The chicken community needs your helpful ideas

[localwork]

Hey Mozzers!

We are currently working on reputation management for a client that sells chicken coops. They've gotten a few nasty reviews from one of the most popular community forums. Given the high DA it will be hard work (understatement of the year) to outrank that forum thread enough to knock it off the first page of SERPs.

I've been brainstorming some unique ideas for the chicken community that could bring a more positive rapport to the product. We've considered an interactive game, polls, content for chicken communities and publications.

Mozzers always have such fantastic insight, I thought I'd open up the brainstorm and see if anyone has a great, unique idea to drive traffic and increase brand engagement and awareness! Thanks so much in advance for your awesome ideas!

[MiriamEllis]

Hey Ryan,

Has the business owner tried to respond and make amends on the high ranking forum? This would be my first choice, even if it's a bad situation, like forum spamming that angered the community or something like that. I'd try to make amends there first. Any hope of that?

[DmitriiK]

Hi there.

We experienced the same issue for one of our clients - bad review was coming on the first page of google results when searching for client's company name. We came up with couple ideas, which can work in theory:

1. Create local listing directories, get reviews there, make it fully filled out, get several backlinks etc. - basically make it one of the main directories. This way, since large directory websites have high DA, they would come up right after client's website, pushing website with bad reviews down. The same idea would work if you can get company on wikipedia etc.

2. Also you can create secondary pages, optimize them for keyword, so you get several results on first page from your domain for the same keyword, again, pushing down the result with bad review.

3. This one is a little tricky/spammy. Create one landing type page website, not duplicate of main domain though, put it on separate domain, optimize it, get backlinks etc. Idea stays the same - hopefully it will come up on first page, pushing down bad review result.

Hope this helps.

[fiberglass]

Though I respect Miriam as a top local SEO, I actually disagree here.  I would suggest not responding to the forum, because this would give it even more weight and ranking authority.

And I don't really know this Dmitrii fellow, but I tend to agree with some of what he's saying.  I've never had a case where we couldn't push something down off out of the top 10 results in Google.

If you can't get other pages to outrank this crazy-powerful forum... then you could always try embracing it, and try and rank a page from that forum that you'd rather show in the search results.  I mean, really know nothing about chicken coops or whatever forum you're talking about... but what if you were to create an established thread in the community showing off innovative chicken coop plans/designs.  You may have to become a paid vendor or sponsor or something before the forum mods let you post something like that in a relevant section of the forum, but if you pay it attention and have the customers to help push it, it could definitely end up outranking the other thread (likely that Google would only display one thread from this forum in the search results) and it would also be great marketing-wise.

[EricaMcGillivray]

Could you work with the popular forum, take in their suggestions for product changes, and then work on a content piece about how the company did this? The chicken community is pretty small, and it seems like it would be more worthwhile to change people minds and work together than just create/build links/whatever to bury it in Google results.

[localwork]

Hello Everyone,

Thanks for the great feedback. My initial response has been similar to your suggestions by trying to establish a more popular thread in the forum. However this community sure knows their stuff about chickens and I can't keep up in conversation. I plan to talk with the business owner to try keeping active as much as he can. I agree that embracing the forum is a great idea because, like I said it's the most popular forum for this community so it can't be ignored. A sponsor might be the way to go here.

I've been creating directories but they haven't landing page one yet, they are close though. With a few backlinks we could break through. I have to say I've never created backlinks to the directory profiles. Best practices for backlinks to directories? A wikipedia page is also a great idea, I'll have to look into that as well.

Thanks again guys. I'd love more suggestions is anyone has more to add!

[DmitriiK]

As for best practices for backlinks to directories = best practices to any website

The only difference - you can actually link to directories from your own website if there is natural placement spot.

[MiriamEllis]

Hey Clint!

Very nice of you to say I see where you are coming from, and like your idea about trying to get a different, positive thread on the same forum to rank higher than the bad discussion. That's very smart, given that Google may only give 1 or 2 spots to the forum in results for a query. Really good thinking! At the same time, though, ignoring the fact that the bad press already exists might be a bit like covering my eyes that I have a really bad review. In my experience, unless the review (or the thread) is totally insane, it represents a chance for me to respond positively and, hopefully, turn bad impressions of the business into good ones.

[EricaMcGillivray]

You want to make sure that you are creating listing on relevant directories, not just directories because they are there and you can put a link on them. Do be careful. You'd hate to have a Penguin cleanup on top of an ORM problem.

[localwork]

Currently the forum is holding the top 2 positions. Awesome point to make that they will only give rankings to one or two spots, and that creating a new thread might replace one of those positions.

As a follow up, I've reached out to the forum to discuss sponsorship opportunities. We have already positively responded to the negative thread so the only opportunity now is to move forward and create a more positive presence within the forum.

I've thought about creating a thread for exact match 'xyz reviews' and within that forum letting the community give their feedback on the product and how it might be improved in the future. Then create that content piece you guys have mentioned on how we can improve.

Maybe taking the Buffer transparency rule here and creating content that says along the lines of here's how we failed you and how that has made us better.