Everyone is aware of the dire necessity of online reputation management but the question is – how to do it the right way? Online reputation management is both an art and a science and you must bring to limelight all positive things said about you and drive away all sporadic negative comments to the third or fourth page of search results.
It is said if you do not zealously monitor your online reputation, someone is always there ready and waiting to ruin it. If you are not already aware, please know search engines are becoming more and more sophisticated and several advancements have been made in recent times that include – Universal search/Personalized search/Enhanced search /Rich snippets
There are thus lot more opportunities than ever before to rank high negative or adverse comments about you. If you do not continually preserve and protect your online reputation, some unethical competitor or a disgruntled former employee can easily post a slanderous comment, create a mischievous blog post, develop a hate site or file a complaint to destroy your reputation.
Highlighting the positive reviews about you and deliberately suppressing all adverse comments is not an immodest or shameless act but a means of defense to safeguard your online reputation.
It is common knowledge that most users do not look past the first page or two of search results. To assess how your reputation is faring online, you can start with simple searches on all major search engines using your name, your company name, your brand, your products etc.
To get the most accurate search results, first log out of your account on the search engines or, if you’re searching on Google, use a shortcut for disabled personalized search.
Try to record how many reviews/comments about you or your company were positive and how many negative. These numbers will indicate to you how intensely you need to build or manage your online reputation.
If you find that you have a number of search results that make no mention about you (especially in the top 10), you should immediately start building your online reputation.
If you are not prominent in your search results, then it is much easier for some nasty comments about you to creep to the top. You have to be proactive about creating your online reputation or else you leave yourself vulnerable for someone to ruin it for you.
Since managing online reputation the right way calls for a fair degree of expertise and is also time-consuming, you are well advised to hire the services of professional ORM agencies for nominal fees.