A lot of us spend most of our ‘search engine’ focus competing against other sites that rank high in our niches, often toggling back and forth for the top spot. BUT sometimes your biggest competitor can be yourself.

And this is why every successful campaign (organic or PPC) needs a good SERM (search engine reputation management) campaign behind it. If you’re not keeping an eye out for yourself, a single piece of negative press about you or your product can pop up and taint your search results.

Take United Airlines for an example. Word spread quickly that they had a pilot Arrested in an international airport for trying to fly DRUNK. If you were to Google ‘United Airlines’ at that time, some of the top Google results included youtube videos and articles spreading the negative press about the fiasco. Not exactly what you want searches seeing when they Google you, right?

When you take into consideration instances like these, you can see how NOT protecting your online reputation has the potential to put a serious halt to your traffic system when negative press shows up just below your blog or sales letter on Google. As far as I’m concerned SERM is part of any search engine campaign (orgainc or PPC), you can’t maintain success with the the latter without practicing the former.

In the end, they both share the goal of keeping you and your products at the top the search engine totem pole (instead of negative press).

One of my top SERM tactics is to set up Google Alerts for keywords like: My name, my products, my colleagues and basically anything that someone might attack that would negatively affect my SEO campaign and search rankings.

What are you guys doing to protect your search rankings? Comment Below.