About a year ago I was maintaining an auto dealer’s seo strategy and it was a bit of a challenge. This dealer spent tens of thousands of dollars regularly advertising their name on radio and print. The problem was that after hearing or seeing the dealer’s ads, people would search for his name and see four of the top ten search results in Google were negative. One search result had “dealership raided by the IRS“, another was a posting on “lemonlaw.com”, one was “dealer getting sued by 50 Cent“, and the last was a posting on “ripoffreport.com”. I could only imagine how much business these negative SERPs were costing the dealer.
One day I received a phone call from the dealership’s lawyer asking me what we could do regarding these negative SERPs. The lawyer and I had a conversation that lasted about 90 minutes and I told him the bottom line: there wasn’t anyway to remove the negative SERPs, but we could push them to the second and third pages. It’s actually a simple process of creating content that’s deemed more relevant than what’s currently appearing. It’s not going to happen overnight and it’s going to take work and patience.
The funny part was after taking a few hours developing a step by step plan of attack and emailing the plan to the dealer, I never heard from him again. After about three months, I started seeing a shift in the SERPs regarding the dealer’s name. It looked like they had implemented a good portion of what I recommended. Never got back a “hey Ryan, thanks for the great plan in helping my Online Reputation Management”. Oh well. I knew my work was solid.
In some later posts, I’ll explain where, how, and why to create certain pieces of content in various websites outside of you own.
