How to Pro­tect & Improve Your Online Reputation

In the old days, cor­po­rate rep­u­ta­tion man­age­ment was a rel­a­tively sim­ple strategy…

You could 1) sim­ply wait for con­sumers to for­get the bad things they saw about your busi­ness in news­pa­pers and on TV; or 2) hire a PR firm to help you improve the public’s per­cep­tion of your brand.

Today, how­ever, the global mar­ket­place is much more com­plex. The Inter­net has totally changed the way that con­sumers think and feel about your business.

• Angry cus­tomers take to the Web to crit­i­cize your business
• Neg­a­tive com­ments become viral and vis­i­ble to mil­lions of consumers
• Bad sen­ti­ment grows out of con­trol in social media, forums and review sites
• Dam­ag­ing mes­sages begin to appear at the top of search results in Google, Yahoo & Bing
• Your tar­nished rep­u­ta­tion has dev­as­tat­ing effects on your busi­ness performance

Even just one sin­gle bad com­ment can begin to neg­a­tively impact your bot­tom line, espe­cially when it becomes more vis­i­ble in search engines.

But unlike old-fashioned news­pa­pers and TV news reports, those com­ments don’t become dis­tant mem­o­ries as time goes by. Once they’re on the Inter­net, they are typ­i­cally stuck there for­ever, able to be found by poten­tial cus­tomers for years.

If you’re not imple­ment­ing a web-focused cor­po­rate rep­u­ta­tion man­age­ment strat­egy, then you’re putting your busi­ness at risk. In fact, your rep­u­ta­tion may already be get­ting attacked online, and you might not even real­ize it.

What is Online Cor­po­rate Rep­u­ta­tion Man­age­ment?

Online rep­u­ta­tion man­age­ment ser­vices are designed to help busi­nesses defend their brand in the extremely volatile Inter­net marketplace.

In gen­eral, you do not have any power over what con­sumers say about you online. When con­sumers have a not-so-good expe­ri­ence with your prod­ucts, ser­vices, or even your staff, they are very likely to post about it online. You have no con­trol over this.

➜ You can’t stop con­sumers from writ­ing angry reviews and tes­ti­mo­ni­als.
➜ You can’t delete those com­ments when they are posted on out­side web­sites.
➜ You can’t pre­vent peo­ple from shar­ing their bad expe­ri­ences on social net­works like Face­book and Twit­ter.
➜ You can’t take back the harm­ful effects of a neg­a­tive story that has gone viral.

You can do your best to mit­i­gate the issue by directly address­ing indi­vid­ual com­ments and shar­ing “your side” of the story and your attempts to resolve the issues. But that still won’t stop those dam­ag­ing com­ments from being found online.

In order to effec­tively pre­vent those com­ments from being found by other poten­tial cus­tomers in the future, then you need a way to con­trol the vis­i­bil­ity of the com­ments themselves.

That’s where online cor­po­rate rep­u­ta­tion man­age­ment comes in.

Go After the Cul­prit: Bad Search Results!

You might not imme­di­ately think of Google or Yahoo as being the “cul­prit” behind your tar­nished reputation.

Sure, it’s the angry con­sumer who started it. But once the major search engines begin to promi­nently dis­play those neg­a­tive mes­sages in their search results, that’s when things go bad.

An effec­tive cor­po­rate rep­u­ta­tion man­age­ment sys­tem can help make sure those com­ments are out of sight from the peo­ple search­ing for your busi­ness in Google.

Why are search results so harm­ful? Think about it:

• Every day, peo­ple search for your busi­ness online, or for key­words that are related to your products.
• Neg­a­tive reviews can eas­ily appear at the top of these results, espe­cially if they have been on the Inter­net for a while, are heav­ily clicked on, or are linked from all over the Internet.
• Those neg­a­tive sug­ges­tions often con­tain words like “scam,” “rip-off” or “stay away” – which sti­fle your organic traffic.
• Your poten­tial cus­tomers see those bad search results, lose trust in you, and imme­di­ately choose to visit another site.
• This sce­nario could be repeat­ing itself sev­eral times a day, caus­ing you to lose hun­dreds of poten­tial cus­tomers, month after month.

When imple­mented cor­rectly, web-focused cor­po­rate rep­u­ta­tion man­age­ment can help you pre­vent peo­ple from find­ing those dam­ag­ing tes­ti­mo­ni­als, while also improv­ing your online rep­u­ta­tion overall.

A Fresh Approach with Out­stand­ing Results

FreshRep­u­ta­tion is a web-focused cor­po­rate rep­u­ta­tion man­age­ment sys­tem that helps you pro­tect your com­pany rep­u­ta­tion in the online marketplace.

Based on the pro­pri­etary tech­nol­ogy and proven SEO strate­gies devel­oped by FreshRank­ings, FreshRep­u­ta­tion helps you con­trol the mes­sag­ing that appears about your busi­ness in search results.

Our Approach:

1. We aggres­sively pro­mote pos­i­tive con­tent to out­weigh the neg­a­tive on major search engines.
2. Neg­a­tive sug­ges­tions are effec­tively removed from sight of peo­ple search­ing for your business.
3. Even after bad terms are cleaned up, we keep push­ing more pos­i­tive con­tent to improve the public’s per­cep­tion of your brand and pre­vent neg­a­tive sug­ges­tions from com­ing back.

As part of ongo­ing rep­u­ta­tion mon­i­tor­ing, we take screen­shots for all terms that show neg­a­tive results and re-adjust our strat­egy to ensure every­thing is cleaned up.

Clients get real-time access to our Fresh­Metrics™ inter­face, which shows the results of our efforts, includ­ing dates when tar­geted tags have been removed, as well as increases in organic traf­fic to your website.

Our SEO-based strate­gies have helped clients triple their prof­its, see­ing increases of mil­lions of dol­lars in less than a year. Part­ner with us and see how our cor­po­rate rep­u­ta­tion man­age­ment sys­tem can help your busi­ness restore its online reputation.

Con­tact us to learn more about Cor­po­rate Rep­u­ta­tion Management.