Google Insurance. Why you can’t afford to be unprotected.

A new year is approaching and we’re starting to see a new turn in Internet Marketing. I have this conversion about once a week with new clients and most find this topic both fascinating and frightening at the same time–so I felt this is the perfect venue to talk about Google Insurance and why every company can’t afford to be without it.

Google Insurance is a series of methologies geared to protecting your business from frustrated customers, nasty competition, and slander via blogs, forums, and other venues that can be used to negatively impact your company’s image. It is important to perform a series of best practices to prevent a bad situation from happening. This can easily be done through regular SEO maintenance.

Consider the following doomsday scenario: You have a profitable business, several employees, large accounts, and a fairly high retention rate. While most of your customers are very satisfied, you have one client who is difficult. This client verbally abuses you, is never satisfied, and spends every waking moment making doing business with them as miserable as possible. You make a decision that it is time to let this particular client go and cut your losses.

The client decides to get revenge and writes a negative rant about you in their blog. A bad situation gets worse when Google crawls the blog, which has a better PageRank, and their blog entry ranks higher than your website. Suddenly, when your company is Googled, that blog entry ranks higher for all of your targeted keywords–including your company name.

New business comes to a complete halt and current clients decide to take their business somewhere else. You consider suing the blogger for slander, but you realize that there is no use. You have no choice but to restructure under a different name and start over.

Although you may not hear about it often, this situation happens every day to companies who fail to take the proper precautions to ensure their website is optimized for the search engines. Proper SEO could have prevented this bad situation from becoming a corporation killer.

Here is a list of things every company should be doing:

• Make sure your PageRank is not “0″. That PageRank is reserved for websites that are new and have not been ranked yet. Sometimes, a “0″ ranking is a result of being delisted from Google because of blackhat SEO.
• Check to see who is linking to you and who you are linking to. Use “link:www.yourdomain.com” in the search query to see what your backlinks are. You should have backlinks with high PageRanks, this will ensure that your PageRank is high and your website is healthy.
• Consider hiring an Internet Marketing firm to manage all aspects of your website’s health.

SEO is not just a method of bringing traffic to our website, it is also a safety mechanism. It is important to understand that in this economy, many companies are getting nastier and many are investing in Internet Marketing firms to enlarge the gap between them and their competition.