Most businesses don’t believe they do and see online reputation management as a tool to clear up negative content such a bad fake review after the event.
The truth of the matter is that the best time to conduct ORM is when you don’t actually need it.
The prevention is much quicker and cheaper than the cure.
Right now you could be under the assumption you are sitting pretty, when you search the first 3 pages of Google you only see the odd directory listing, perhaps a social media account and maybe a 3 year old press release. Looks good yeah? No one saying bad things about you is a positive thing right? Yes it is, but you’d be wrong to think this didn’t put at risk.
Currently that content is ranking by default, meaning its ranking for your business name or brand terms purely as nothing is trying too. This puts your online reputation at considerable risk, imagine if a unhappy customer adds a bad review to a review site or you are mentioned in an unfavorable way on news site or forum.
What happens?
This content will be shown (more than likely) on page 1 of Google and the other search engines. Forums, news sites and review sites are mostly high authority sites that Google loves and they automatically optismise the content to gain rankings and traffic for the search terms. A negative mention on these sites with no other positive content in place to stop it from ranking will spell disaster for your business.
Not only will you have to rush to create positive content to out rank it, issue emergency press releases that will also fuel the flames but and perhaps most importantly of all you will also lose out on sales while it is in place – over 70% won’t buy after reading negative content. Not to mention mud sticks, even if it is untrue.
And of course out ranking and suppressing this negative content will not happen over night it typically takes months for this to work.
The time to invest in online reputation management is when you don’t need it.
Want to get in touch? We can help gain you positive reviews and ensure you have ownership of your business name / brand name search results.