Online Reputation Management: An Increasingly Needed Industry

Online Reputation Management, or Online Brand Management, is quickly becoming an essential part of business. With companies’ presence now being so heavily weighted towards the online side of things, it is becoming increasingly easy for a damaged reputation to spread and cost businesses customer interest and money.  Online Reputation Management is all about clearing up any negative information there is about a person or business online. Think about it, if you search for a certain company using a search engine and the first page of results is filled with negative reviews and bad press, the chances of you using the company are pretty much nil.

It is next to impossible to actually get this information deleted off Google or another search engine. Therefore, the best way to tackle the situation is to use search engine optimisation to knock it down off page one. Search engine optimisation is an “organic” way of getting websites to be ranked highly in search engine results pages, i.e. methods such as link building are used to get results, rather than simply paying to be the top result on Google.

Baring this in mind, if positive content is created about a company or person, this can be boosted up using SEO, which, in turn, knocks down the negative content. This positive content can come in various forms. For example, social networking profiles can be created on sites such as Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter.

Reputation Management companies are becoming more and more common as the need for the service they provide rises. And it’s not surprising; statistics show that 79% of Brits look for reviews on search engines such as Google and 75% of Brits would change their mind about a purchase after reading three bad reviews. Further, it is rare for someone to search directly for the exact URL of a website. Instead they will search the company or organisation’s name in a search engine like Google; statistics show a huge 63% of people do so. It seems, then, that search engines really do hold an immense power over the success of a business, or the reputation of an individual person!

The industry is a fascinating one and still fairly new, but is unarguably needed for businesses to survive in the online world. The internet is so accessible across the globe now that it is certainly not hard for bad news to spread. With negative reviews being an unavoidable part of most businesses, Online Reputation Management really could save a company from failing.