Importance of Crisis Management
It’s important to keep in mind that whether a business knows it or not, they have the potential to face a public relations disaster at any time. An effective way to prevent a PR catastrophe is to avoid any activity or behavior that goes against the values and ethics of the company. This is a form of crisis prevention. If the potential damage to the company is significant, the public finds out, or a regulatory body takes notice, it is a crisis that threatens the very existence of the organization. An unethical executive decision, while not illegal, has the potential to ruin a company’s reputation. Crisis management in this instance might be a new executive decision and a PR campaign to inform the public of the actions and demonstrate the positive impact on the company and/or customers.
There are different types of methods a business may use to manage a crisis. For instance, some may reduce the harm of the crisis by issuing an apology to the public and admitting they were wrong, and then explaining what they intend to do to resolve the situation. Crisis management is used in a few different scenarios such as a natural disaster that affects businesses and people, an act of terrorism, or a criminal act such as theft or assault. Given the different arenas in which a crisis can take place, crisis management is a procedure to address all aspects of the crisis, rather than just one.
Crisis management can be described as the process that an individual or a business goes through to handle a crisis situation. This can either make or break a company. Its purpose is to reduce the harmful effects of the crisis, which in turn helps the company recover much quicker.
Role of SEO Services
Search engine optimization (SEO) is nowadays widely accepted as a chief way in which businesses can uphold their online presence in the aftermath of the crisis. By reinforcing rankings in search engines, businesses can take hold of the attention of their customers and start to influence the information available whilst diluting the impact of harmful content.
SEO Strategies for Crisis Management
Reputation management The form of reputation management discussed in this essay has already been touched on. It is essentially an SEO service campaign to rank search results. However, there are other forms of reputation management, such as utilizing the “right to be forgotten,” which is a legal mandate in the European Union allowing individuals to request removal of search results that are inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant, or excessive. This is a reasonably controversial topic with concerns that it may impede the freedom of the press. The decision to delist information that is in the public interest remains a responsibility of search engines, and it is ultimately another method to remove negative search results.
Content creation and optimization The strategy mentioned above requires adequate and well-written content to compete with existing search results. Content creation forms the basis for any SEO campaign, and it is crucial to ensure any content created appears professional and is well written. It is often worth employing professional copywriters to create content as it will yield better results. Testing the content to see if it ranks above the negative search results is also an effective way to measure how much content needs to be created. In some cases, a few blog or article posts may be enough to outrank the negative information. In other cases, complete websites may need to be created when the negative search results are tied to a person or company name. The quality and structure of the content are important; however, the most crucial aspect is the optimization.
The best strategy to suppress negative publicity online is to push down the information within the search results. In most cases, people do not search past the first few pages of search results. Therefore, if the negative information is pushed to the third page of Google, for example, then it is less likely to be found. Modern keyword optimization with the aim of suppressing negative information involves identifying the keywords associated with the negative information and then creating and optimizing content for those keywords with the purpose of ranking above the negative search results. This essentially creates neutral or positive content relating to the keywords, taking the place of the negative information.
Keyword Optimization
As an important element in SEO efforts, using the right keyword selection can easily determine the success of a campaign. The use of crisis-specific keywords is needed so that your efforts can be targeted and not wasted. For example, in the Asian bird flu crisis, 2 years ago, global internet users were more often seeking information on prevention efforts and ways of overcoming this problem, compared to those seeking general information on bird flu. If a company involved in bird flu research and has just made a new drug to combat this virus, using general bird flu keywords would not benefit them, because the segment of internet users they are targeting would be people with bird flu or health problems related to bird flu. With optimization and the right keyword selection, they will be able to find a drug manufacturer company with a search engine. This process would be a long time coming unless they use the right methods. If they’re lucky, SEO efforts would put them on the first page of search engine results, or worse case is being among the top 20, where CTR (click through rate) from search results is still relatively low. This would give them a significant increase to traffic on their website. Tuning with the chosen keywords, and then see that this traffic has great potential. If there’s not a significant increase in VC (visitor conversion) to people looking for services, they still have a chance to alter the optimization or keyword selection. On the other hand, if it an alternative way to obtain maximum results, see back the effectiveness of VC to get a new drug users, because of significantly increased traffic would be out of the predicted, explain it to visitors is a good opportunity with the help of live chat.
Content Creation and Optimization
In all cases, the content must be optimized to suit the needs and requirements of the campaign and its target audience.
Queries relating to the crisis event can serve as a source of ideas for negative material that needs to be counterbalanced with positive spin. When creating positive material, it is important that it touches on the issues and provides direction to further related information, rather than generic content that has no focus.
The first stage of content creation is idea generation and planning. Creating a content calendar is an effective way for all parties to visualize and understand what content is being created and when it will be distributed. This assists in avoiding confusion and maintains an effective organizational structure.
Crisis management SEO campaign strategy requirements may be different depending on the needs of the campaign. A site-wide SEO strategy for an event that has caused a global effect may be to create an independent micro-site to share all the information, developments, and actions. On the other hand, a more general approach, where the aim is to improve public opinion, would simply involve creating additional positive material.
Content creation plays a vital role in any SEO strategy, whether it is used for crisis management or otherwise. It is important that the content is distributed to the masses and generates a buzz to serve its purpose.
Reputation Management
One of the reasons reputation management is so effective in conjunction with SEO is due to the amount of information involved. When an online crisis occurs, there is always a large amount of easily available information detailing what happened, why it happened, who was affected, and what was/will be done to prevent it from happening again. This goes back to the “information is king” concept, and the more available information there is, the easier it is to put ranking strategies in place. The many different channels of online media used to disperse information during crises (websites, news, blogs) provide good opportunities to rank, and SEO companies can afford to be more aggressive with their strategies because in a worst-case scenario, there is further damage to the reputation which an SEO strategy could attempt to recover.
Reputation management is an important and delicate issue during crises. It is always the case that a company’s reputation takes a hit when there is a crisis. During an online crisis, this can be even worse as information, whether it is true or false, is so quickly obtained and so widely spread. As a result, a negative online reputation created during a crisis can have a long-term impact on offline sales and reputation. SEO services often play a big role in recovery from online crises, and this involvement in crisis management and recovery is often a favorite and more rewarding task for a client.
