Reputation Management and Keyword Choice

[seoessentials]

I am assisting a company with reputation management. While we know we must use our brand name plus a modifier (or many different modifiers) within our numerous company owned blogs, websites as well as within press releases, blog entries, and article topics - so that we can hopefully get all of our sites to push out the negative ones for the use of our name - the question is whether to simultaneously compete for popular keyword terms to gain more secondary traffic that may not be looking for our company name but product?

If getting more hits on our sites helps our rankings, then would it be worth targeting specific key phrases? Or, should we just focus on our brand name only at this point?

Thanks,

Pamela Ravenwood

SEO Essential Solutions

[SteveOllington]

It would depend on the brand name a bit, and if there are common modifiers that tend to go with it. Just do the usual thing and check using Google instant to see any suggestions that come up, plus check search volumes with the keyword tool. If there's searches for "Buy <brand name="">" then yes it will be worth using "buy" and "item" as a prefix and suffix.</brand>

[saibose]

If you are there just for reputation management, I would advice that you push the brand name mostly. Of course, if you are targeting secondary (read related keywords) which point to the website's offering rather than the brand keywords, you are doing a great service for your client.

You can actually talk to your client letting him know about your intentions so that you maybe credited for the effort.