The Verdict: Negative online reviews destroy Google rankings

In 2019, Swiftlylabs analyzed over 100 customer accounts that hired us for both Online Reputation Management (ORM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO), here are the lessons learned:

The process of managing a company’s online reputation differs greatly from SEO. Online Reputation Management Services is about looking good in front of potential customers. SEO is about getting those leads in the first place. Google has avoided answering the question about using sentiment analysis to influence search rankings over and over again.

Many SEO experts believed that having negative sentiment about your company online affected your search rankings. Google managed to dodge the bullet whenever this question arose. While it would only make sense that negative online reviews should affect a company’s search engine rankings, there was no data to prove it.

We worked closely with businesses suffering from bad online reputation due to many online negative reviews. Our strategy focused on reaching out to existing happy customers to get them to share their opinions and experiences with the business online. Since mostly the disgruntled customers are the ones to go public with their experiences with a business, this strategy proved successful.

Most customers started seeing real positive online reviews dominating Google search results and review websites in a matter of weeks. Since all customers from this study hired us for both Online Reputation…