Search Engineering Through A Crisis
Bob Brin, APR, director, Padilla Speer Beardsley Interactive and Creative Services

When a recent virus hit the Internet, a Minneapolis-based software company with an antidote to the bug quickly placed ads on the major search engines and sold tens of thousands of dollars worth of product within a few days.

Opportunity seized.

But can search engines help if you're the software company with the security hole . . . or the manufacturer whose shipping skids to a halt . . . or the employer of the virus developer who used your computers as a Petri dish?

The best counter to crisis, of course, is good, responsible communication about what went wrong, why and what you're doing about it. Search engines can be important when you're in the hot light because they're one of the first places people turn for answers. Of course, just how aggressively you use those tools depends on the situation and your crisis-management plan.

Following are approaches that a communications strategist will want to consider in crisis planning and response.

• Post your response. Obviously, you need content for a search engine to find. Create a mini-site or subsection to your site and promote its presence on the home page of your site. You may want to consider a separate site with a unique Web address, such as WidgetRecall.com.

As part of their crisis-response strategy, many companies now create "dark" sites, essentially Web page templates that are kept offline but ready to populate with content and go live immediately at the onset of a crisis.

• Optimize your site/subsection. Referred to as coding or tagging, optimizing your site is mostly about content, or what we used to call text back in the 1900s. Every page should have unique title and description tags with the important keywords that correspond with the actual text on the page. For example, if the page is about an asbestos-cleanup timeline, those words should be used in the tags and content of the page.

• Submit it. Next, you need to get your site or pages submitted or registered with the top directories and search engines. This is best done manually, one at a time, but some offer services offer to ensure that your site gets "spidered" every 48 hours. This means the search engine sends a software robot (the spider) that acts as a content scout, reviewing your site and testing its worthiness for a high ranking on the engine.

• Consider pay-per-click ads. It may seem counter-intuitive at first — paying to have people learn about your crisis. But pay-per-click ads — the sponsored links that are served up with search engine results — have two great benefits: speed and control. You decide when — to the minute — your message begins to appear and when it disappears. You can also control the geographic distribution of that message to some degree. As we all know from our own searches, the engines aren't always good at house cleaning and a top-ranked site in the natural (as in non-paid) listings can take you to long-gone pages.

• Use the wires. Get out a press release with the address to your special crisis site or page. PRNewswire and Businesswire content is frequently picked up by the major search engines, plus many Web sites aggregate related news into their sites.

• Blog on. A blog, or Web log, is essentially an online diary or log of information and events around a certain topic. Because of their depth of content and the cross-linking among blogs, they can have a big impact on search engine rankings.

Similar to pitching a story to a reporter, you may want to suggest that your site be mentioned on some existing blogs. Or create your own blog and have your quality or security expert, for example, openly discuss the topic, and post updates and developments as they occur. Entries can be frequent or every few days. A blog is easy to set up, and often much of the content is linked from other sites and blogs. Blogs can be a great way to bring in news items, links and postings to give the topic greater context and credibility, along with your own commentary or statements.

With your reputation and business on the line in a crisis situation, a rapid, professional and honest response is vital. You also want to ensure that customers, employees, reporters and other stakeholders hear your message directly from you. Because many will use search engines to find out what happened and what they can do about it, search engine strategy should be included in your overall crisis-management plan.