What services does a Reputation Management Company Offer?
Infographic explains different services online reputation management companies provide.
Choosing between different online reputation management companies can sometimes be difficult. Developing a full understanding of the services each specializes in can help make educated decisions when picking the ORM services that will work best for you.
What do online reputation management companies do?
The infographic below explores a few services offered by most companies in the online reputation management (ORM) niche of internet marketing.
Online Review Management Services
Online review management refers to the attempt to monitor and control customer feedback left online, usually on one of a handful of local business directory or review websites such as Yelp, Google My Business, Facebook, CitySearch, Manta, etc.
Online reputation management companies use review management software to help small businesses and large corporations track ratings, respond to customer reviews and improve business listings on dozens of well-known local business review websites.
Case 1: A business with bad online reviews
If its negative reviews on a site like Yelp that are causing damage to your online then your choice is quite simple; you need review management. Review management, however, comes in several forms. Some review management campaigns require search engine suppression while others cases can be fixed by removing negative reviews and/or acquiring more positive reviews from real customers.
Content Removal Online Reputation Management
Online reputation management firms offer content removal services to help clients get unwanted information off the internet. Content removal services offered by online reputation management firms typically fall into one of two general categories:
(1) Internet Privacy — The removal of personal information from online directories, databases and search engine results.
(2) Reputation Repair — The removal of negative information and suppression of unwanted search results
Overlapping categories: It’s worthwhile to note that the different types of online reputation management services explored in this article may overlap. That is, a negative (defamatory) review might call for online review management as well as content removal strategies to be employed. Likewise, the two categories of online reputation content removal services mentioned above may overlap.
Case 2: An individual or business has been slandered online
In many online defamation cases reputation management services are all that are needed to get the libelous content taken down. While certain legal provisions protect webmeisters whom refuse to take down defamatory content, most of the time online reputation companies are able to remove negative information from the internet.
Search Engine Suppression via Reverse SEO
Case 3: A Government website published an negative article about a person or business
News articles, legal documents, etc. published on government websites are notoriously difficult for online reputation management companies to get rid of. Staying within legal boundaries, which all companies are strongly advised to do, government publications (those actually published on .gov sites and not taken from such sites and republished elsewhere) are seldom removed.
In cases like this, where a piece of negative information cannot be all-together removed from a website, allowing it to then be removed from search engines and the internet entirely, an alternative course of action is required — Search Engine Suppression, also referred to as Google Suppression. Search engine suppression involves the creation, publication and promotion of positive, reputation enhancing content. In the process of promoting the content a technique known as Reverse SEO. To understand Reverse SEO and its role in online reputation management a very brief intro to standard SEO is necessary.
Standard SEO aims to identify certain web pages and rank these pages on the top of Google results for a certain set of keywords and, by doing so, increase the web pages search visibility and the amount of visitors it receives through organic traffic, Reverse SEO aim identifies certain problematic web pages, often containing negative or defamatory content, and push these pages as far back on search engine results as possible.
What constitutes success in search engine reputation management campaigns?
In most online reputation repair cases of this sort, getting these, what we in the industry refer to as, negative assets, past page 3 or 4 of Google Search Results for a clients name is generally considered a job well done, especially in the difficult cases, such as those involving a news article or government site publication.
In easier cases, good online reputation management companies are often able to get negative information pushed back to page 8, 9 or 10, and sometimes even beyond. Not that that matters, given that credible studies show only a small fraction of search engine users go beyond the first page of Google when searching for information about something or somebody online.
Originally published at https://onlinereputation.services on January 15, 2016.
