The Best Online Reputation Services for 15 Years.

What is online reputation management?

Online reputation management – the practice of influencing online sentiment about brands and individuals – is a business strategy used to take control of core narratives, improve public opinion, and increase exposure to business opportunities. Online reputation managers use curated content, strategy, and analytics to change the sentiment portrayed by Google about a brand.

What can it do?

Reputation management services allow businesses to:

• Build online brands with better search results than competitors
• Develop and rank counterpoint narratives in search results
• Remove negativity bias in Wikipedia articles
• Increase star ratings on review sites like Google Reviews
• Remove or reduce the visibility of negative content online
• Enhance the visibility of positive content online

How much does online reputation management cost?

Online reputation management costs can be divided into several services. 

One-time removals:

• Content / Review Removals | Content can be removed instantly (and for free) if it violates Google’s content guidelines. More often, the decision to remove a piece of content comes down to a negotiation with the site owner. If they won’t remove it, a dedicated campaign will be required to reduce the online visibility of the content – these typically start at $4,000 and scale with the size of the project.

Campaigns:

• Improving Reviews | The cost of improving reviews can be as little as $250 per month per location. 

• Improving Search Results | The cost of pushing down a search result in Google may run $4,000 to $15,000 per month or more and may require many months to complete. 

What goes into a typical campaign?

A typical reputation campaign includes five stages:

Each stage of the reputation management campaign includes a program of analysis and development techniques. For example, during the research stage there may be:

• Search phrase analysis
• Search intent analysis
• Competitive analysis
• Content gap analysis
• SEO analysis
• Persona development
• Sentiment analysis
• and more

You can learn more about how a typical reputation management campaign is budgeted here. You can learn about the process in detail here. 

How long does online reputation management take?

Removal of problem content can take as little as two weeks, or many months.

The length of time necessary for reputation repair versus review management is significant. For example, small businesses can begin to see their star-rating improve within a couple of weeks. But the time needed to push down a negative search result will almost certainly be many months. Find out more about how long reputation campaigns take here. 

The length of time required for a reputation management campaign depends on many factors such as:

• The relative strength of a web property to be moved or removed
• The structure of the page or pages being targeted
• The SEO strength of the page or pages
• How the title is structured
• How other sites reference the target page or pages
• How often the target is refreshed
• How fresh the content is

Can Wikipedia be edited to improve brand sentiment?

Wikipedia pages can be changed, but the changes must adhere to Wikipedia guidelines. Importantly, while the guidelines themselves are fairly clear, volunteer Wikipedia editors make those guidelines subjective. With more active pages a consensus must be reached because there is no "best" way to edit a page. 

A core guideline for Wikipedia articles is a "neutral point of view". But for controversial people and companies that neutrality is often overlooked. Reputation X brings balance and neutrality to Wikipedia pages. 

To complicate things further, we've run into many instances where Wikipedia editors (regular unpaid people) have an agenda or are (sometimes) paid to damage corporate reputation. The bigger a company gets, or the more visible it is in the press, the more people are watching the page. The more more people watching, the more challenging it becomes. The more challenging, the longer it takes because pages must be edited slowly and by very experienced editors. 

Reputation X has been successfully improving Wikipedia pages for over ten years. Our process engages editors in a peer review process prior to edits being made. The group edits content off-line, discusses it, and only once it is agreed upon that the new content will most likely pass judgement do editors make changes. This method works best for the users of Wikipedia, as well as our clients. The work we do must always improve Wikipedia. 

Can software be used to improve reputation?

Most online reputation problems require a more nuanced approach than software can provide. With the exception of online review and ratings management, most aspects of any reputation management campaign (i.e. removing an article from a prominent publication, reducing visibility of negative search results) require a dedicated team of people to complete.

On the other hand, software can work exceptionally well when used as a tool in conjunction with a reputation management campaign. Our team uses a combination of public and proprietary software to increase the effectiveness of our work. To see the types of publicly available reputation management tools we use, click here. 

Why online reputation matters

Almost everyone will search a brand online before doing business. The same is true for individuals. 60% of consumers say that negative reviews made them not want to use a business.