Online reputation management is very difficult. Particularly if the damage is long-running, and bad reviews have built up over time at sites like Ripoffreport and Yelp. We can help, but it will require the following – and this effort takes research, planning and execution.
Lots of it, over many months, perhaps a whole year. With no guarantees, other than your reputation will improve, over time, and based entirely on the reaction (that can’t be guaranteed) of the online search engines and customer communities.
That’s it.
Successful Online Reputation Management techniques include at least the following 5 basic elements – and #s 4 and 5 are most critical and most important from a reputation management perspective.
1 – Onsite SEO infrastructure (i.e. tags, meta, tech performance, IA, etc.) – must be as optimized as possible, as accurate as possible. This requires real SEO & Web Tech expertise.
2 – Onsite SEO content – requires high volume and velocity of well-optimized, unique, useful multi-media content (blogs, articles, news, events, photos, videos, feedback, reviews, employee submissions, whitepapers, etc.). This is a lot of coordinated, consistent work, not least of all by the business itself – along with real SEO expertise.
3 – Offsite SEO infrastructure (i.e. channels, ad networks, directories, lists, profiles, etc.) – larger volume of well-organized links and optimized profiles pointing back to the canonical site or landing pages…for example company owned channels on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, G+, etc. All dupe sites, old links, invalid profiles, aged content, images and ads need to be adjudicated. This can be quite a bit of research and digging, then some corporate-governed decisions and management.
4 – The Brand – the company’s brand, in text messaging, offers, capabilities, expertise and community profile needs to be standardized, updated, made positive and helpful. Brand is exposed not only in onsite and offsite content, but in business processes, customer engagement methods and tools, and social media governance. How the company interacts with its communities and partners. This might be the hardest element to understand, to accept (as negative), to change….particularly if the “brand” is synonymous with a singular personality, like the company’s owner. This will also require some visual/media design skills, and some true marketing or PR expertise.
5 – Offsite SEO content – requires also volume and velocity of content placed or submitted to other sites (ads, social channels, discussions, communities, social media, magazines, secondary sites, etc.) – this is BOTH paid and organic content; “organic” or “earned” content is that which is shared, promoted, highlighted, amplified by others, i.e. the Community of Interest. This requires a “Community Manager” to build up, promote and analyze the visibility and reach of this content, all over the web, plus the optimization/ keywords that are encouraged to be used.