How to Keep Your Online Reputation Spotless

When customers perform an online search for your company, what do they see in the first page of the search engine results? Chances are, if you’ve been around for a while, a Google search will include websites with negative comments, reviews or blogs.

Some may be legitimate complaints from years ago that your customer service has already handled. Others may be off-hand rantings of someone blowing off steam ... or even competitors trying to smear your reputation.

And when a potential customer, sales person, or journalist glances over the search engine results, those negative sites pop out like red flags.

Who can resist the urge to just take a quick peek at sites promising to reveal the “dirt” on someone? Curiosity compels us to find out what others have to say about a company, product or service we’re interested in.

In fact, even if your website ranks at the top of the list, your customers may not even notice it, let alone visit it. Reading a few negative comments may be enough to turn them away, without giving you a chance to make your case.

The result -- your online reputation suffers, your site gets fewer visits, and sales decline.

It Gets Worse...

You might feel that you can brush off a few negative remarks about your company. After all, what harm can they really do? Plenty! Along with promoting a bad impression of your company, they can significantly affect your bottom line.

Let me tell you about one client of mine.

Seven of the top ten sites in the search results for this company were negative. That’s bad enough. But after carefully reviewing their rankings and prior year revenue, I determined that they were probably losing over $1.5 million in sales because of those negative search engine results. The company confirmed this -- in fact, they admitted that my estimate was low.

Can you afford this kind of revenue loss?

Not only does your bottom line suffer, your brand gets tarnished. Your very name could come to be associated with terms like “scam” and “rip-off” in the eyes of potential customers who read these disapproving comments.

Word spreads. Others begin adding their negative reviews online. And while your site may be hanging on to a highly-ranked position in the search engine results, having that top spot becomes almost meaningless if the results pages fill up with negative sites.

Without a proactive effort on your part, the first page or two of a Google search can become overrun with links to unfavorable comments and blogs, like a home infested with vermin.

And then the worst happens.

Your site begins to sink in the rankings. The top position is now held by a site that focuses on posting negative comments about your company, perhaps run by some crusader with a grudge.

Your website gets fewer clickthroughs from Google searches, your response rates continue to drop, and your online referrals slow to a trickle. One day you find that your main company website is near the bottom of the Google results page, lost in the noise of complaints, criticisms, and dishonest attacks. Soon, you’ve slipped off the first page altogether.

The Easiest, Most Effective Way to Boost Your Online Reputation

What can you do? Unfortunately, you can’t simply demand that all those negative web pages be removed. The legal issues get tricky when free speech is involved.

A few website owners may be willing to remove the offensive pages -- if you can get in contact with them, if you can convince them that the comments are no longer relevant, and if they can find the time to update their website. But this approach can often be a waste of time.

The most effective Online Reputation Management strategy is to get positive websites about your company to rank high, which pushes everyone else down in the rankings -- ideally out of the top 20 search engine results. After all, few people bother to look past the first couple of pages of a search result.

Easier said than done, of course. But this strategy has three distinct advantages:

1) You don’t have to confront the owners of the negative sites, who may or may not be cooperative in removing the comments or forum posts.

2) You are in control of your efforts to rank the positive sites, and are no longer at the whims of complainers, critics, or disapproving reviewers who post their opinions online.

3) It’s completely fair. You’re not forcing anyone to change their content, whether through begging, arm-twisting or legal threats. You’re simply helping those who search on you to see the good side of your company.

Imagine the effect on your reputation when an online search produces a page full of websites containing only positive reviews, complimentary articles and glowing testimonials. You’ll project a much better image to everyone who finds you through Google.

So how can you get all those favorable sites to rank high?

It’s not easy. And it takes patience, diligence and a sound knowledge of the search engines’ ever-changing criteria that determine why some websites are in the top-ten spots, while others are buried deep in the search results.

SEO to the Rescue

The way to make sure the positive sites rank higher with the search engines is to perform Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

SEO used to involve simply cramming your web pages full of relevant words and phrases. But over time the search engines have become more adept at recognizing such obvious tricks, and SEO has likewise become more sophisticated.

Today, Search Engine Optimization is a combination of including relevant content on your web pages and getting other websites to link to those pages.

You see, Google and other search engines gauge the relevance of a web page based on how many other websites link to it. The more “backlinks” you have to your website, the more likely it is that your website deserves to be ranked higher -- in the same way that magazines will feature the most popular celebrities on their covers.

However, there’s an art to this strategy.

You can’t just buy a thousand links to your site and be done with it. If Google sees the number of your backlinks go from a few links to several hundred overnight, they get suspicious and drop you out of the rankings. Instead, you need to add your links gradually, so your site’s popularity grows at a natural pace.

In addition, these should be legitimate links from well-known websites. Gone are the days when you could just get listed in the online “directories” and expect everyone to find your site. Today, we use social bookmarking, which involves placing links to your site within various forums, blogs and message boards on social networking sites.

So far, so good. But we still need to push all those negative sites out of the higher rankings, which means we need other sites to take their places. To accomplish this, we find or 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 of a search are wiped clean of any negative sites, we go to work on the next ten spots.

The goal is to eventually give you 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. By “owning” the first two pages, you make it more likely that a negative site can’t suddenly pop up on Page 1 of a search.

Online Reputation Management vs. Traditional Public Relations

How does Online Reputation Management fit into your overall PR strategy? In short, it’s part of PR, and a very crucial one in today’s online world.

Much of public relations concerns managing your reputation, whether it’s publicizing good news about your company or responding to criticism. No doubt you’d prefer that the public only heard positive comments and was not exposed to anything critical about you.

That’s what we aim for with Online Reputation Management, only we focus on what people see about you when performing an online search. And since that’s the way more and more potential customers, sales people, and journalists learn about you these days, managing your image on the search engine results pages becomes a very important part of PR.

The Bottom Line

Negative websites, articles, forum posts and other comments are hurting your brand and costing your company money in terms of lost sales and revenue.

You can either let your reputation and sales suffer, or you can manage your online reputation just as you manage everything else in your company -- taking steps to get the results you want and keep your company on track for success.

Online Reputation Management is the key to making that happen.

Please check out our Online Reputation Management Results page.