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Reverse SEO’s importance never became more apparent than it did a couple of weeks ago. I got a call from a potential client — we’ll call him Ken H. Block — who had a Google problem.

Ken was a former sports anchor, well-known to sports fans in his area, and has been online for years. He does video marketing for a couple of very large, multi-national companies, as well as some smaller clients. He banked on his name, but hadn’t done very much to promote it. The problem was that there was another man — Ken S. Block, a convicted felon and scam artist — who had the same name. The problem became obvious when the CEO of one of the companies had Googled his name, and found Ken S. He knew Ken H. was not Ken S., but he couldn’t resist teasing him about it. During a phone call with other company executives.

Ken H needed some reverse SEO badly.

What is Reverse SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of optimizing your website so it appears at the top of search engine results. Conversely, reverse SEO means you push down unwanted, negative results by piling your pages on top of the negative one, pushing it right off the page.

Most people only have to worry about name doubles stealing their thunder, but Ken H. had a problem with people confusing him with a convicted felon. While it wasn’t an issue for the people who knew Ken, it could be a problem for the people who wanted to hire him. And short of paying for a Google Ad that said, “Ken S. Block the felon is not to be confused with Ken H. Block the video marketer,” reverse SEO was going to be his best option.

What can Reverse SEO do for me?

Since Ken H’s search results were a single blog post, it doesn’t look like it will be that difficult to knock from the top rank. But it is not always this easy. We know people who share names with other notable people, and they have worked hard to maintain a top search ranking. One friend shares a similar name with a Big Ten running back, which can sometimes lead to some interesting search results.

There are only a few steps we would need to take for Ken S, but we need to do them many times until we achieve the desired result.

• Blogging is the primary tool in our reverse SEO toolbox, and should be the hub in your social media campaign. Ken H should blog about anything and everything related to his work. He should also write about the Ken S./Ken H. confusion (“I am not Ken S. Block”), and try to focus on getting that as a featured post so people will find it during future searches. By winning searches with that post, he can reverse SEO the Ken S. Block page down from the top position.
• YouTube videos are a great reverse SEO tool. And since Ken H. is a video marketer, he needs to use video to promote his work anyway. And as videos become more popular, easier to access, and available on mobile devices, this will become more important in reverse SEO campaigns.
• Backlink to your website. This is a practice for regular SEO, so you know it’s going to work for reverse SEO too. Basically, the search engines put more stock into websites with a lot of links going into them (that’s a backlink). The more you have, the higher your site appears. In Ken H’s case, if he were to increase his backlinks, his blog will rise to the top of the rankings, which will push Ken S’ name down.

Reverse SEO is not that difficult. It’s just time consuming. You can’t just do a couple of optimization tricks and sit back and relax. These steps need to be repeated many times, and in the right places, if you’re going to have a successful reverse SEO campaign.