How to Repair & Recover Negative Brand Mentions in SERPs
Brand mentions boost online trust and visibility, acting as digital word-of-mouth—even without links.
How to Repair & Recover Negative Brand Mentions in SERPs
Brand mentions are all about how you stay front-of-mind for people online, whether they’re talking about your brand, your products, or your company directly, or just referring to you in passing. And this can happen with or without a link.
Brand mentions are essentially every time your brand shows up online, whether someone links to your site or not. It’s digital word-of-mouth. And there’s research to back this up over 70% of consumers trust brand mentions more than traditional ads.
Any time someone mentions your brand name online, without necessarily linking to you, that’s a brand mention. It’s like a signal to search engines that you exist.
In today’s world of AI-driven search results and Google’s obsession with entities, brand mentions are becoming just as meaningful as backlinks.
Negative Brand Mentions in SERPs impact your small business, pushing down your website and scaring away potential customers. You can act fast with posts on social media or rebuild trust over time by fixing relationships with the audience. Use tools like Google Alerts or SEMrush to monitor mentions and act fast.
Even one bad review or article can lower positive content, making it harder for the audience to focus on the good parts of your brand. Here are step-by-step process to turn bad press into good results on SERPs
- Acknowledge Mistakes Openly
- Produce Positive Content Swiftly
- Request Content Updates
- Improve Local SEO Performance
- Communicate Directly with Customers
- Focus on Public Relations Efforts
- Track Keywords Regularly
- Consider Hiring SEO Experts if Needed
Diagnosing the Root Cause of the Negative Sentiment
- What event or series of happening triggered the negative response?
- How did this trigger impact the audience? (specify and explicit here. Generalization are not helpful)
- Why did this trigger the industry to such an extent? (Be explicit here)
- How toxic is the relationship? You need to know how damaged the relationship is, and you have to be consciously aware of it.
Getting Out of Comfort Zone and Being Transparent
It is a process. Need to reinforce to your audience that you are constantly engaging in that process and don’t take their trust for granted.
It’s because the relationships that brands have with their audience work just the way our personal relationships do.
That means a new level of transparency and vulnerability is needed.
Changing the Narrative Sets Everything Else in Motion
In the end, if you are doing it for creating engagement and audience interest is exactly what you are looking for. There should not be a result change or an article rewritten.
Negative Branded SERPs
- Monitor The Brand SERP
- Cannibalise the Brand SERP
- Claim some negative keywords
- Respond to Negative Content
- Create Positive PR and expose it
- Use Structured data to gain attention for the site over others
Monitor The Brand SERP
Check the SERP once a day. See if there is anything negative there and try to control it.
The easiest way to monitor the brand is to create a Google Alert, because it can deal with a range of search terms to monitor.
For examples: “ryanair” - site:ryanair.com
This monitors the term “ryanair” from all of the web except from its own domain. This alert may populate a lot of results, but it is something they should monitor to maintain brand reputation.
Cannibalise the Brand SERP
The brand SERP may have some negative results in there so ensure you sign up to as many relevant profile based sites and networks that can cannibalise the negative results. Some of the social profiles that brands can easily claim include Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and Quora.
Ensure that content is regularly published and would rank on page 1 for your brand rather than providing a chance of negative results.
Claim Some Negative Keywords
other keywords relating to the brand should also be monitored and controlled. One example is Google’s autosuggest that pops up as you’re entering your search term. You can also scroll to the bottom of page 1 and see if any related searches give you other terms.
Respond to Negative Content
Speak to the brand’s customer service and social media team and ensure that any negative feedback is replied to by the brand itself. Not only does this portray good service to the unsatisfied customer by trying to resolve the issue, but potential new customers will notice that the brand is actively trying to solve issues outside of their own website. This proactive approach may help to minimise negative feedback and also improve the brand’s general reputation.
Create Positive PR and Expose it
Positive online presence is the goal – so produce positive content and publish it. Use your social profiles to mention that good press, as well as link to it from your site.
This will, in effect, be a small link-building task to a third-party site, but it will help that site rank for the positive press that the brand deserves.
Use Structured Data to Gain Attention for the Site Over Others
Google can use structured data to provide the searcher with more relevant information right in the SERP itself. Examples include star rating systems and author images by the side of the result.
When the result has structured data there is more of a chance that a searcher will be drawn to that result over the normal results underneath
