Internet reputation management is a service or strategy resorted to when one’s online reputation has been endangered by negative web-based publicity. This publicity may assume the form of negative comments on forums and podcasts, negative press, negative blog postings, fake reviews, and so on. If you were to approach an SEO firm for an online reputation management solution, it could help you in three respects:

• Monitoring your online reputation and furnishing reports
• Investigating your online assets
• Controlling online conversations

What It’s All About

The spreading of false or partially true information about any company which once enjoyed a solid, stain-free reputation would cost the company a loss of face and affect consumer confidence. This would in turn decrease revenue and returns. This is where internet reputation management assumes importance. It involves the successful removal or pushing back of negative search engine results through an increase in the number and appropriateness of affirmative search results. The bad is diluted to make way for the good.

The Reputation Management Strategy

A good internet reputation management professional would know the exact criteria on the basis of which search engines rank websites. This knowledge would be employed to adopt strategies that would help websites remain on top of the ever-changing search engine algorithms, successfully defeating all the negatives.

With respect to monitoring your online reputation, one of the tools that SEO firms take advantage of is Google alerts. These alerts help by informing you through email if the “robots” have found a mention of your firm’s name or your own on the internet. So, you can instantly take action.

One of the facts that help to make internet reputation management so much easier is that most people doing an online search check out only the first page of the search results. So, a great improvement can be achieved by simply promoting or creating web content like articles, websites, blogs, press releases, and video to ensure absolute positivity of the most frequently visited first pages. Link building would further help the process.

You Can’t Expect Results Overnight

It cannot be denied that it would take a while (anywhere from a couple of months for a simple problem to maybe a year for a more complicated problem) for you to be able to reap the fruits of your efforts, but it’s really worth it.