provide information to you so that you can use the Site and Services more efficiently,
To create, manage and control your Account and to verify access rights to the services and software,
To charge your Account,
To communicate with you about changes or additions to the Services, or the availability of any services we provide,
For service level assessment, traffic monitoring and popularity score various options service,
To carry out our marketing activities;
To comply with this Privacy Policy;
To respond to claims regarding any violation of our rights or the rights of any third parties;
To meet your customer service needs;
To protect the rights, property, and personal safety of you, us, our users, and the public, and as required or permitted by law.

From time to time we may notify you about our products, services, news and events. You have the option not to receive this information. We provide the option to opt-out of all such email communications, or suspend notifications for the purposes described above, if you contact us and confirm that you do not want to share this information with you. The only kind of these communications that you cannot opt out of are mandatory announcements regarding the Services, including information related to your Account, planned suspensions and deactivations of the Services. We will try to keep such alerts to a minimum for you.

Age of majority

We do not knowingly provide the Services and will not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under the age of majority.

Rights to your information

You have the right to access and edit your information at any time through the web interface provided as part of the Services.

Information disclosure

We will disclose your information to third parties only in accordance with your instructions or as necessary in order to provide you with a particular service, or for other reasons in accordance with applicable privacy laws. As a general rule, we do not and will not sell, rent, distribute or disclose your personal information without first obtaining your permission or without setting out the necessary conditions for doing so in this Privacy Policy.

Aggregate data

We may also use your personal information to obtain Aggregate Data for internal use and to share with others on a selective basis. “Aggregate Data” means data that has been stripped of unique information to potentially identify customers, landing pages, or end users, and that has been altered or combined to provide aggregated, anonymous information. Your identity and personal information will be kept anonymous in the Aggregate Data.

The Site may contain links to other sites and we are not responsible for the privacy practices or the content of those sites. We encourage you to read the privacy policy of the linked sites. Their privacy policies and practices differ from our Privacy Policies and Practices.

Cookies and logging

We use "cookies" (cookies) and "logs" (log files) to track information about users. Cookies are small pieces of data that are transmitted by a web server through your web browser and stored on your computer's hard drive. We use cookies to keep track of page variations that a visitor has seen, to count clicks made by a visitor on a particular page variation, to monitor traffic, and to measure the popularity of service settings. We will use this information to provide you with relevant data and services. This information also allows us to make sure that visitors see exactly the landing page they expect to see if they return via the same URL, and it allows us to tell how many people click on your landing pages.

Transfer of property or business

In the event of a change of ownership or other business transfer, such as a merger, acquisition or sale of our assets, your information may be transferred in accordance with applicable privacy laws.

Safety

We will strive to prevent unauthorized access to your personal information, however, no transmission of data over the Internet, mobile device or through wireless device cannot guarantee 100% security. We will continue to strengthen the security system as new technologies and methods become available.

We strongly recommend that you do not disclose your password to anyone. If you have forgotten your password, we will ask you to provide proof of your identity and send you an email containing a link that will allow you to reset your password and set a new one.

Please remember that you are in control of the data you provide to us when you use the Services. Ultimately, you are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of your identity, passwords and/or any other personal information in your possession while using the Services. Always be careful and responsible with regard to your personal information. We are not responsible for, and cannot control, the use by others of any information you provide to them, and you should exercise care in choosing the personal information you provide to third parties through the Services. Similarly, we are not responsible for the content of personal information or other information that you receive from other users through the Services, and you release us from any liability in connection with the content of any personal information or other information that you may receive while using the Services. We cannot guarantee and we accept no responsibility for the verification, accuracy of personal information or other information provided by third parties. You release us from any liability in connection with the use of such personal information or other information about others.

If you have questions or suggestions regarding the Privacy Policy, please email us at

In this article, we will get acquainted with an interesting concept from the world of online marketing, namely SERM. This is an abbreviation that stands for Search Engine Reputation Management. In the case of a literal translation, we get "reputation management in search engines."

SERM is a certain set of ongoing activities, the main purpose of which is to exclude negative signals (pages with content that denigrates the reputation) regarding the company, product, brand, website, etc. in search results.

In fact, SERM is part of Online Reputation Management (ORM) or reputation management on the Internet. Most likely, you have already done this, and if you have not done it, then at least you have heard about it. They just didn't know what it's called in kosher terms.

ORM works on creating the image, reputation of something or someone on the Internet. If we talk about reputation, it is important to understand that this is nothing more than a social assessment that is assigned to this very person or something. Those. what they think of us in this society.

Society is the most influential gentleman who can appear before us in various forms of a buyer, customer, appraiser, etc.

If we talk about the difference between SERM and ORM, then we can say that the first term covers only the issuance of search engines, and the second covers all the possibilities of the Internet (social networks, blog posts, comments on sites, forums, reviews and much more) which may affect reputation.

Who is reputation management used for?

Online reputation management is used to:

Brands;
specific goods;
Companies;
Sites;
Public persons (singers, actors, politicians, football players and many others).

Why do people work on reputation?

Here it is better to bring the most common example from SERM. You have a business. Such a good online business. You develop intensively, invest in SEO, SMO, SMM, crowd marketing, use contextual advertising and smash your competitors to pieces. You eat up their market share methodically and mercilessly, as a result of which their profits also methodically fall. Who will like this? Nobody. Therefore, competitors begin to think about how you can be put in your place. And this is where the word "reputation" comes to mind. It's easier to mess it up than trying to outbid your promotion budget.

It is important to understand that ruining a reputation is easy enough. Typically, the following steps are taken:

a group of high-quality articles is created regarding a brand, product, site, person with frankly or indirectly "black" (sometimes "gray") content. Such content must directly or indirectly discredit the victim in the eyes of potential customers.
articles are posted on various resources and are optimized for the requirements of search engines;
articles are promoted in order to get into the TOP for the query "company name" and sometimes for the most competitive queries.

At the same time, the system for displaying a site, pages for a specific request looks similar to the one above. You should kick out defamatory articles from the first page, or rather two searches, and continue to monitor the state of affairs around the company's image.

The result of such actions will look something like this:

Reputation management is necessary because:

The image of the company in the network has an impact on sales;
Reputation affects the overall perception of a brand or a particular person;
Reputation has an impact on the generation of sales through advice from users who have already bought.

Reputation management should be treated as ongoing process, which is necessary in the conditions of fierce competition and the desire to be recognizable.

If you have any questions regarding the materials of the article, ask them in the comments and our team will be happy to help you figure it out.

A bad company image can devalue the work of marketers and years of work in the market. Reputation is a new intangible asset of the company. It is like a credit history. Any potential client can get acquainted with it, just go to the search engine and enter the name of the company. Based on the results of the issuance, it will become clear what the business is. SERM and ORM will help build a favorable image or correct mistakes. The first one is responsible for positive results in search engines, and the second one is responsible for the reputation on the Internet in a broad sense.

How these tools will help modern business, experts from the Reputation.Moscow agency explain.

Why ads don't work

New tools appear where the old ones fail or have to work in greatly changed realities. Therefore, SERM and ORM are being talked about more and more often.

Old school advertisers pray for a term from the world of psychology - "cognitive ease". These are signals that tell a person that everything is going well. And habitual things and actions are good for a person. In the marketing plane, the principle of cognitive ease works like this. The customer walks up to the sausage stand. Intuition tells us that more expensive models should be better, but brand N often flashes on TV. The buyer perceives it as a "default" option. It’s easier to buy N, because all other options will come from the position “how is this different from N”. SERM and ORM act differently.

Recognizability is still important. However, it seems that traditional advertising has been reduced to this factor alone. The packaging is getting brighter and the slogans are getting bolder. The buyer gets tired of the endless struggle for his attention and ignores advertising. It turns out that marketers have cleared the site for SERM and ORM.

The world around is oversaturated with advertising. There are posters on the bus, ubiquitous posters on the subway, and it’s scary to visit sites without an ad blocker. Global trend: 82% of consumers unconsciously ignore advertising messages. This is the immunity of the 21st century. If only that were the problem.

The advertising message is not just ignored - it is not trusted. Information from the Russian branch of the Nielsen agency confirms this thesis. Only 36% of consumers trust print media and radio. TV advertising a little more - 41%. Reviews on the Internet (62%) and opinions of acquaintances (77%) became record holders.

SERM

The term stands for "Search engine reputation management" or "Reputation management in search engines". The name speaks for itself. SERM-specialists correct the search results, displacing the negative from it and raising the positive sites in the rating.

Negative search results are a problem for businesses. Depending on the content and attendance, such sites can cost up to 80% of potential customers. The main share of reputation is formed in Google search engines and Yandex. According to seo-auditor data for January 2018, they share almost all search traffic in RuNet. The closest competitor - Mail.ru - is content with crumbs.

The majority of clicks are in the top 10 search results. Let's use the Rush Analytics calculations for the average click-through rate for Yandex search results. According to our calculations, there are 10% fewer queries on average on Google.

Let's assume that the name of the company is searched 500 times a month, and negative sites crept into the third and sixth positions of the issue. We calculate according to the formula: (500 x 0.24) + (500 x 0.17) = 205 clicks per month to sites with negative business information. Is it worth neglecting two hundred possible clients- everyone will decide for himself.

Companies have different methods of building SERM. So let's talk about our approach.

Creation of own sites. These can be blogs, websites or profiles in in social networks. A SERM specialist will bring them to the top 10 for key queries.

Monitoring. A SERM specialist studies search results several times a month. If there are negative mentions, they will be noticed.

Registration in directories. We will place at least 25 mentions per month on company directories. All information is posted according to the content plan.

Posting reviews. Buyers trust reviews 12 times more than manufacturer descriptions. Plus, the reviews are well ranked and consistently occupy the top 10 search results.

Removing the negative. Unwanted information is forced out or removed from the search results. Controlled or positive sites will take its place.

All these methods are aimed at generating search results in favor of the business.

ORM

Means "Online reputation management", or online reputation management. ORM is commonly understood as tracking mentions on the Internet, interaction with sites and other tactics aimed at maintaining a positive reputation of a brand or person. It may seem that this is similar to the usual PR. Definitely, it is part of the ORM, but no more.

ORM is not limited to familiar tools. Reputation management is about the question of “how to achieve results”. All answers within the law are considered worthy of attention.

According to surveys, 74% of consumers will search for a company Additional information on the Internet if you are interested in its services. Here ORM shines brighter than others. Let's take a look at the key tactics.

SERM. Cleaning the top of the search results is also part of the ORM, although it stands apart.

Removing the negative. 7 out of 10 potential customers may abandon a purchase if they see more than one negative position in the search results or in the comments on search engine sites. Therefore, the negative is dangerous for business and is one of the tasks of ORM.

Negotiators, lawyers, psychologists and social engineers deal with the removal of unwanted information within the law. Reviews in 60% of cases will be deleted by the author himself after negotiations within the ORM.

Create reviews. Consumers trust other people's recommendations 12 times more than traditional advertising. However, custom reviews will not help. Rather, they will only harm the ORM. best method- encourage customers to write reviews. Can organize special bonus programs or a compliment from the institution (if we are talking about a cafe or restaurant).

Hidden promotion. Brands are increasingly turning to hidden marketing: it is respectful to the consumer, does not steal his time or give something in return. As part of the ORM, the company will be mentioned in a positive light in the media or influencer blogs.

Article marketing. We create image articles for display in the top 10 search engines. They can also be placed on the largest Runet portals. They are written with an ORM strategy in mind. These can be educational materials, news collections or useful articles. Unlike, say, contextual advertising, image content has a long lifespan, a high level of trust and customer involvement.

What kind of business is reputation management suitable for?

Reputation is a long-term investment. SERM and ORM are worth paying attention to for businesses that rely on a lasting effect from promotion. The results won't show up right away. It takes one to three weeks to launch an article. Then it will gain a foothold in the top of the search results and will not require serious efforts to maintain.

Businesses with an established reputation need SERM and ORM to clean up the negative, increase the popularity of positive mentions. Image management is a must for victims of negativity on the Internet. The services of experienced negotiators will cost many times cheaper possible problems with the negatives and the haters.

You can conduct an image audit on the Internet using the Reputation.Moscow agency calculator. On the market, this service costs from 70,000 rubles, but with us it is free.

As part of SERM and ORM, we removed 1,200 negative web pages and 10,000 negative reviews.
We will develop and conduct a viral campaign or viral content within the framework of ORM. The minimum reach is 50,000 views.
The rights of the parties are enshrined in the contract. When ordering, we form a clear KPI of work: how many views, comments or other ORM indicators.

If necessary, we will discuss SERM and ORM issues 24/7. Write to e-mail, call or use another communication channel. If we do not master the scope of work, we will return the unearned money. We will then provide a detailed report.

Bourgeois love to invent all sorts of tricky things. One of the things they came up with is called SERM - Search engine reputation management. In Runet, the thing is still little known, but in the West they are already offering services in this direction with might and main.

The essence of SERM is to improve reputation, and this improvement is achieved using traditional SEO tools. Roughly speaking, everything is done so that users see only positive reviews about the company, firm, etc. in the top ten search results and do not see negative ones. SERM services typically include:

Creating positive websites about you or your company
Moving negative information off the first page of search results
Moving positive sites to the top positions
Create positive PR
Reduce negative PR
Make it so that people who will search for information see the content they need

In general, it is clear that SERM is a rather dubious moral technique aimed at manipulating the opinion of the masses. But the bourgeois, of course, would not be bourgeois if they did not try to present everything differently - as a useful technique, pursuing exclusively good goals. Below is my free short translation of one bourgeois article about SERM.

Why do you need to do SERM?

Remember the game of "broken phone"? Listening to a story retold by several people in their own way, one can have a good laugh at the result. A couple of years after I graduated from college, I met an old high school friend. In a brief conversation, I mentioned that I was in the "commodity business." Nothing special, right? However, forward to the meeting that took place 10 years later.

At least ten people came up to me and asked, “How are you, I heard that you are in the modeling business?” I wondered: “What? In what model? I'm in the commodity business!" I was somewhat taken aback by this fact, especially considering that I have nothing to do with my appearance in the modeling business.

I finally ran into the guy I was talking about at the beginning and the first thing he said was “Hi, the last time I spoke to you, did you say you were in the modeling business, and how are you?” "Aha!" - here it is the source of rumors about my modeling career! Obviously, he mixed up the words by mistake, and this is where the whole story begins. Sounds a lot like playing "broken phone", doesn't it?

Basically, we just laughed at this story and that's it, but I could imagine how someone chuckles that a guy like me chose a modeling career. And that would be bad for my reputation.

A rumor can quickly turn into a bad name for your business.

There is nothing special in the story that I told about, but you can pay attention to 2 things. Firstly, I never knew that there were rumors and secondly, since I did not know about it, I did not take any action to correct it. What if it did some damage? What if the same story happened to your business? The rumor can quickly get out of hand, and if enough people find out about it, it takes on a life of its own.

Several years ago, Intel got involved in a discussion about one of their chips. At first they ignored the rumor, then they denied it, and when they finally began to oppose it, it was already too late. The incident cost them millions. Much has changed since then. When it comes to your online presence, a single blog post or forum post is enough. The news spreads like a virus.

Your business reputation may suddenly suffer damage, image problems will arise, which will affect your profits. Without constant online monitoring of your reputation, trademarks and copyrighted materials, you risk missing out on damaging public opinion about you and inappropriate use of your brand. But if you know about the negative information about your business and what to do with it, then the difference in its impact will be huge ... But how are you supposed to track all these things? Why should you worry...

Negative information about your company that is buried on the 200th page of the SERPs has little impact, but the TOP 10 will definitely have an impact. Search engines are the preferred source for collecting information about everything, and they are used by Internet users everywhere. The problem is that the good, the bad, and the ugly show up in search engine rankings. This is influenced by search conditions and proprietary algorithms search engine. The search engine will rank any textual content, regardless of the source. Maybe good, maybe bad.

Where can damaging content come from? These are forums, blogs, hate sites, propaganda sites and consumer sites, sites from disgruntled workers, unions, business partners, sites created by some law firms. Subject to some content optimization dangerous information can easily land on the first page of search results for many key phrases related to your company. In the case of Google, this will be the first ten results.

From my point of view, the biggest threat may come from blogs. Since individual internet geeks started blogging, the number of blogs has skyrocketed and will continue to grow at a rapid pace. At some point in the future, they will outnumber regular sites! At the same time, blogs often collect different content.

While it can take months to get to the top for harmful content from regular sites, a blog can get into the top 10 faster than you can run out of a burning house. A blog can be set up in minutes and is accessible to any idiot, blogs are free or very inexpensive, come with RSS feeds, news feeds, and are filled with the frequently updated text content that search engine bots love.

Can the lack of reputation management put the business at risk?

Your reputation is an integral part of your business. If your customer service selling proposition is outstanding, information that calls that into question can be very damaging. At the same time, the risk to reputation arises both from real shortcomings in the work, and from false, misleading information. All this affects:

Corporate image
Regulatory Issues
Branding
Share prices
Yield
Products / services

Often, inexperienced or unscrupulous agencies offer a SERM service to a client, but in fact they mean ORM.

ORM(Online Reputation Management) - reputation management on the Internet. In this case, automatic services look for brand reviews within their own index base.

SERM(Search Engine Reputation Management) - reputation management in search results. Here, in addition to monitoring revocable resources, an analysis of the sites of the first page of search engine results is carried out.

Thus, the agency forms the picture that the user sees when they are going to study reviews about the company or leave their own. In addition, specialists also come to the attention of reviews without a company name, which customers leave on popular sites in brand cards.

SERMometer search results analyzer interface screenshot

SERM agencies constantly monitor publications in the top of the issue, while ORM specialists look there once a month at best. In the latter case, some of the negative reviews may be ignored.

What to do: check with the agency with what frequency the issuance analysis will be carried out. If we are talking about weeks or months, it is meaningless.

Sign 2. Large-scale goals

Some reputation managers promise to track brand mentions on all Russian sites. However, there are several million resources in Runet and SERM tools are not able to cover everything.

Automatic services that search through their own database of sites monitor 5-10% of Russian resources. And search results are analyzed on the first page, because users rarely go further. And if the customer works in several regions, the results of each city are analyzed separately, because different sites are in the top of the results of Voronezh and Krasnoyarsk.

It makes no sense to evaluate search results in Russia as a whole: each user has restrictions on a specific region and few people specifically expand their search throughout the country.

Therefore, competent specialists do not promise to cover the entire Runet, but focus on specific review sites.

What to do: if a specialist promises to analyze the entire Internet, ask how he will do it. Most likely they are trying to scam you.

Sign 3. Limited KPI

One of the main indicators of the effectiveness of reputation management is the level of brand image in the top search results, which is measured using automatic services. It can be positive, neutral or negative.

The task of the agency is to maintain a positive reputation of the brand, no matter how much or positive you have to work out.

However, some experts take only the number of reviews written or worked out as KPI. For example, the contract specifies writing 100 positive and working out 10 negative publications per month. But if 11 negative reviews appear, instead of understanding the problem, the specialist will ignore it and start publishing positive reviews in order to close the first part of the KPI.

What to do: specify how the agency will act if there are negative publications in excess of the monthly norm. In the best case, you will be offered to pay for additional working out. At worst, the contractor will cover the negative with a positive, which is bad.

An unanswered negative customer comment characterizes the company from the negative side.
By posting a large number of positive publications, the agency raises the site in the search results. And if, after 50 good fake reviews, 1 real bad one appears, then potential customers will see it in the search.

Sign 4. Unnatural selection

An important point is the principle of choosing sites for posting reviews and communicating with users.

There are two types of review sites:

First - so-called managed resources, who, at the request of the brand, can remove the negative review after the customer's problem has been resolved.
Second sites - do not delete reviews even according to their authors.

Competent SERM agencies work with the first type of sites, even if they are not in the top of search results. By posting positive reviews on "managed" resources, specialists help them improve their positions in the search. And if a negative about a brand appears on these sites, it can be removed after the problems with consumers are resolved. Thus, sites with positive publications will remain on the first page of the issue.

Most management professionals post positive reviews only on popular resources, many of which are of the second type.

As a result, despite positive posts, negative posts remain at the top of search results.

What to do: ask about the principles of choosing review sites. Correct answer: “We cooperate with “managed sites”. Incorrect answer: "We work on popular sites" or "We work with sites where there is negativity."

Principle 5. We wanted the best, but it turned out as always

Some agencies, posting a lot of positive reviews, don't care about "covering their tracks": they publish posts from one IP address or reviews about different companies from one account. For example, we have come across positive reviews about Moscow employers published from accounts in Kazan.

Reviewers track such fraud, flag unreliable publications and unscrupulous companies. Naturally, these marks negatively affect the reputation of the brand.

Screenshot of a site with reviews about employers

What to do: go to popular sites that can be found by searching for "Brand+reviews" or "Brand+employee reviews". If the resource recognized the forgery and marked 1-2 positive posts, it is worth discussing the situation with the contractor. After three warnings, the mark will appear on the company card and the reputation will be damaged.

Sign 6. Sincere recognition

Most customers prefer not to disclose cooperation with a SERM agency, so it is necessary to communicate with users on behalf of the brand, not the contractor. To do this, most sites give companies the opportunity to create an official profile on the site.

We have come across situations where inexperienced specialists responded to reviews under agency nicknames or their own. As a result of communication, for example, with Reputation Guru or Alexa222, users got the impression that the brand does not participate in the discussion, which means that it is not interested in the opinions of customers.

What to do: do not be lazy and once a month independently monitor the work of the agency on review sites. If the nickname under which specialists communicate with users on behalf of the brand does not correspond to its name, there can be no question of the professionalism of the contractor.