Reputation Management Online

The cost of not doing reputation management can be very difficult to really know but here are some basic indications, if you have negative comments showing directly below your own site in the search engines then up to 70% of people will click on the negative result before clicking on your company site, even if it is number 1. It makes sense as it’s in human nature to read the bad things first as they know you won’t mention them on your site. If you have been really badly attacked and have loads of negative content about your company on the Internet then the truth is you don’t know how much it has cost you in lost sales. You don’t know how many potential staff members have been put off applying for a job with you. You don’t know how many suppliers or clients have checked your company out on the net and been put off by the negative remarks.

In some cases we have actually seen company’s competitors writing bogus complaints and remarks about them, or seeded conversations to entice negative remarks. So when a company says they know they have lost in excess of 1 million dollars from customers who have actually said to them they are no longer proceeding because of the negative things they have read, the truth is its cost them a lot more than that, maybe several million.

One way to reduce the amount of potential customers you’re loosing is to hide or bury the negative content from the first page of google. Most people will stop on page one if they have found what they are looking for, so along as you have optimised you own site to do well for your company name, product or brand then and it appears on the first page of the SERPs (search engine results page) then you should be ok.

How much will it cost for effective long term reputation management will totally depend on several factors:

· How much negative content there is about your company on different websites, blogs, and social network sites and so on.

· How long the negative content has been there, has it been there several years and gained momentum from other people also commenting on it.

· What authority does the website have that the negative content is on? Some websites have a lot of authority with Google (authority means Google treats the website as a very good site with good content and trusts it), these sites can be more difficult to move from the first page of the SERP’s, not impossible just more difficult. Wikipedia us a good example of a site that Google gives a lot of authority to.

· The size of your business will also have effect, the bigger you are the more customers you have and naturally the more people talking about you.

· How many countries do you operate in, each country has to be treated almost like a new search, what ranks well in Google.co.uk may not rank well in Google.com.au or in Google.com.my

· How many variations of your company name, product and or brand. The more keywords that need to be protected then more work is involved.

· How many websites do you own, how many blogs etc have you set up already.

So the costing will totally depend on the work involved and very difficult to put into categories. We have also discovered that reputation management actually can attract more sales. As more customers find and read positive things about your business, as you develop a social networking strategy and show you as a forward thinking company all helps to throw out a bigger net.

So reputation management should be seen as an investment and not just a cost, many of our clients have seen the true benefits of good SEO and reputation management and how sales can be increased.