4 Key Steps to Defend­ing Your Business

Rep­u­ta­tion pro­tec­tion can help your busi­ness cre­ate a wall of defense against neg­a­tive com­ments about your brand online.

If you’re not tak­ing proac­tive steps to remov­ing those neg­a­tive asso­ci­a­tions with effec­tive rep­u­ta­tion pro­tec­tion tac­tics, then your bot­tom line will suffer.

Con­sumers today have mil­lions of out­lets to voice their crit­i­cism about your com­pany. All it takes is one of those com­ments to appear in Google results to cause incal­cu­la­ble dam­age to your brand. With­out a solid rep­u­ta­tion pro­tec­tion strat­egy, your busi­ness is defenseless.

Neg­a­tive Com­ments About Your Busi­ness Show Up In Google…Get Rep­u­ta­tion Protection!

- Neg­a­tive com­ments are asso­ci­ated with your brand.
Regard­less of whether user com­plaints are true, they hurt your brand image imme­di­ately. When some­one searches for key­words related to your busi­ness (such as your com­pany name), Google auto­mat­i­cally pro­duces the results that it believes are most help­ful to users.
This means that neg­a­tive com­ments can become the first thing that peo­ple see when they search for you. Those search results can affect not only their imme­di­ate click­ing deci­sion, but also their long-term opin­ion of your brand.

- Drop in web­site traf­fic.
Neg­a­tive reviews and tes­ti­mo­ni­als with terms such as “scam” and “rip-off” can dra­mat­i­cally reduce your nat­ural traf­fic. Peo­ple search­ing for your busi­ness will skip over rel­e­vant links to your offi­cial web­site, sim­ply because they see neg­a­tive sug­ges­tions in the results.

Users will either a) click through to read the entirety of the neg­a­tive review, or b) go directly to a competitor’s web­site. In both sce­nar­ios, you lose. And since an esti­mated 93% of all online traf­fic comes from search, this can trans­late into a seri­ous loss of online traffic.

- Decreased response rates.
Fewer peo­ple vis­it­ing your web­site means that fewer peo­ple will con­tact you. Whether you’ve invested in paid adver­tis­ing online, search engine opti­miza­tion, or other forms of mar­ket­ing, your response rates will begin to drop once neg­a­tive tes­ti­mo­ni­als appear in search results.

If you’ve noticed that your web­site traf­fic has been decreas­ing, it could be a sign that neg­a­tive sug­ges­tions asso­ci­ated with your brand are appear­ing in Google, Bing or Yahoo.

- Drop in sales.
Not sur­pris­ingly, the drop in web­site traf­fic and response rates will hurt your sales tremen­dously. These days, web-based con­sumers make their pur­chas­ing deci­sions in just sec­onds. Just one neg­a­tive remark about your busi­ness is enough to raise red flags and give pause to your prospec­tive customer.

In many cases, that cus­tomer will skip your busi­ness, just because one reviewer has some­thing bad to say about you.

4 Steps to Effec­tive Rep­u­ta­tion Protection

 1) Iden­tify the problem. 

Rep­u­ta­tion pro­tec­tion must begin with a care­ful analy­sis of your cor­po­rate rep­u­ta­tion online, including:

- What peo­ple are say­ing about your busi­ness
– Where the neg­a­tive com­ments are appear­ing
– Which search key­words are caus­ing those neg­a­tive com­ments to appear

This infor­ma­tion will become the foun­da­tion of your rep­u­ta­tion man­age­ment strat­egy. If you’re unsure how to gen­er­ate this data, don’t worry. A pro­fes­sional rep­u­ta­tion pro­tec­tion firm like FreshRep­u­ta­tion will con­duct this research for you.

2) Hire pro­fes­sion­als.
It can be very dif­fi­cult to remove neg­a­tive mes­sag­ing from search results, espe­cially if the mes­sag­ing has appeared for a while already. This is where a pro­fes­sional rep­u­ta­tion pro­tec­tion com­pany can help. Fresh Rep­u­ta­tion, from the SEO experts at FreshRank­ings, offers pow­er­ful rep­u­ta­tion man­age­ment ser­vices for busi­nesses of all sizes. We use pro­pri­etary tech­nol­ogy to help busi­nesses defend their brand online and clean up the neg­a­tive mes­sages that are hurt­ing their business.

Our spe­cial­ists use a proven for­mula to aggres­sively pro­mote pos­i­tive con­tent for your brand. Over time, this con­tent out­weighs the neg­a­tive, remov­ing it from the sight of peo­ple search­ing for you online. It’s extremely effec­tive, and many busi­nesses begin to see sub­stan­tial results within just the first few months.

3) Mea­sure progress.
A cru­cial ele­ment of rep­u­ta­tion pro­tec­tion is ongo­ing mea­sure­ment of the results of your cam­paigns. This gives you clear vis­i­bil­ity of how your brand rep­u­ta­tion is improv­ing on the major search engines.

At FreshRep­u­ta­tion, we con­stantly mon­i­tor results to ensure that our strate­gies are hav­ing a pos­i­tive effect – and that neg­a­tive results don’t come back. We take monthly screen­shots of results on Google, Yahoo and Bing for all search terms that are pro­duc­ing neg­a­tive results. This allows you and our spe­cial­ists to see exactly where to focus our efforts, and it gives you an ongo­ing view of progress.

4) Fine-tune and maintain.

As the “bad stuff” is cleaned up, it will be nec­es­sary to read­just your cam­paigns to focus on other neg­a­tive sug­ges­tions. But you can’t for­get about the ini­tial prob­lem areas either. FreshReputation will con­tinue to pro­mote the pos­i­tive terms to block the neg­a­tive ones from return­ing. Think of this Rep­u­ta­tion Pro­tec­tion like an insur­ance pol­icy to pre­vent fur­ther risk in the future. Due to the con­stantly chang­ing search land­scape, if we stop pro­mot­ing a cam­paign, there is no guar­an­tee that neg­a­tive sug­ges­tions won’t come back.

The best strat­egy is to con­tinue pro­mot­ing pos­i­tive con­tent to not only keep neg­a­tive com­ments removed, but also rein­force a pos­i­tive per­cep­tion of your business.

Call the experts.

See how FreshRep­u­ta­tion can help pro­tect your online reputation.

Our experts will get to know your busi­ness, iden­tify the terms that are pro­duc­ing neg­a­tive con­tent, and imple­ment an effec­tive strat­egy to help you regain con­trol of your online reputation.

Con­tact us today to take advan­tage of rep­u­ta­tion pro­tec­tion.