Profile Defenders - The Leading Reputation Management Corporation
Permanently remove and replace what you don't want to see online with our Brand Management and ORM services. As the very Best Online Reputation Management Company With years of experience removing negative listings, we know how to get these unwanted listings removed not just hidden from the search results. Every case and scenario is unique and we commonly help clients who have been defamed on complaint board websites, company review sites like Glassdoor.com, Yelp.com, Thedirty.com, local and national news sites, and many more.
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Reputation Management Services that Work
Whether you are a small business or an individual, nobody is safe from attacks online. But there is something you can do about it. We are able to remove over 250,000 different web pages that may be defaming or hurting yourself or your company. If it’s not a website that we can permanently delete for you then our Online Reputation Management services are a perfect fit to help bury the unwanted press and replace it with truthful and positive press and editorial style content that you would want to have people see when they do a Google search.
Reputation, an intangible and hard-to-measure asset, can account for as much as 75% of an organization’s value, making it the biggest risk factor for an organization. This is according to a 2005 survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit, an arm of the Economist Group based in London, UK. Out of the 269 senior risk executives who took part in this survey, more than 50% said that reputation risk was more significant than credit risk (29%), human capital risk (41%), IT risk (35%), market risk (32%) and regulatory risk (41%). Moreover, about 30% of the survey participants reported suffering a substantial financial loss at some point in their careers due to bad reputation. It is worth noting that more than 50% of a brand’s reputation can be attributed to its CEO, according to a 2003 international study involving 1,400 influential stakeholders.
Unfortunately, in the age of social media and other methods of instant communication, the Internet has the power to make or break a business’s reputation. Simply put, your business’s online reputation is at the mercy of online communities. In a recent consumer survey by eMarketer, for example, about 83% of the respondents said that online reviews influence their perceptions about companies. A similar study by the eTailing Group put that number at more than 90%. Digimind, a global social media monitoring and competitive intelligence company, says that a mismatch between the buzz and the reality accounts for about 80% of reputation damage risks. Fortunately, you can take certain measures to protect your brand’s online reputation. Below is a guide to reputation management
An Overview of Online Reputation Management (ORM)
Your business’s online reputation is how Internet users, including your current and potential customers, view your business based on its digital footprint. This means that any information published online about your business, including customer reviews and feedback, will affect your business’s online reputation. Online reputation management is basically the process of improving or restoring a brand’s reputation. The process typically involves proactive and often aggressive solutions aimed at countering, weakening and eliminating the negative online content about a brand by replacing the negative content with positive material. This is important because it is extremely difficult to remove information on the Internet, particularly on online platforms that you do not own or control. In essence, the process aims to reduce the visibility of negative content online by burying it in search engine result pages (SERPs), helping your business build customer trust. Without customer trust, your business is unlikely to survive and thrive. This is because more than 80% of consumers will continue to use a trusted brand frequently and more importantly, will recommend the brand to others. It is important to note that today more than 90% of adult consumers in the US research products online before making a purchase decision and additionally, they deem customer reviews as highly or extremely helpful.
With that in mind, online reputation management involves a wide range of activities aimed at cleansing and controlling a brand’s online reputation in order to build customer trust. Most of these activities involve suppressing negative information about a brand in search engine result pages (SERPs). Search engines typically rank content based on various factors. Google, for instance, ranks content based freshness, quality and trust, among other factors. This means that content that adheres to Google’s ranking criteria typically ranks high in SERPs, whereas content that fails to adhere to this criteria gets demoted in Google’s SERPs. The goal of online reputation management is to get your positive content to rank high and your negative low in SERPs. To achieve this goal, you need a good online content strategy to allow you to create and publish new, high quality and authoritative content online. In particular, your content strategy should help you achieve the following objectives:
• Build positive ratings on multiple review sites
• Ensure your business/brand is listed accurately on review sites
• Ensure the positive reviews are up-to-date in order to decrease the negative reviews
• Respond to both positive and negative reviews,
• Reach out to customers who have had a bad experience
• Ensure the positive reviews get as much visibility as possible
• Monitor the Internet for negative material about your business
It is important to note that online reputation management is not only about getting rid of the negative material about your business online, but also your brand look amazing online. For this reason, online reputation management often involves a lot of hard work and effort, especially if the negative material appears on popular and trusted websites and online platforms such as trusted news sites, popular review sites or government sites. For your positive content to have the desired impact, you have to publish it on the right platforms including authoritative sites, trusted professional and business listing sites.
Online Reputation Management (ORM) versus Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
While both SEO and ORM aim to increase traffic and conversion rates, each of these processes serves a distinct purpose, meaning they are different processes. For starters, the former aims to improve a site’s ranking in SERPs, whereas the latter aims to build trust and credibility. Secondly, SEO typically targets one website at a time, whereas ORM typically covers multiple sites and platforms at once. Thirdly, SEO covers websites owned by the subject, whereas ORM covers websites and other online platforms not owned by the subject including discussion forum, review-rating websites and social platforms.
Customer Reviews and Online Reputation Management (ORM)
With online communities increasingly influencing consumers’ purchase behavior, your brand’s online reputation is vital. For instance, while glowing consumer reviews can boost your sales and market share, bad reviews can easily destroy your brand. A 2005 study by Moz, a SaaS company based in Seattle, WA, found that four or more negative articles about a brand appearing in Google search results could cause the brand to lose about 70% of potential customers. At the same time, more than 90% of consumers will hesitate to do business with a company with less than four stars in a five-star rating system, according to a 2014 study from BrightLocal. On the other hand, a 2011 study from Harvard Business School found that a restaurant can increase its revenues by between 5 and 9% simply by increasing its Yelp rating by one star.
While online customer reviews can help you understand your target market better, negative reviews can easily ruin your business. Unfortunately, bad reviews could come from your competitors or unhappy clients, meaning it is virtually impossible for your business to avoid getting reviews. Fortunately, you can fight negative reviews with positive ones, ensuring the former do not damage your brand’s online reputation. While it may be tempting to ignore or even delete negative reviews, especially on the platforms that you own and control, a better strategy would be to respond to the review and use the opportunity to highlight some of the positive aspects of your business, such as great customer care. Your response will reveal more about you and your business than the review itself.
When responding to a negative review, you should take great care not to come off as condescending rude or insincere. Additionally, you should not attack the reviewer. In other words, you should not fuel the fire. Instead, thank the reviewer for the feedback, address the changes you’ve made, reinforce your brand’s values, and offer to discuss issue offline. Besides bad reviews, you should also respond to good online reviews. Similar to bad reviews, good reviews offer an opportunity to promote your business online. In fact, you can use your online reviews, both bad and good reviewers, to convert your online visitors into customers. When responding to a positive review, ensure you thank the reviewer for writing the review or visiting your business and invite the reviewer to spread the word. Additionally, include the name of your business in the reviewer for SEO purposes and mention key features of your business for future customers to see (promote your business).
Online Reputation Management Best Practices
Be proactive — Most companies that hire a reputation management company do so only after they notice negative information about themselves on the first page of Google SERPs, meaning they fail to act on time. The visible negative press tends to have a negative effect on such business, causing them to lose customers as well as revenue. Even worse, it can take a considerably long time to repair damaged online reputation. For this reason, you should always stay on top of your online reputation to ensure negative content about your business does not outrank the positive content. More specifically, you should develop a proactive online management strategy to help your help content rank higher in SERPs and at the same time, suppress any negative content about your business. In particular, you should ensure no negative content about your brand appears in the first two pages of SERPs. This is particularly important because research indicates that the first two pages of Google’s SERPs get more than 95% of search traffic, with the first page getting more than 90% of the traffic.
Own your brand’s social media accounts — Social media is one of the key elements of online reputation management. For this reason, you should set up your social media accounts on all the popular social media platforms including Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. You should do this even if you no plans of using the accounts regularly. If you fail to do that, somebody else could claim your brand name on these accounts and use them to ruin your online reputation. That said, all your social media profiles and pages should contain all the necessary information about your business, including contact details and operations. Additionally, you should incorporate the relevant keywords in your social media profiles for SEO purposes. Once you set up your accounts on these social medial platforms, link all your social profiles together. More specifically, your YouTube “About” page should link to all your social pages as well as to your main website.
Own multiple domains — In addition to your main domain, buy additional domain that are either similar to your main domain or represent your service/product offerings. Of course, you would need to know what keyword phrases online consumers use to search for your products/services online before you buy domains that represent your product/service offerings. Once your buy the additional domains, use them to create simple websites and optimize them so that they rank high in SERPs. These sites should include all the core information about your brand as well as links to your main site and social media pages.
Track your online reputation — Tracking your online reputation is one of the most important aspects of online reputation managements. Fortunately, you can use reputation monitoring tools and services, such as Google Alerts, to monitor your online reputation constantly with ease, allowing you to respond to any negative content about your business quickly. Once you set up your Google Alerts account, Google would send you an email any time information about your business appears online on a website that is scanned by Google. In addition to Google Alerts, Google also offers another free tool called “Me on the Web” that you can also use to track your online reputation. Other online reputation management services that you can use include Brandwatch, BrandEye, KnowEm and Image Raider. It is worth noting that some of these services, such as Brandwatch, only cover social media monitoring.
The Benefits of Online Reputation Management
With proper online reputation management, you would be able to build a good reputation for your business. Additionally, a good ORM strategy would enable your business to attract better talent, build trust and credibility, improve your conversion rate, increase transparency, resolve customer complaints quickly, gain customer insight, as well as highlight the strength and weakness of your business.
Conclusion on How To Choose the Right Online Reputation Management Agency
With online reviews increasingly influencing consumer purchase decisions, you should take proactive measures to protect your online reputation. In other words, you have to create and implement a solid online reputation management strategy that would allow you to suppress the negative content about your business while at the same time promoting positive content about your business. Some of the things you can do to achieve this goal include set up your brand’s social media accounts, implementing a good SEO strategy, publishing fresh content about your business on authoritative websites, own multiple domains and monitor your online reputation.
Choose a started package to fit your needs
STARTER
- 1 Custom Landing Page
- 2 Paid Press Releases
- 60 Web 2.0 Sites Created
- 1 Positive Video Shared to 75+ Sources
- Services above will be delivered over 12/mo period, and are Billed Annually
ULTIMATE
- Increased Content Optimization
- 2 Custom Landing Pages
- 3 Paid Press Releases
- 90 Web 2.0 Sites Created
- 2 Positive Videos Shared to 90+ Sources
- 4 Editorials Published
- Services above will be delivered over 12/mo period, and are Billed Annually
PRO
- Additional Content Optimization
- 30 Business Citations
- 50 Advanced Contextual Links
- 3 Custom Landing Pages
- 4 Paid Press Releases
- 150 Web 2.0 Sites Created
- 3 Positive Videos Shared to 100+ Sources
- 6 Editorials Published
- Services above will be delivered over 12/mo period, and are Billed Annually
