<img height="1" width="1" style="display:none" src="https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=508589213126107&amp;ev=PageView&amp;noscript=1">

WebiMax Blog

Digital marketing tips and advice.

Defending your Good Name Is More than just a Smart Idea

Patty Ryan, October 26, 2012

Defending your Good Name Is More than just a Smart Idea

The growth of the World Wide Web over the last decade has been a mixed blessing for businesses hailing from around the globe. Although every online advertising firm touts the strength of e-commerce, social media outreach, and viral marketing, there still exist a number of setbacks that can be truly damaging for a business in the online arena. Chief among these is bad publicity.

What's in a Name?

Although the old adage of there being no such thing as bad publicity has worked its way into common parlance, this saying is actually quite untrue when the web is involved. Due to the increasing reliance of smartphone and mobile device users on the internet for reviews and consumer reports, many companies find themselves losing significant business because of negative online interactions. These can include forum complaints, published articles, self-proclaimed "watchdog" blogs, and any other variation of internet content.

It certainly does not help that particular key terms are often incorporated into queries that consistently lead to bad press instead of official properties and balanced reviews. Let's take for example a company that we'll call "Biff's Book Store" (yes, you and I have seen the same movies). If someone is standing outside the book store itself or is looking for reviews for the store prior to traveling to it, then odds are they'll go to Google, type in the name of the business and add "reviews" or "complaints" to the end of it. This is what inevitably results in people finding overly negative reviews.

Sometimes well-respected review sites will populate the search results and other times it'll be random blog posts and forum replies that can be quite harsh. This isn't to say that sharp criticism may not be warranted of a particular business, but there are many occasions where outlying critiques set a bad precedent for how potential customers see a company. That's why reputation management services exist.

Managing your Good Name on the Internet

SEO companies and online marketing firms provide a varied selection of services to their clients and one of these is reputation management. In short, reputation management is exactly what it sounds like: it's a series of procedures and content creation techniques that downplay the negative feedback. This can be accomplished through a number of different approaches, but more often than not SEO agencies try to emphasis positive company reviews and highly ranked web domains (such as Glassdoor.com) so that they appear above negative results in the SERPs.

By implementing standard SEO procedures and a number of other techniques, reputation management providers are able to ensure that potential clientele will be able to look into a business and see well-balanced reviews appearing above unfair ones. This helps situate companies in a manner that prevents customer loss before interaction can ever occur. In our modern web-oriented age, this sort of preemptive approach to customer service is crucial to keeping momentum for businesses and is something that no company should be without.

Need an Expert Contributor?

Ken Wisnefski is a seasoned web entrepreneur and a frequent contributor to news outlets and business publications. Ken’s vast knowledge of how to make online businesses succeed has made him a sought after consultant from businesses wishing to improve their online initiatives. Contact pr@webimax.com to collaborate!

More...

Subscribe to Updates