Online reputation is all about what people see on the first page of search results when they perform a search for you or your company.
If the search throws up negative comments, adverse reviews or unflattering blog, your reputation is under peril.
The most efficient way to protect your online reputation is to get positive websites about your company to rank high while pushing adverse reviews down in the rankings — ideally out of the top 20 search engine results.
This ORM strategy has three pronounced advantages:
• You don’t have to directly confront the creators of the negative sites, who may or may not be cooperative in deleting the comments or forum posts.
• You are in control of ranking of the positive sites, and no longer at the mercy of complainers, critics, or disapproving reviewers who post their opinions online.
• You’re not requesting or compelling anyone to change their content, whether through begging, arm-twisting or legal threats. You’re merely helping those who search on you to see the positive side of your company.
When an online search produces websites containing only positive reviews, complimentary articles, and glowing testimonials, your online reputation will remain well-preserved. You’ll project a much better image to everyone who finds you through search engines. This will enhance your customer base and boost sales.
The way to make sure the positive sites rank higher with the search engines is to perform search engine optimization (SEO). Search Engine Optimization is a combination of relevant, informative content on your web pages and getting other websites to link to those pages.
Google and other search engines determine the relevance of a web page based on how many other websites link to it. The more backlinks you have to your website, the greater the chances that your website will rank higher.
You need to push all those negative sites out of the higher rankings- that mean you need other sites to usurp them. To accomplish this, you have to create websites that contain positive or neutral information about your company and perform SEO to get them to rank higher.
And once the top ten spots in a search are wiped clean of any negative sites, your job is to sustain that position. Your company, if free from adverse reviews and uncomplimentary comments, will grow unhindered.
Your endeavour should be to eventually give yourself two search results pages of positive sites. This is a necessary cushion because a negative site’s ranking could move up or down by a few spots over time.