Online Reputation Management Services

SEO Brand CEO Mike Salvaggio explains, “The best and most effective action is authority. You just have to ensure that your side of the story is heard on every issue. If it’s a Yelp review, write a response with an explanation as well as a potential resolution to the matter. If it’s a complaint on the BBB website, explain your side of the story. Other than that, the best way to build up your positive content is through quality. Actions such as publishing a press release, guest posting on a website that gets much traffic and influence in social circles, creating subject-specific websites such as microsites, and appearing in high-profile media outlets such as the Huffington Post will always win out on SEO. As an online reputation management agency, we understand that the worst thing you can do is let the negative press sit untouched and hope for the best. If it goes unaddressed, the more it will tend to stand out and engage other users on search, cementing their place in the search rankings.”

With Social Media and SEO, brands and individuals have more access than ever to influence the flow of communication best. Having a social media presence on multiple platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, TikTok, and whatever comes out in the next few months, as well as taking ownership of listings on online review sites, is essential to showing your new and existing audience all the things you excel at. Not to mention, this shows your audience that you’re listening. By bridging the communication gap, you make a massive impact on brand perception, much like word-of-mouth advertising. Throughout the past few years, we’ve seen this grow into the make-or-break element of a brand’s survival. By showing you’re a business that goes the extra mile to listen to what is being said out there, you can alter the search experience in a manner as effective, if not more, than native advertising. It’s not just about positive or negative stories, it’s also about whether or not you’re in touch with your audience.

The more authority sites you have ranking for your name, the more uphill it will be for negative stories to climb up the Google SERP. So make sure you have the essentials. Here are a few:

• A LinkedIn Page
• Business Profile Directories (Whitepages, Manta, Etc. )
• A Google Business Page
• Affiliated Google Properties (Blogspot, YouTube, Google Maps)
• Press Releases with Your Information and a Quote from a Company Spokesperson
• Positive Content Linking to Other Contents
• Engaging Content (news stories about charitable works and positive things for the community)
• Search Optimization of Online Images (They rank like web listings)
• Microsites (subject-specific websites) of Your Current Ventures

To go the extra mile, use your positive content to build an audience. Connect with users on as many social platforms as you can. Make your websites, designed for this purpose or not, well-optimized for search and engagement with your audience. Make an effort to routinely publish new content, be it a press release, a YouTube video, or even a photo album. Finally, remember to maintain the high road and focus on your customers, fans, and supporters.

Regardless of what you believe, online reputation is important and is something we should all take seriously as individuals, as a society, and as an online community. Yes, we have the right to our personal information—past, present, and future—but we also hold a great deal of that responsibility at our fingertips. We have the power of the Internet on any given day, time, and place, but we also have the power to choose what we do and do not share.

The Internet has made our lives smaller. We are all a part of a digital “web” of social networks spun by technology. Our ability to pick up any kind of electronic device and “connect” with the rest of the world in a matter of seconds attests to the level of power we have at our fingertips; however, with great power comes great responsibility. When the Internet became popular in the average household in the early to mid-90s, we were all like children on Christmas morning—excited to log on and hear AOL’s coined greeting, “You’ve got mail,” via a dial-up signal. Our society was so consumed with our new “toy” that we really weren’t sure of how to handle it. Twenty years later, we face various challenges and controversies, such as cyber theft, identity theft, plagiarism, and even sharing and managing personal information.

To make matters more critical, just –not- having anything negative is not going to cut it anymore. If there is nothing on your name, then your invisibility can speak volumes. Suppose someone searches you and finds the only thing to your name is someone else doing something completely unrelated to what you do or a personal profile that doesn’t feature anything related to your business. In that case, it’s not a good look compared to those with profiles, published documents, appearances in guest posts, and press releases relating to their business ventures. The role of a reputation management agency isn’t about suppressing or curing the negative as much as bringing the positive truth and personal branding to the forefront. In our years of practice, we’ve found that the best success with online brand reputation management services is to build a foundation.

Let’s look at Europe’s “Right to Be Forgotten” law, which is becoming increasingly complicated. One of the factors that Google uses to “rank” a website for credibility, authority, and legitimacy is the number of links. Over time, these links appear in search engines, visible to all. However, Europe claims that links that appear in EU-based search engines violate the “right to be forgotten” and the “right to information” proxies for the right to privacy (European Convention on Human Rights, article 8; and Declaration on Human Rights, article 12). Europe’s Courts passed the law allowing users to request the removal of past personal links from search engines. However, these requests are becoming more and more complicated for Google. In fact, some might ponder on how to legislate various geographical spaces of the Internet and our rights to specific information. These are just some reasons why the Right to Be Forgotten law is raising more questions than answers…

As time goes on, Google only faces more scrutiny about how it seeks to handle “forgotten” requests and its approach to managing the removal of links. In fact, Google is beginning to face European social and political pressure to “open up” and speak about how it plans to respond to these requests. On the other hand, some believe that the “Right to Be Forgotten” law is wrong, putting unnecessary pressure on Google to find a solution to a problem that is “unworkable” and “unreasonable.”