The reason that businesses are employing search engine reputation management more often these days is because gossip can spread really quickly around the net and ruin a company’s reputation. If the right kind of people find out what’s going on and read this negative scuttlebutt, these negative comments content to get spread all over the Internet become viral. Just like a virus, it’s imperative to protect the company’s reputation by staying on top of all the Internet company gossip and responding to negative comments posted about your company as quick as possible. There is no reason to spoil your company image just because you didn’t have the time to respond to a quickly which is why reputation management companies exist. These types of companies will help you net negative comments in the bud.
The reason search engine reputation management companies exist is because your bottom line can be affected by just a few negative comments from unhappy customers or clients. The last thing you want to happen to your business is to have a rats nest form on the popular forums, customer complaint sites and the most popular company and service review sites like yelp, the online Yellow Pages and other similar sites. Public relations for your business need to remain positive in the comments about your business that are not positive need to be taken off the Internet or pushed so far down the search engine results pages that it won’t matter anyway because no one will find them. You need to be conscious about your selling brown, how you carry yourself in what other people are saying about you to succeed these days.
The other reason you want employ search engine reputation management is because someone that mention some disparaging information about your company that gets listed on the 140th result in Google will have a negligible effect at the very best. However if this comment is listed in the top 10 your business is in jeopardy of losing serious revenue and even potential long-term clients. The search engines these days of the preferred way for clients and customers to search for the people and businesses that they want to do business with now and in the future. Over 80% of people these days do at least some minor research on a company or business before they decide to use them. However, not only does all the great stuff about your company show up on the Internet but the bad stuff shows up as well.
So the job of a search engine reputation management company is to get rid of these disparaging comments as soon as possible. Timing is very imperative here, because everyday these comments are showing up in the top 10 results in Google, is everyday that a potential customer client will view these comments and decide to do business with a competitor instead of your company. Algorithms in search engines especially Google which uses a very complex algorithm that nobody really understands, does not differentiate between bad and good commentary regarding a business. In fact, the responsibility is yours as the company owner to keep the bad stuff about your company off the Internet. But the question is, what’s the most effective way to weed out the negative commentary?
Angry customers that have a grudge against your business or you think they got ripped off or taken advantage of might start posting negative comments on blogs, customer sites, objection sites, hate sites, customer review sites and customer complaint sites like the ripoff report. If you get a customer angry enough, they will actually go on a strategic smear campaign to try to really hurt your business and their reputation. Luckily this doesn’t happen too often, but if it does you’re going to need to employ the services of a search engine reputation management company to help combat this. There a few different things they can do to help destroy a smear campaign. The first thing they can do is contact the angry customer and try to work something out with them if they agree to remove all the negative comments. This is assuming they have the right to do this, which they don’t in all cases.
Another search engine optimization management tip is to understand the other things you can do as the owner of a company to stop a smear campaign. If these comments about your business are not true enter slanderous or libellous, you can send them a cease-and-desist letter demanding that they remove all these negative posts on the Internet about you and if they don’t you can pursue legal action against them. They do have a Second Amendment right to free speech, however in using the Second Amendment right to free speech they don’t have a right to post slanderous or libellous comments against your company. In certain instances where they post to places that they can’t retract their statements, you could make them post a retraction comment saying that they’re sorry that they post the original comment and that they settled everything with your company and that this comment takes precedence over the previous comment.
Search engine reputation management is becoming more important in the social media age because these days anybody can set up a free blog at blogger in just about 10 min. and can say anything they want about any company they want. 99% of the people on the Internet thankfully are mature enough to not spend a lot of their time trying to hurt other people are businesses, however if that 1% that you need to worry about. One thing we do to help companies preserve their reputation is put all variations of your company name in Google alerts. When this company name comes up, we look at everything on the Internet that’s posted about the company we are monitoring and if it’s positive we leave it alone. However any negative comments that we find we respond to accordingly using the three different methods we described above.