How can you Protect your Small Business from Negative SEO?

Negative SEO techniques involve someone trying to negatively affect your ranking. Find out how to protect your small business from negative SEO.

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Ramzi Chamat / 8 Ways Media
2016-09-19 09:32:00

When it comes to SEO, everything that you do for your website should be focused on exposing your brand and your business by ranking well in organic SEO results. There are a number of ways to do this, as we have touched upon many times on the 8 Ways Media blog (see here, here and here for some of our top SEO blog posts).

Some of the primary ways to improve your SEO success are to ensure that you incorporate keywords into the content on your website (including blog posts), ensure that all of your images are SEO optimised and having well-written, accurate metadata to support every piece of content that gets published. These are the first steps towards an effective approach to SEO.

Though the above should hold true for absolutely every business out there, there are far too many businesses performing negative SEO techniques. These techniques are not the same as black hat techniques because black hat techniques are techniques designed to dishonestly improve your SEO rankings. Instead, negative SEO techniques involve trying to negatively affect someone else’s rankings so that they stop ranking as well as they currently are.

Listed below are some examples of negative SEO behaviour and things that you can do to ensure that you do not fall victim to them:

Monitor all reviews

Sometimes, competitors will post false reviews about your business in order to give you a negative review. As we’ve mentioned before here on the 8 Ways Media blog, reviews can be very influential in persuading or discouraging potential customers to consider your business, which is why it’s vital to keep a look out for negative reviews and go out of your way to fix them. However, if you feel that a false review has been published, you can quickly and easily report it in order to get it removed.

Keep track of your backlinks

Also known as inbound links, backlinks point to your website from an alternative website. Though backlinks are typically very good for SEO, they can be of detriment if suddenly you experience a surge in backlinks. This means that someone has bombarded your website with spam links. This needs to be taken care of as quickly as possible before it negatively impacts on your website (see here for more information about how to deal with negative backlinks).

Be an industry leader

Finally, if you want your business to go far in life, then it’s essential that you operate honestly, ethically and to the highest quality imaginable. Have a website that you’re proud of; a site brimming with outstanding content that enables you to stand out from the crowd and be perceived as an industry leader. By being the best at what you do, no amount of negative SEO behaviour will be able to bring your business down. 

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