Your online reputation is your greatest asset, and it must be managed properly. This is a full-time job, and one for which you should enlist the services of an online reputation management company so that it is done right. They will ensure that you always look positive when your prospective and existing customers search for you.
What Does a Reputation Management Company Do?
An online reputation management will focus on your business, brand, or on you, making sure that you look good. They do this by highlighting the positive while at the same time pushing back the negative. Doing this offers a number of key benefits, but the greatest benefit is that you will always appear in a positive light, which in turn attracts more custom to your website.
How Does a Reputation Management Company Do This?
There is a reason why reputation management is a full-time job. The company you hire will:
- Set up alerts so that they know whenever something new, good or bad, is posted about you.
- Engage in SEO (search engine optimization) tactics so that all the positive postings about you are found on the first page of google.
- Engage in reverse SEO to ensure that any negative postings are pushed back to the third page of Google or further.
- Respond to those negative comments that cannot be pushed back so that customers continue to see you in a positive light.
- Attempt to have libelous criticism removed or de-indexed.
As you can see, online reputation management is quite a complex technological field. This is another reason why you should bring in the professionals. Unless your own business is a reputation management business, or you have some personal skills in digital marketing, you simply won’t know what to do. And even if you do, you are likely to be too busy running your business to also take on this task.
So why not simply hire a member of staff to deal with this? There are several reasons for this, but the main one is one of cost. The internet changes at lightning speed. Did you know, for instance, that Google changes its search algorithm just over once every day? While not all of these changes are major, they do all matter. Staying up to date with that requires a significant investment in training. Not just that, but if you have a single member of staff on board to manage your reputation, what would you do if they were off sick or even went on vacation? Your reputation is not something that can wait until tomorrow, but rather something that must be monitored at all times.
By working together with a reputation management company, they ensure a highly trained individual will monitor your online position around the clock. They are responsible for their training and for their replacement should they be absent for whatever reason. Yes, you do have to pay them for this. If you don’t, however, the overall cost doesn’t come anywhere near what it would cost you to lose your business, and that is a very real possibility.
