It is common knowledge that it takes a lot of time and effort to build and sustain a company’s online reputation.
When opinions are expressed about your company in an environment as fragile as the internet, where content can be posted by anyone to a large audience, the results can really hurt one’s online reputation.
People use the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, or MSN to gather information. Whether you like it or not – they rely on the content they find to make decisions. More importantly, they rely on the content they find on the first page of the search engine listing.
Thus, Online Reputation Management (ORM) has become essential nowadays. Internet has come to stay and more and more businesses are participating in online marketing strategies. In such a scenario, you have to protect your company reputation from negative bloggers and even defamatory content submitted anonymously from business competitors or disgruntled employees.
Data from a recent survey s reveal that 74% of consumers choose companies/brands based on others’ customer care experiences shared online. For most people, the information they read online influences their buying decisions.
The unfortunate aspect is defamatory content quickly make its way to the top of the search engine results and ruins your business reputation.
Remember that “Search engines rank by relevancy and not by quality”. Therefore, untruths and misinformation can be spread more easily than positive reviews. This is why online reputation management is critical to your success.
You have to effectively manage your online reputation and successfully handle negative and defamatory content against your company. Briefly stated, ORM is to control what the potential customers view about your company.
There are many SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) marketing strategies that suggest how you can manage your online reputation and claim front page rankings of the search results.
You should specifically move all the negative content to lower pages of search engine results. Some of these online reputation management tactics are: develop your own website (or multiple sites), creating quality content, blogging on regular basis, submitting videos to youtube.com, and creating powerful social network profiles that can show up in the search results.
Then you must engage in a link building strategy to ensure these sites rank well on the search engines.
Online reputation management provides marketing stability, effectively combats against defamation, and most importantly, allows a company to “put its best face forward in the online world”.