Your Brand Deserves A Better Reputation

Reputation is the subjective, qualitative belief a person has in a brand, a person, a service, or other entity. In people, reputation is different than character. Character is an intrinsic value, but reputation is an opinion.

Today, search results are the "middle-man" between the true character of an entity and how it is perceived - reputation.

Online reputation management services work to improve how search engines reflect the reputation of brands, whether people, companies, or something else. Learn more about what reputation is here.

Reputation is how a brand is seen. Reputation management works to improve what people see about a brand, mainly online. Reputation management is improved by engineering content, ratings, reviews, and more. It includes promoting positive content, and working to demote (reduce or eliminate) the visibility of negative content. A brand reputation can apply to a person, company, product, service, or even a political entity. Find out more about what reputation management is here.

Defamation and libel are often confused. Defamation is when someone's words or other content cause damage to a person or brand. Libel is when those words are written down. Slander is when those words are spoken. Both libel and slander are methods of causing defamation. Want to learn more about defamation? Click here.  

Reputation management works by:

• Identifying negative online content.
• Removing what can be removed, causing positive information to populate the online environment.
• Enhancing the visibility of positive online content over that which is negative.

Methods used in online reputation management include review improvement, ratings improvement, removal of negative content, suppression of negative content, and developing content that is supportive of the brand. To learn more about how reputation management works, click here. 

Most search results can be changed, but not all content with negative sentiment can be removed. A bad story about a company in a local online newspaper is easier to remove or push down than a negative New York Times article. Reviews and star-ratings are easier to change when there are few reviews, whereas brands with thousands of reviews can be changed but will take longer to do so. While many other factors go into answering the question as to whether search results can be changed, the answer is usually yes because no matter the content search engines display, it can almost always be improved. Google and other search engines generally react well to better, more highly optimized online content. To learn more about removing negative search results, click here. 

Online reviews can be improved by improving products, services, or the way customer service deals with issues. While this approach generally works to decrease the number of negative reviews, a more proactive approach to improving reviews and star-ratings on sites like Yelp, Google Reviews, and others needs to be taken. Reputation X uses an approach to improve reviews that differ from industry to industry. In some cases a gated review approach may be taken to vet reviewers before asking them to leave a review, for others gating is not necessary. In any case, reviews are improved almost 100% of the time. To learn more about improving online reviews, click here. 

Reputation management costs between $3,000 one time, and $15,000 or more per month. The price range of an online reputation program varies widely based on factors and depends on the desired outcome. It may include Wikipedia management, ratings and reviews, promotion of positive content, development of new content, removal of content from websites or search engines, and many other things. Every reputation management campaign is different, and costs vary significantly. To learn more about costs and pricing for online reputation management services, visit this page. 

Some changes to search results, like removing a page, can happen in only a few days. Other forms of reputation management can take weeks or even years. The time it takes to change search results varies depending on a number of factors. For example, a typical campaign to improve online reviews may begin to bear fruit in only a week or two and continue to result in better reviews and ratings over time. But the time it takes to push search results down for a negative Wall Street Journal article for a financial services firm may require many months. Campaigns in languages other than English have their own timelines. To find out more about how long it takes to change Google or other search results see this article.